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It's not a single thing. There are multiple places that use dynamically-generated links. They make the source very simple. I've gradually replaced them in th
by pg 13y ago
It's not a single thing. There are multiple places that use dynamically-generated links. They make the source very simple. I've gradually replaced them in the most common situations. Replacing more is not in my top 10 priorities for things to fix. The reason is that it's not really what users want. What people come here for is good stories and comments. I doubt we have ever lost a single user over expired links. Whereas stupid or uncivil comment threads have probably cost us lots of users, and indeed, some of the ones I'd least like to lose. So that's the sort of issue I spend time thinking about.
Incidentally, for those of you working on startups, this is a good example of why making something people want is not a simple matter of making what they say they want.
- credo 13y ago>>The reason is that it's not really what users want. What people come here for is good stories and comments. I doubt we have ever lost a single user over expired links. Yes, you probably haven't lost any users over expired links However, I think you have inconvenienced a lot of users through the expired links. Sometimes, I think it is good to spend a little bit of effort on helping a large number of users. I'm assuming among readers (who attempt to go past page-1), an overwhelming majority has hit this problem multiple times (and lost time because of this problem)
- ghshephard 13y agoI've been a user for 5+ years, for more hours a day than I would care to admit, and have never run into an expired-link problem that couldn't be resolved with a BackButton, copy+paste. Honestly, it gives HN a bit of charm, and it's never ever really bothered me.
- SiVal 13y agoAmen. What a nuisance. You can keep clicking the next page button to see what other stories there are until you actually read one, after which the next page button will fail, and you'll have to start over again. What's the point of even having more than about three pages? The only way to reach those pages is to keep clicking next while carefully avoiding the temptation to read anything along the way, lest you get sent back to Level 1. I'm not buying the argument that if HN has good stories and comments people will keep coming back and if they come back, it means they want a next page button that fails. A doesn't imply B. If frequent expiration is to remain a feature, would it be possible to have a preference setting allowing us to put the first four pages or so on our front page? Then we could read whatever looks most interesting among the first 120 items instead of the first 30 before we get that expired next button we supposedly don't mind.
- nazka 13y agoTo avoid that I use this website: http://hckrnews.com/ http://hckrnews.com/ Maybe you should take a look. Just simple and useful. And to share everything I also use a theme for HN. It makes the design a little more as a flat design and with bigger letters which is especially what I wanted. https://github.com/gabrielecirulli/hn-special https://github.com/gabrielecirulli/hn-special
- wanda 13y agoThere is also http://hackerbra.in http://hackerbra.in but I always use vanilla HN because I'm fond of it and the UI is pretty much the best for me. That said, it would be very cool if users could implement their own custom CSS natively like you can on http://yayhooray.net http://yayhooray.net I personally detest browser extensions and I don't like how they slap custom CSS over the top of sites like make-up. Even those who aren't up for fiddling with style sheets could share in what others make.
- 001sky 13y agoHowever, I think you have inconvenienced a lot of users... 'Inconvenienced' is broad word. Plenty of people eventually get the hang of driving a motorcycle with the front-brake in the "wrong" spot, and are no longer inconvenienced by that. But it is not truly dangerous or troublesome in the way that having the control pedals in a Car were to be put in the wrong place (eg swap the throttle and brake pedal location). So, in this case its more an inconvenience of having some learning curve; it's not the more dangerous or nefarious inconvenience of something that is truly troublesome, random, or wasteful.
- zimmern 13y agoThe solution is ctrl-left click (in chrome) so articles open in a new tab in the background, queue up everything you want to read before reading the articles, simple.
- pjungwir 13y ago> I think you have inconvenienced a lot of users through the expired links. I suspect that fixing expired links would improve HN's front-page story quality. I seem to recall patio11 or tptacek once saying if you really want to help out HN, you should sit on the New page and upvote stories. That's too much of a pain for me, but if I could get to pages 2-4 without friction, I'd see more non-front-page stories I could upvote. This would help good stories make it to the front page or stay there longer. So perhaps making things easier for users would also help HN. It may even make it easier for content-rich stories to compete against link-baity ones. What if fixing expired links kept HN from becoming like Reddit?
- gus_massa 13y agoFixing the New-page should be much easier than fixing the Front-page. In the New-page you only must remember the last index and the last submission shown, so https://news.ycombinator.com/newest?count=60&id=777777 https://news.ycombinator.com/newest?count=60&id=777777 should work, because they don’t exchange order. The Front-page is much more difficult because you must remember all the shown submissions, because they change of order in time.
- pjungwir 13y agoYes, but I'm not saying they should fix the New page. The New page has too many garbage submissions for me to want to spend time there. But if they fixed pages 2-4 behind the front page, I would visit those pages. Those pages have more signal-to-noise than the New page, so I want to read them. And if those pages were getting upvotes, maybe their stories would make it to the front page.
- DanBC 13y agoI click more. I find the stories that I am interested in. I open the submission in a new tab and the comments in a new tab. I repeat this until I get to page 4. I read an article. I upvote it if needed. I read the comments page. I then refresh the page before making any comments. Once i've finished reading and voting and commenting i close the pages and move to the next article.
- wpeterson 13y agoI'm impressed at the closure based pagination as a novel way to solve a problem. Unfortunately, the user experience is quite unpleasant. I hit expired pagination links several times a day. You guys can do better.
- olivier1664 13y agoI use http://hckrnews.com/ http://hckrnews.com/ only to avoid this problem.
- guyinblackshirt 13y agosame here!
- nazka 13y agoSame for me! As I said in another comment I use that [1]. Which makes the whole experience perfect for me. (Bigger letters, flat design, and stuff..) [1] https://github.com/gabrielecirulli/hn-special https://github.com/gabrielecirulli/hn-special
- codex 13y agoIs there value to maintaining this site yourself? I agree that you shouldn't spend the time to fix this issue yourself, but couldn't a contractor fix it for pocket change, at a low cognitive burden to you? Hasn't this issue been surfaced repeatedly by users, wasting the time of a good many people (including you)? Doesn't it hurt your reputation as a thoughtful and detail oriented organization?
- pg 13y agoI'm not the only person working on it anymore. For the past year or so we've also had Nick Sivo (kogir), who handles all the systems stuff. And we also have a moderator who is a hacker and has written a bunch of code for identifying voting rings, sockpuppets, and so forth.
- melloclello 13y agoI just want to put my hand up against the selection bias in this thread and say that I totally don't care about the broken links, and that rock-solid moderation is a far more important issue for any online community.
- alok-g 13y agoI would say that the site should actually be opened up to the whole community to add to it. Hackers may be able to help in ways never imagined before. Some examples: 1. Auto assign upvotes to new stories using machine learning algorithms that use older, already upvoted, stories for learning. This can fix one of the issues often encountered where good stories go ignored because too few people have time to screen new stories. 2. Instead of using ad hoc rules for ordering stories and comments, use machine learning engines again. Some stories get flagged. These would also provide good data for supervised learning. I understand some control would need to be exercised to prevent gaming of the system.
- CamperBob2 13y agoThe reason is that it's not really what users want Yeah, actually, it is. Seriously. Nothing makes "hackers" look worse than a hack that doesn't work.
- pg 13y agoThe true hacker solves the right problem. Expired links are just the visible problem. The real problems are more subtle: users voting up fluff posts, nastiness in comment threads...
- computerslol 13y agoMy main problem with the "More" button is that it doesn't always give you more. I suggest a text change on the anchor tag to "More, if you're quick about it", and the error message to "You weren't quick enough." This way I can only blame myself when pressing the button doesn't work as expected.
- codex 13y agoDo you really think you can't solve both problems, or that fixing links hurts your ability to solve bigger problems? It's $500 to a contractor. You can even have someone else find the contractor. This smells fishy. I suspect the fix will result in a large change to the code base and you want to always own/understand the code for some reason. So if you can't fix it yourself, nobody is allowed to, either. That's fine--just admit it's your baby and you don't want to let it go.
- wlievens 13y agoI guess it's also because of the technical elegance of using closurees for page actions. It's hard to admit that a technique that feels elegant and expressive fundamentally doesn't scale.
- CamperBob2 13y agoThat's part of being a mature developer. We've all stood stubbornly by a piece of inappropriate code that we want to use because it's so clean and elegant, but most of us have gotten past that stage of ego development by the second or third year of school or professional life. It goes without saying that Paul Graham has long since transcended that level. So, the only answer that fits all of the parameters is that he's trolling us.
- mproud 13y agoCount me in as this being the most annoying issue for me. (Maybe that means you’re doing a lot of things right, but it’s still plenty irritating.) So much so as I have been using sites which mirror or display HN submissions because they don’t have this problem.
- elwell 13y agoWhat considerations have been taken into account to dissuade making HN open source? (I know there are some copies of older versions of the source on GitHub) (Arc code could be rewritten in Clojure (don't kill me!)) (I'm assuming there is some concern that transparency would increase ability for spam or 'gaming' the system)
- pg 13y agoThe main reason I haven't published a new version lately is just that I've been too busy working on YC itself. It would take a day of work to strain out the bits of code we don't want to publish, and I don't have any spare days now.
- bfe 13y agoEvery comment expressing a preference between lisps should be made with nested parens. Well played.
- WWKong 13y agoEven if the site had blinking text with glitter background the regulars would still come. Those very regulars click on the pagination and get inconvenienced frequently (also typing and comment and losing it). Since this seems like a highly visible problem and probably the only bug I encounter, I'm a little surprised that it is not in top 10.
- chacham15 13y agoWhile I agree with the overall sentiment, it is like optimizing a program. You profile the program and see that foo (lets relate this to the expired link problem) takes 5% of the cpu and bar (the upvoting problem) which takes 50% of the cpu. Naturally, youd want to optimize bar. However, if it takes 50 hours to optimize bar and 1 to optimize foo you're better off going with foo. This too is said with the caveat that 5% better is worthwhile: nobody cares if a 1 second operation is shortened to 950 milliseconds whereas shortened to .5 seconds is something more noteworthy.
- alok-g 13y agoHere's a simple thing that has helped me avoid the issue (which otherwise is quite nagging): Starting from the HN main page, I first open the discussion pages of all the stories I potentially want to read in new tabs (till I start encountering older stories that I have already gone through). This process is fast enough to not encounter expired links. For each story now, I click the link leading to the story from the HN discussion page, and get back to the discussion page simply using the back button. When done, I simply close the tab.
- bruceboughton 13y agoIronically, the only time I really run into this is when reading through bestcomments. I'm often more interested in interesting discussions rather than the original links and bestcomments is a good way to jump right into these discussions. It'd be great if bestcomments could me migrated away from the fnid mechanism, but I appreciate this is a side project and this is low priority.
- turingbook 13y agoWhy not just integrating HNSearch? That is very convenient for all users.