At a guess (after 1 min grep), this is the original code (from an old copy of the HN src). afaics, that's the code to render the entire table for all the storie

At a guess (after 1 min grep), this is the original code (from an old copy of the HN src). afaics, that's the code to render the entire table for all the stories (plus the 'more' link), including the html (note the inline 'tr' tags etc). https://github.com/wting/hackernews/blob/master/news.arc#L925-L956 https://github.com/wting/hackernews/blob/master/news.arc#L92... The point is that all the variable you want for rendering "page 2" are right there in scope. A closure can capture those, so you don't have to do any extra work serialising them, sending them to the browser, validating them on return, etc. Closures can seem odd the first time you come across them, but they're pretty mainstream these days (perl, python, ruby, C++, C#, golang all have them (some of them for a very long time :-), as well as the more traditionally-functional languages). There's more info here and it's the sort of topic you'll get lots of answers from in HN. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closure_%28computer_programming%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closure_%28computer_programming...