The easiest way to do it would be to pick an ID in the future (say 20 ahead of the latest one) then type the title and link out, then just keep refreshing the page for your selected ID minus one (for example, if your chosen ID is 3743040 refresh news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3743039) until you get a result then hit submit, if you're not too slow you'll get the ID 3743040.
Comments
is OP a mod? how did he know what his postid would be before he submitted it? spraying [sequential] submissions all at once?
[edit]
IDs are sequential, you can predict them with ease. For example (without editing) I can tell you my comment ID (for this comment) will be: 3743005
(edit: nope, I was 3 off, you get the point though, apparently a lot of people are commenting at the moment, ha)
Yes, that's how I did it. Took me about 3 attempts.
Confirmed.
Aren't they sequential? Isn't it just a matter of using the ID of the latest post + 1?
Couldn't he have edited the url after posting it?
No, that's impossible.
Link it to a php file on your server, and edit the php file to header('Location: the_actual_url') after the fact.
That isn't what is happening though, hover over the link and its a direct link to HN.
I was trying to figure that out too.
an ID can refer to a comment or a link, you can find the latest comments: http://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments latest links: http://news.ycombinator.com/newest
The easiest way to do it would be to pick an ID in the future (say 20 ahead of the latest one) then type the title and link out, then just keep refreshing the page for your selected ID minus one (for example, if your chosen ID is 3743040 refresh news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3743039) until you get a result then hit submit, if you're not too slow you'll get the ID 3743040.