> What is the reasoning behind only an itemid in the URL for HN? The reason is because it's the minimum information required to do the job. HN was built to fun

> What is the reasoning behind only an itemid in the URL for HN? The reason is because it's the minimum information required to do the job. HN was built to function by PG who built it old school as a demonstration of his custom programming language, it's clearly not been optimized for SEO and putting a slug in the URL adds nothing functionally and thus the engineer had no reason to add that feature. It also uses tables for layout, has embedded style information, and saves all state to files on disk using no database. It's hardly a "best practices" type application.