Look, this isn't 4chan: the set of posts in order is not totally changing itself every five seconds. In that context, what you have described would be different

Look, this isn't 4chan: the set of posts in order is not totally changing itself every five seconds. In that context, what you have described would be different and perhaps even useful, but that's just not our contribution model here. Given that, the expectation is not for "the next batch of stories in line", it is for "the current stories ranked from #31-50 inclusive", the way that simply visiting news.ycombinator.com gives you the current stories ranked from #1-30. Someone prematurely optimized this aspect of Hacker News and it became a bit of a nightmare to use in the pursuit of "correctness" -- this would be good if the notion of "correct" were in fact correct, but it is an ideological purity having nothing to do with the needs of the community at large.