6 ms·

Please fix: Unknown or expired link.

112 points by kijin 13y ago

I'm pretty sure that the HN community likes to read thoughtful, thoroughly researched comments that are somewhat longer than one-liners. But whenever I take more than a few minutes to write a comment, I am greeted with the following error message as soon as I hit "Submit": Unknown or expired link. Fortunately, I can usually hit the Back button, refresh the page, and resubmit my comment without losing the contents of the textarea. Anyway, I try to be extra careful and copy the comment to the clipboard before I hit "Submit" if I feel like it's been more than a few minutes since I started writing. But this should not be necessary in the first place. Please increase the timeout on your CSRF tokens (or whatever it is that triggers the error message above) to something more user-friendly. I would suggest a sensible default of 86400 seconds. Thanks.

lutusp 13y ago
There's a reason things are set up as they are: * Although HTTP connections are normally stateless, HN has a login system for account holders, which means there's a state, a connection, associated with each logged-in user. * Because of the state information associated with logins, A Web server has a limited number of login connections it can handle. * To serve the maximum number of visitors, a server needs to recycle connections that are no longer in use. * There's no reliable heartbeat method between browser and server that a server can use to determine whether a given connection is still in use. Also, heartbeats would represent an extra traffic load on the server. And now that tabs have become popular, there's no way to be sure that a heartbeat response isn't from an unused, forgotten tab among dozens. * Therefore, after a connection has not seen packet requests for a set time interval, the server expires the connection to make it available to other visitors. * The shorter the timeout, the more connections the server can handle. > I would suggest a sensible default of 86400 seconds. Let's say the server can handle 2048 simultaneous login sessions (I don't know the actual number). According to your suggestion, after the first 2048 visitors log in, the server would refuse to accept any new logins for 24 hours. This isn't realistic. Here's how I handle the problem -- if I decide a reply is going to take more than a few seconds, I transfer my reply to a text editor and let the connection expire. When my long-winded reply is ready, I refresh the original page, paste my reply in, and click "Add Comment". I hope this helps.
- krapp 13y ago
  Although - other sites can manage user state and validating posts just fine without this 'feature.' Even assuming it's all but impossible to fix given the implementation in Arc, surely it would be possible to automatically reassociate the post with whatever the current function id is? It seems to be as much a user experience problem as anything.
  - jayrox 13y ago
    i always figured it was because they built each page and cached it to html, then that cache was set to expire after 5 minutes. then once the cache expired you couldn't go to the next page or what ever because the cached file was deleted. IMO the reasons presented for this "Feature" should be changed to "lazy programming". cause that's all it is.
    - krapp 13y ago
      Even then it would make more sense if the location that new comments were POSTed to was not necessarily one which could expire. Would it be impossible for the API (or whatever passes for an API) to present a static endpoint for receiving comments?
      - jayrox 13y ago
        its not impossible, just appears to be coded by someone who over did it with caching in the beginning before the site needed it.
- exelib 13y ago
  Then it's broken by design. There is no sense to do so, but a great way to anger visitors and destroy UX.
- nwh 13y ago
  I don't think this is what is going on here, it makes no sense for it to operate like this. To demonstrate this is not the case, I just momentarily unplugged my NIC and then submitted this comment. The connection was definitely dropped and re-associated, but my comment passed perfectly fine. This is more likely a very short cache time on CSRF tokens rather than anything to do with associated sockets.
jamesmoroni 13y ago
This happens with the next page button as well if I've been on the page for more than 3 minutes or so.
- Quai 13y ago
  I see this almost every day. I have always assumed that Hacker News is too cool to fix/support navigation after the frontpage (or any other page) has changed.
  - judk 13y ago
    It's not "cool", it's that the implementation is a quick hack, not intended to be a quality product. It just needs to be good enough to make users grudgingly return and see the PR for YC startups.
midnitewarrior 13y ago
Ya, for a community that is supposed to value great design and technical acumen, this site looks like somebody's pet project that was abandoned.
- danford 13y ago
  I don't really mind the design. I have a feeling they purposely keep the site design simple and, what some might consider "unappealing" to the average user. Helps weed out the normies.
  - judk 13y ago
    It also weeds out the adults who think about what they read and don't have child eyes.
    - nitrogen 13y ago
      You can always zoom in or enable high DPI mode if your browser supports it
      - 6cxs2hd6 13y ago
        Or one can always make a mother*ucking web site [^1], which works perfectly in every browser. Zero issues with font size, layout and scrolling. Just-works. [1]: http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
brudgers 13y ago
It's not a priority for HN development. See Graham's 2009 essay for an explanation of what matters: http://paulgraham.com/hackernews.html http://paulgraham.com/hackernews.html
vannevar 13y ago
This 'bug' has been around so long that at this point I suspect that it's really just a long-running troll.
chrismorgan 13y ago
This has bearing on my absolutely favourite part of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0: Section 2.2.1, Timing Adjustable (http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/#time-limits-required-behaviors http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/#time-limits-required-behaviors): ---- 2.2.1 Timing Adjustable: For each time limit that is set by the content, at least one of the following is true: (Level A) - Turn off: The user is allowed to turn off the time limit before encountering it; or - Adjust: The user is allowed to adjust the time limit before encountering it over a wide range that is at least ten times the length of the default setting; or - Extend: The user is warned before time expires and given at least 20 seconds to extend the time limit with a simple action (for example, "press the space bar"), and the user is allowed to extend the time limit at least ten times; or - Real-time Exception: The time limit is a required part of a real-time event (for example, an auction), and no alternative to the time limit is possible; or - Essential Exception: The time limit is essential and extending it would invalidate the activity; or - 20 Hour Exception: The time limit is longer than 20 hours. Note: This success criterion helps ensure that users can complete tasks without unexpected changes in content or context that are a result of a time limit. This success criterion should be considered in conjunction with Success Criterion 3.2.1, which puts limits on changes of content or context as a result of user action. ---- Yea, verily! HN isn’t even Level A (the most basic level that "everyone" should comply with) compliant. Through this, HN fails Accessibility 101. (Its text colour choices are also often dubious as far as contrast goes—that’s covered in WCAG 2.0 as well, of course.) I simply don’t care about the technical reasons. The choice of coroutines to back all of these things has broken the basic accessibility of all the content.
- zura 13y ago
  > The choice of coroutines to back all of these things has broken the basic accessibility of all the content. Exactly. This is actually a good example of More is Less.
- seabee 13y ago
  The choice of coroutines is not the cause of the problem, it's the decision to store session state on the server and clearing that state before the user is done. This same problem can happen in a PHP application, and it can be avoided in a Racket web framework application that uses continuations.
IgorPartola 13y ago
Also, can someone please make the site render with a larger font on mobile? I am spending a fortune on new glasses and contact lenses, as well as monocles and loupes just to read HN when not on my computer. So many people on here have asked for this over the years. Perhaps this is a subtle attempt by the YC to make sure all the people in our industry have to use eyewear so we can recognize each other at the secret meetings. Maybe this has something to do with Gunnar Optiks marketing eyewear for geeks? Maybe YC is about to fund an optometrist practice. Or maybe someone here knows that Apple is about to release a 20 inch iPad? Please, for the love of everything that is good and pure and true, make the font larger! Sincerely, Blind among blind Edit: please don't suggest one of the other HN wrappers. I know they exist. I don't want to hand over my HN password to them. My HN identity is important to me, so unless I can run my own wrapper on my own servers I don't want it. Edit edit: I believe if HN mods/operators announced a contest for best mobile design they'd get a ton of submissions. Sadly I am not a designer and could not participate, but I am sure the amount of submissions would be huge.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- loup-vaillant 13y ago
  Can't you control the minimum font size on your mobile browser or something?
  - IgorPartola 13y ago
    I believe on iOS you can increase the font size for the entire UI, not just the browser. Not something I would want to do. No idea about Android.
- maxerickson 13y ago
  There is a new layout that is supposed to be more mobile friendly in progress. dang has (briefly) posted about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7606298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7606298
- saurik 13y ago
pfg 13y ago
See [1] on why this is happening. Relevant part: >Internally, the web server associates a token called the fnid with each instance of a link or form, and records the continuation function for each token. Periodically, old fnids are deleted. [1]: http://arclanguage.github.io/ref/srv.html http://arclanguage.github.io/ref/srv.html
- kijin 13y ago
  Thanks for the reference. Any idea where the fnids are stored and how they are garbage-collected? Could it be that they're just dumped into a memcached instance and older fnids get pushed out whenever the memory limit is reached?
  - wahnfrieden 13y ago
    It's not the fnid that gets garbage collected, it's the coroutine itself.
- gaving 13y ago
  I'm not sure anybody particularly cares why it is happening, just that it is happening.
jmount 13y ago
I agree with you: HN time-outs and failures (which also occur on reading) are an unnecessary pain. This is one reason you should never write into a web text box (a rule I also fail to adhere to). But really even "modern application grade" web stuff is so flakey if you value your text you write it in a local editor and then copy/paste later.
- BrandonMarc 13y ago
  With this rule in mind, I wonder if a textures / notes area would be a good feature to include in the web browser itself (including mobile browsers) ...
sergiotapia 13y ago
Public Service Announcement: If you're on Chrome use HackerNews Enhancement Suite. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhancement-s/bappiabcodbpphnojdiaddhnilfnjmpm https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhanc... No more ass-ugly hackernews font choices and colors.
- sk5t 13y ago
  Neat! Worth it for the option to collapse threads alone. Recently some extraordinarily lengthy, tedious threads have dominated the discussion on otherwise-interesting topics, and simply finding the end of the dreck was a problem.
cordite 13y ago
Yeah, it's really annoying to have to edit the URL on mobile when this happens..
throw_away12847 13y ago
I really do believe that HN is poorly designed for end users. The UI is not forward with intent, or pleasurable to use. It's been literally years and the expired link issue hasn't been addressed. ---No, I'll stop you right there. It's been acknowledged as an implementation bug, but not addressed. PG's lack of user empathy and stubbornness make HN worse. The only reason people come here is the content.
- btilly 13y ago
  The only reason people come here is the content. I consider this a good thing. It attracts the right kind of people.
  - throw_away12847 13y ago
    Are you insinuating that the key to dissuading the wrong kind of people is to make Hacker News difficult to use? The notion that good users will "power through" a bad design is dubious at best. I hope that you're not involved in product design. This thought process is not good for anyone.
    - btilly 13y ago
      I make no apologies for my opinion, however much you dislike it. I've maintained for years that the key to a high quality online forum is for it to be limited in some way. It can be limited by bugs. Limited by nobody advertising that it exists. Limited by having a very focused topic of discussion. I'm willing to believe that it can be limited by moderation, but I self-select out of those forums so don't know. But without some sort of limiting you get what happened to Usenet, Slashdot, kuro5hin, the main page of Reddit, and so on. Which is that they became the place that everyone knew that they should go. And then the noise went up faster than the signal, resulting in a poor signal to noise ratio. And then the best people found new forums to go to, and slowly disappeared. Of course if you make the limiting TOO effective, eventually nobody will be left. There is a balance to be had. And this only applies to high quality content of the kind that I want to engage with. Which is admittedly not to everyone's taste. It is not a way to make something popular.
jellicle 13y ago
For any new readers: this is a "bug by design", it has been extensively complained about in the past, and it's marked "will not fix, stop complaining" by management. This has been a public service announcement.
- akkartik 13y ago
  Not true. It's an open bug. It's just really hard to fix. https://github.com/HackerNews/HN/issues/11 https://github.com/HackerNews/HN/issues/11
  - kijin 13y ago
    @akkartik's JS redirect suggestion sounds like it will be trivial to implement. No need to fix the legacy arc code, just add a stopgap measure that will improve the UX for a lot of people :)
  - falcolas 13y ago
    With all due respect, if a framework makes storing sessions for more than 30 minutes "hard", there's something fundamentally wrong with the framework. This has been a solved problem for longer than I have worked in the industry.
    - akkartik 13y ago
      Yes, it's been frustrating to me as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5032739 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5032739. Just an unfortunate consequence of starting out as a prototype.
phamilton 13y ago
One positive side effect of the architecture is proper isolation in pagination. When I fetch Page 1, the link to Page 2 will always return the same set, regardless of timing (up until it expires). You will never see the last entry on one page show up as the first entry on the next page.
grey-area 13y ago
I have a modest proposal for addressing the terrible dearth of fnids on this site. Since fnids are in such high demand, and yet are expensive to keep in memory, one small change might free up lots of them - remove the use of fnids for more pages and use a static url instead so the more link on: https://news.ycombinator.com/news https://news.ycombinator.com/news would point to: https://news.ycombinator.com/news/2 https://news.ycombinator.com/news/2 and so on.... This would free up many fnids for use elsewhere, and also make the secondary list pages more easily cacheable and reduce load on the server. The same could be done for other lists which currently use fnids without any appreciable change in the user experience or probably much change in the server code.
Kiro 13y ago
Can someone explain why this expiration thing is happening like I'm 5? Even the most basic PHP tutorial app doesn't have this problem so I don't understand people saying it's inevitable.
BrandonMarc 13y ago
So ... is this a bug or a feature? Is the internal activity causing this unpopular behavior supposed to do this, in the first place? If the site is indeed behaving exactly as its designers want it to, then that's a rather separate debate as opposed to simply ways and means. I'm not saying I agree with the behavior; I'm just trying to see what should be debated to start with.
- Raphael 13y ago
  Yes, the order changes over time, so the second page will often contain items from the old first page.
dang 13y ago
I'll try to respond to everything in one comment. kogir and I talked recently about getting rid of "unknown or expired link". It's on our list. There are a lot of things on the list; we don't know yet when we'll get to it. There's work ongoing to make HN more usable on mobile. This will likely roll out sooner than the above. We intend to roll it out incrementally, starting with the front page. We'll give people lots of notice so anyone running scrapers that are affected (like me!) will have time to change. The look and feel of HN is unlikely to change much. We can argue about that one till the cows come home. I'm tempted to—my opinions are as strong as many of yours—but that doesn't seem like the best idea right now. Feature requests should go to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363. Software bugs should go to https://github.com/HackerNews/HN/issues https://github.com/HackerNews/HN/issues. That would have been the appropriate destination for the OP, and indeed this issue has been posted about there. Threads like the current one get lots of upvotes and comments, but they've never been on topic for HN. I'm going to bury this one now.
- krapp 13y ago
  How is it not on topic for HN? It would be on topic to discuss the implementation of any other site.
  - dang 13y ago
    What's on topic for HN, as the guidelines say, are stories that gratify intellectual curiosity. Meta posts gratify several things, but that is not one of them. They generate masses of comments like fast-growing weeds, because we're all full of opinions about HN, but the discussions never go very deep, or really anywhere. This has been the case for many years—pretty much since the beginning of the site—and so has the policy on it.
    - krapp 13y ago
      You don't think a community of programmers and hackers and UX nerds would or should be intellectually curious about why a forum written in a Lisp dialect works and why it doesn't, and how it solves, or doesn't solve, various problems? I can understand why it's annoying for the staff to have to encounter these threads so often - it's annoying for users to keep running into dead links. But I don't think it's entirely true that this topic has no value to the community at large. Having opinions and discussing things is kind of what forums are supposed to be about.
dfc 13y ago
> I'm pretty sure that the HN community likes to read thoughtful, thoroughly > researched comments that are somewhat longer than one-liners. Could not agree more and this is a great side effect of the time out. It gives the commenter yet another reason to compose their comment in a real editor. Personally I find the comment text box is too small to do a decent job of assessing and editing my comment. A real editor also makes it easy to format the above blockquote[^1] or to insert[^2] logical and consistent footnotes.[^3] [^1]: http://www.nicemice.net/par/ http://www.nicemice.net/par/ [^2]: http://jblevins.org/projects/markdown-mode/ http://jblevins.org/projects/markdown-mode/ [^3]: I just wish markdown-mode would renumber the footnotes if I go back and insert a new footnote. As it is I have to pipe the output through pandoc

112 points by kijin 13y ago

lutusp 13y ago

There's a reason things are set up as they are: * Although HTTP connections are normally stateless, HN has a login system for account holders, which means there's a state, a connection, associated with each logged-in user. * Because of the state information associated with logins, A Web server has a limited number of login connections it can handle. * To serve the maximum number of visitors, a server needs to recycle connections that are no longer in use. * There's no reliable heartbeat method between browser and server that a server can use to determine whether a given connection is still in use. Also, heartbeats would represent an extra traffic load on the server. And now that tabs have become popular, there's no way to be sure that a heartbeat response isn't from an unused, forgotten tab among dozens. * Therefore, after a connection has not seen packet requests for a set time interval, the server expires the connection to make it available to other visitors. * The shorter the timeout, the more connections the server can handle. > I would suggest a sensible default of 86400 seconds. Let's say the server can handle 2048 simultaneous login sessions (I don't know the actual number). According to your suggestion, after the first 2048 visitors log in, the server would refuse to accept any new logins for 24 hours. This isn't realistic. Here's how I handle the problem -- if I decide a reply is going to take more than a few seconds, I transfer my reply to a text editor and let the connection expire. When my long-winded reply is ready, I refresh the original page, paste my reply in, and click "Add Comment". I hope this helps.

krapp 13y ago
Although - other sites can manage user state and validating posts just fine without this 'feature.' Even assuming it's all but impossible to fix given the implementation in Arc, surely it would be possible to automatically reassociate the post with whatever the current function id is? It seems to be as much a user experience problem as anything.
- jayrox 13y ago
  i always figured it was because they built each page and cached it to html, then that cache was set to expire after 5 minutes. then once the cache expired you couldn't go to the next page or what ever because the cached file was deleted. IMO the reasons presented for this "Feature" should be changed to "lazy programming". cause that's all it is.
  - krapp 13y ago
    Even then it would make more sense if the location that new comments were POSTed to was not necessarily one which could expire. Would it be impossible for the API (or whatever passes for an API) to present a static endpoint for receiving comments?
    - jayrox 13y ago
      its not impossible, just appears to be coded by someone who over did it with caching in the beginning before the site needed it.
exelib 13y ago
Then it's broken by design. There is no sense to do so, but a great way to anger visitors and destroy UX.
nwh 13y ago
I don't think this is what is going on here, it makes no sense for it to operate like this. To demonstrate this is not the case, I just momentarily unplugged my NIC and then submitted this comment. The connection was definitely dropped and re-associated, but my comment passed perfectly fine. This is more likely a very short cache time on CSRF tokens rather than anything to do with associated sockets.

jamesmoroni 13y ago

This happens with the next page button as well if I've been on the page for more than 3 minutes or so.

Quai 13y ago
I see this almost every day. I have always assumed that Hacker News is too cool to fix/support navigation after the frontpage (or any other page) has changed.
- judk 13y ago
  It's not "cool", it's that the implementation is a quick hack, not intended to be a quality product. It just needs to be good enough to make users grudgingly return and see the PR for YC startups.

midnitewarrior 13y ago

Ya, for a community that is supposed to value great design and technical acumen, this site looks like somebody's pet project that was abandoned.

danford 13y ago
I don't really mind the design. I have a feeling they purposely keep the site design simple and, what some might consider "unappealing" to the average user. Helps weed out the normies.
- judk 13y ago
  It also weeds out the adults who think about what they read and don't have child eyes.
  - nitrogen 13y ago
    You can always zoom in or enable high DPI mode if your browser supports it
    - 6cxs2hd6 13y ago
      Or one can always make a mother*ucking web site [^1], which works perfectly in every browser. Zero issues with font size, layout and scrolling. Just-works. [1]: http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

brudgers 13y ago

It's not a priority for HN development. See Graham's 2009 essay for an explanation of what matters: http://paulgraham.com/hackernews.html http://paulgraham.com/hackernews.html

vannevar 13y ago

This 'bug' has been around so long that at this point I suspect that it's really just a long-running troll.

chrismorgan 13y ago

This has bearing on my absolutely favourite part of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0: Section 2.2.1, Timing Adjustable (http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/#time-limits-required-behaviors http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/#time-limits-required-behaviors): ---- 2.2.1 Timing Adjustable: For each time limit that is set by the content, at least one of the following is true: (Level A) - Turn off: The user is allowed to turn off the time limit before encountering it; or - Adjust: The user is allowed to adjust the time limit before encountering it over a wide range that is at least ten times the length of the default setting; or - Extend: The user is warned before time expires and given at least 20 seconds to extend the time limit with a simple action (for example, "press the space bar"), and the user is allowed to extend the time limit at least ten times; or - Real-time Exception: The time limit is a required part of a real-time event (for example, an auction), and no alternative to the time limit is possible; or - Essential Exception: The time limit is essential and extending it would invalidate the activity; or - 20 Hour Exception: The time limit is longer than 20 hours. Note: This success criterion helps ensure that users can complete tasks without unexpected changes in content or context that are a result of a time limit. This success criterion should be considered in conjunction with Success Criterion 3.2.1, which puts limits on changes of content or context as a result of user action. ---- Yea, verily! HN isn’t even Level A (the most basic level that "everyone" should comply with) compliant. Through this, HN fails Accessibility 101. (Its text colour choices are also often dubious as far as contrast goes—that’s covered in WCAG 2.0 as well, of course.) I simply don’t care about the technical reasons. The choice of coroutines to back all of these things has broken the basic accessibility of all the content.

zura 13y ago
> The choice of coroutines to back all of these things has broken the basic accessibility of all the content. Exactly. This is actually a good example of More is Less.
seabee 13y ago
The choice of coroutines is not the cause of the problem, it's the decision to store session state on the server and clearing that state before the user is done. This same problem can happen in a PHP application, and it can be avoided in a Racket web framework application that uses continuations.

IgorPartola 13y ago

Also, can someone please make the site render with a larger font on mobile? I am spending a fortune on new glasses and contact lenses, as well as monocles and loupes just to read HN when not on my computer. So many people on here have asked for this over the years. Perhaps this is a subtle attempt by the YC to make sure all the people in our industry have to use eyewear so we can recognize each other at the secret meetings. Maybe this has something to do with Gunnar Optiks marketing eyewear for geeks? Maybe YC is about to fund an optometrist practice. Or maybe someone here knows that Apple is about to release a 20 inch iPad? Please, for the love of everything that is good and pure and true, make the font larger! Sincerely, Blind among blind Edit: please don't suggest one of the other HN wrappers. I know they exist. I don't want to hand over my HN password to them. My HN identity is important to me, so unless I can run my own wrapper on my own servers I don't want it. Edit edit: I believe if HN mods/operators announced a contest for best mobile design they'd get a ton of submissions. Sadly I am not a designer and could not participate, but I am sure the amount of submissions would be huge.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
loup-vaillant 13y ago
Can't you control the minimum font size on your mobile browser or something?
- IgorPartola 13y ago
  I believe on iOS you can increase the font size for the entire UI, not just the browser. Not something I would want to do. No idea about Android.
maxerickson 13y ago
There is a new layout that is supposed to be more mobile friendly in progress. dang has (briefly) posted about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7606298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7606298
saurik 13y ago

pfg 13y ago

See [1] on why this is happening. Relevant part: >Internally, the web server associates a token called the fnid with each instance of a link or form, and records the continuation function for each token. Periodically, old fnids are deleted. [1]: http://arclanguage.github.io/ref/srv.html http://arclanguage.github.io/ref/srv.html

kijin 13y ago
Thanks for the reference. Any idea where the fnids are stored and how they are garbage-collected? Could it be that they're just dumped into a memcached instance and older fnids get pushed out whenever the memory limit is reached?
- wahnfrieden 13y ago
  It's not the fnid that gets garbage collected, it's the coroutine itself.
gaving 13y ago
I'm not sure anybody particularly cares why it is happening, just that it is happening.

jmount 13y ago

I agree with you: HN time-outs and failures (which also occur on reading) are an unnecessary pain. This is one reason you should never write into a web text box (a rule I also fail to adhere to). But really even "modern application grade" web stuff is so flakey if you value your text you write it in a local editor and then copy/paste later.

BrandonMarc 13y ago
With this rule in mind, I wonder if a textures / notes area would be a good feature to include in the web browser itself (including mobile browsers) ...

sergiotapia 13y ago

Public Service Announcement: If you're on Chrome use HackerNews Enhancement Suite. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhancement-s/bappiabcodbpphnojdiaddhnilfnjmpm https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhanc... No more ass-ugly hackernews font choices and colors.

sk5t 13y ago
Neat! Worth it for the option to collapse threads alone. Recently some extraordinarily lengthy, tedious threads have dominated the discussion on otherwise-interesting topics, and simply finding the end of the dreck was a problem.

cordite 13y ago

Yeah, it's really annoying to have to edit the URL on mobile when this happens..

throw_away12847 13y ago

I really do believe that HN is poorly designed for end users. The UI is not forward with intent, or pleasurable to use. It's been literally years and the expired link issue hasn't been addressed. ---No, I'll stop you right there. It's been acknowledged as an implementation bug, but not addressed. PG's lack of user empathy and stubbornness make HN worse. The only reason people come here is the content.

btilly 13y ago
The only reason people come here is the content. I consider this a good thing. It attracts the right kind of people.
- throw_away12847 13y ago
  Are you insinuating that the key to dissuading the wrong kind of people is to make Hacker News difficult to use? The notion that good users will "power through" a bad design is dubious at best. I hope that you're not involved in product design. This thought process is not good for anyone.
  - btilly 13y ago
    I make no apologies for my opinion, however much you dislike it. I've maintained for years that the key to a high quality online forum is for it to be limited in some way. It can be limited by bugs. Limited by nobody advertising that it exists. Limited by having a very focused topic of discussion. I'm willing to believe that it can be limited by moderation, but I self-select out of those forums so don't know. But without some sort of limiting you get what happened to Usenet, Slashdot, kuro5hin, the main page of Reddit, and so on. Which is that they became the place that everyone knew that they should go. And then the noise went up faster than the signal, resulting in a poor signal to noise ratio. And then the best people found new forums to go to, and slowly disappeared. Of course if you make the limiting TOO effective, eventually nobody will be left. There is a balance to be had. And this only applies to high quality content of the kind that I want to engage with. Which is admittedly not to everyone's taste. It is not a way to make something popular.

jellicle 13y ago

For any new readers: this is a "bug by design", it has been extensively complained about in the past, and it's marked "will not fix, stop complaining" by management. This has been a public service announcement.

akkartik 13y ago
Not true. It's an open bug. It's just really hard to fix. https://github.com/HackerNews/HN/issues/11 https://github.com/HackerNews/HN/issues/11
- kijin 13y ago
  @akkartik's JS redirect suggestion sounds like it will be trivial to implement. No need to fix the legacy arc code, just add a stopgap measure that will improve the UX for a lot of people :)
- falcolas 13y ago
  With all due respect, if a framework makes storing sessions for more than 30 minutes "hard", there's something fundamentally wrong with the framework. This has been a solved problem for longer than I have worked in the industry.
  - akkartik 13y ago
    Yes, it's been frustrating to me as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5032739 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5032739. Just an unfortunate consequence of starting out as a prototype.

phamilton 13y ago

One positive side effect of the architecture is proper isolation in pagination. When I fetch Page 1, the link to Page 2 will always return the same set, regardless of timing (up until it expires). You will never see the last entry on one page show up as the first entry on the next page.

grey-area 13y ago

I have a modest proposal for addressing the terrible dearth of fnids on this site. Since fnids are in such high demand, and yet are expensive to keep in memory, one small change might free up lots of them - remove the use of fnids for more pages and use a static url instead so the more link on: https://news.ycombinator.com/news https://news.ycombinator.com/news would point to: https://news.ycombinator.com/news/2 https://news.ycombinator.com/news/2 and so on.... This would free up many fnids for use elsewhere, and also make the secondary list pages more easily cacheable and reduce load on the server. The same could be done for other lists which currently use fnids without any appreciable change in the user experience or probably much change in the server code.

Kiro 13y ago

Can someone explain why this expiration thing is happening like I'm 5? Even the most basic PHP tutorial app doesn't have this problem so I don't understand people saying it's inevitable.

BrandonMarc 13y ago

So ... is this a bug or a feature? Is the internal activity causing this unpopular behavior supposed to do this, in the first place? If the site is indeed behaving exactly as its designers want it to, then that's a rather separate debate as opposed to simply ways and means. I'm not saying I agree with the behavior; I'm just trying to see what should be debated to start with.

Raphael 13y ago
Yes, the order changes over time, so the second page will often contain items from the old first page.

dang 13y ago

I'll try to respond to everything in one comment. kogir and I talked recently about getting rid of "unknown or expired link". It's on our list. There are a lot of things on the list; we don't know yet when we'll get to it. There's work ongoing to make HN more usable on mobile. This will likely roll out sooner than the above. We intend to roll it out incrementally, starting with the front page. We'll give people lots of notice so anyone running scrapers that are affected (like me!) will have time to change. The look and feel of HN is unlikely to change much. We can argue about that one till the cows come home. I'm tempted to—my opinions are as strong as many of yours—but that doesn't seem like the best idea right now. Feature requests should go to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363. Software bugs should go to https://github.com/HackerNews/HN/issues https://github.com/HackerNews/HN/issues. That would have been the appropriate destination for the OP, and indeed this issue has been posted about there. Threads like the current one get lots of upvotes and comments, but they've never been on topic for HN. I'm going to bury this one now.

krapp 13y ago
How is it not on topic for HN? It would be on topic to discuss the implementation of any other site.
- dang 13y ago
  What's on topic for HN, as the guidelines say, are stories that gratify intellectual curiosity. Meta posts gratify several things, but that is not one of them. They generate masses of comments like fast-growing weeds, because we're all full of opinions about HN, but the discussions never go very deep, or really anywhere. This has been the case for many years—pretty much since the beginning of the site—and so has the policy on it.
  - krapp 13y ago
    You don't think a community of programmers and hackers and UX nerds would or should be intellectually curious about why a forum written in a Lisp dialect works and why it doesn't, and how it solves, or doesn't solve, various problems? I can understand why it's annoying for the staff to have to encounter these threads so often - it's annoying for users to keep running into dead links. But I don't think it's entirely true that this topic has no value to the community at large. Having opinions and discussing things is kind of what forums are supposed to be about.

dfc 13y ago

> I'm pretty sure that the HN community likes to read thoughtful, thoroughly > researched comments that are somewhat longer than one-liners. Could not agree more and this is a great side effect of the time out. It gives the commenter yet another reason to compose their comment in a real editor. Personally I find the comment text box is too small to do a decent job of assessing and editing my comment. A real editor also makes it easy to format the above blockquote[^1] or to insert[^2] logical and consistent footnotes.[^3] [^1]: http://www.nicemice.net/par/ http://www.nicemice.net/par/ [^2]: http://jblevins.org/projects/markdown-mode/ http://jblevins.org/projects/markdown-mode/ [^3]: I just wish markdown-mode would renumber the footnotes if I go back and insert a new footnote. As it is I have to pipe the output through pandoc