Comment by dang

I use HN Search manually but support that in a browser extension that I use for HN moderation. For example, I have keyboard shortcuts to open an HN search tab for the URL or title of a selected post, another to restrict the search to threads that got comments, another to convert search results into a list on HN itself, another to copy the title/URL of a selected post to the clipboard, and so on. (One of these years I will find a way to share this software with HN users, since it's kind of an HN power-reader, besides the mod functions.)

That lets me find and scan past threads fairly quickly to find the interesting ones. It's still too manual, though; I need to make more steps towards automation. I'm not sure it can be fully automated because you have to do human interventions to either track down relevant past threads or exclude boring ones. The endgame is probably not to fully automate these lists but to have software generate a starter version and then give the community ways to edit it.

The only place that recalling things off the top of my head (or somewhere in the poorly-lit middle of it) plays a role is that often I vaguely remember that there existed a discussion about $X in past years and then tweak the searches till I find it.