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I think it's a feature not a bug. It seems to stop the second page becoming stale, forcing you to refresh and get a new copy of the front page first preventing

by jpswade 14y ago

I think it's a feature not a bug. It seems to stop the second page becoming stale, forcing you to refresh and get a new copy of the front page first preventing you from viewing outdated content.

corkill 14y ago
I find it handy to indicate I probably spent to much time on the site. Also pretty sure it's by design.
sirclueless 14y ago
While I agree it's a feature, I'm pretty sure it works the opposite way. The idea is that you want the second page to be "stale": if you've just spent time reading the front page, when you click to the second page you should be getting all new links. This comes at a cost though, because the server must cache all the possible second pages that might be requested. So HN makes a compromise and caches them for an hour or so. If you wait an hour, it will have been evicted from the cache and the error will appear.
- kaiwetzel 14y ago
  I like your explanation of this feature. I guess it rarely works for me because I open dozens of tabs when I start and some of them inevitably become stale if I do something else in between and then go back to read some hacker news discussion. I often and up just closing discussions having a "more"-link since it tends to frustrate me one way or another. I wish there was an option to disable "more"-links entirely (or is there?) I can see how it's useful for small screens but full-size on a 27"+ screen or in portrait mode (my preference for browsing the web) I think seeing 500+ comments on one page would be totally fine :-) (Ideally, after reloading it, new submissions would be highlighted, one can only dream)
se85 14y ago
Yes, it is a feature, a feature that leads to a terrible user experience, so while it may not be a bug due to it being by design, its still a really big defect. In my personal instance: I would be much more of a contributor to HN If I didn't have this problem on a daily basis. Usually it happens after I have tabs open, go get some food, come back, and I need to start my browsing on HN all over again as a result, usually this only happens once, because I say fuck it and go elsewhere. What are the pro's that make this con worth it? I'm not seeing it, its just a big massive pain in the ass.
- pbhjpbhj 14y ago
  Man, really, a feature? You think the designer of this forum decided to break all the links on purpose? That's some strange design decision. Wouldn't a minimum fix be a simple htaccess redirect for failed links? As page refresh usually works then a redirect to the referer (ie send you back to the page you're on) would seem like it should work most of the time: of course it should preferably give some feedback to indicate what has happened.
  - se85 14y ago
    It really isn't as simple as that. I don't know the inner workings, but from what I understand - data gets invalidated by its "key" and new pages with new keys are generated so that the page content remains "fresh" - so no htaccess rule is going to help you with a problem like that. It sounds like there is some serious changes required to fix this so it behaves like conventional pagination, which I'm guessing is why it has not been fixed.
ralph 14y ago
No, it's a bug, a design flaw in using continuations. See my other comment. If it was by design then the links wouldn't continue to work for longer at quiet times on the site; they do simply because old continuations haven't been flushed to make room for new ones.

by jpswade 14y ago

I think it's a feature not a bug. It seems to stop the second page becoming stale, forcing you to refresh and get a new copy of the front page first preventing you from viewing outdated content.

corkill 14y ago

I find it handy to indicate I probably spent to much time on the site. Also pretty sure it's by design.

sirclueless 14y ago

While I agree it's a feature, I'm pretty sure it works the opposite way. The idea is that you want the second page to be "stale": if you've just spent time reading the front page, when you click to the second page you should be getting all new links. This comes at a cost though, because the server must cache all the possible second pages that might be requested. So HN makes a compromise and caches them for an hour or so. If you wait an hour, it will have been evicted from the cache and the error will appear.

kaiwetzel 14y ago
I like your explanation of this feature. I guess it rarely works for me because I open dozens of tabs when I start and some of them inevitably become stale if I do something else in between and then go back to read some hacker news discussion. I often and up just closing discussions having a "more"-link since it tends to frustrate me one way or another. I wish there was an option to disable "more"-links entirely (or is there?) I can see how it's useful for small screens but full-size on a 27"+ screen or in portrait mode (my preference for browsing the web) I think seeing 500+ comments on one page would be totally fine :-) (Ideally, after reloading it, new submissions would be highlighted, one can only dream)

se85 14y ago

Yes, it is a feature, a feature that leads to a terrible user experience, so while it may not be a bug due to it being by design, its still a really big defect. In my personal instance: I would be much more of a contributor to HN If I didn't have this problem on a daily basis. Usually it happens after I have tabs open, go get some food, come back, and I need to start my browsing on HN all over again as a result, usually this only happens once, because I say fuck it and go elsewhere. What are the pro's that make this con worth it? I'm not seeing it, its just a big massive pain in the ass.

pbhjpbhj 14y ago
Man, really, a feature? You think the designer of this forum decided to break all the links on purpose? That's some strange design decision. Wouldn't a minimum fix be a simple htaccess redirect for failed links? As page refresh usually works then a redirect to the referer (ie send you back to the page you're on) would seem like it should work most of the time: of course it should preferably give some feedback to indicate what has happened.
- se85 14y ago
  It really isn't as simple as that. I don't know the inner workings, but from what I understand - data gets invalidated by its "key" and new pages with new keys are generated so that the page content remains "fresh" - so no htaccess rule is going to help you with a problem like that. It sounds like there is some serious changes required to fix this so it behaves like conventional pagination, which I'm guessing is why it has not been fixed.

ralph 14y ago

No, it's a bug, a design flaw in using continuations. See my other comment. If it was by design then the links wouldn't continue to work for longer at quiet times on the site; they do simply because old continuations haven't been flushed to make room for new ones.