3 ms·
Except that stories can move up and down the list over time, and users do care. Slow browsers like me were hitting dead links precisely because we were slow.
by willvarfar 12y ago
Except that stories can move up and down the list over time, and users do care. Slow browsers like me were hitting dead links precisely because we were slow.
Yes you can still store this much more centrally and cheaply than closures. You can have all stories with a timeline in and do a sort using next-thirty-at-this-timestamp and, despite you visiting every story and then sorting, I'd expect it to be snappy enough for a heavy hit site. Furthermore, you could speed it up with linked lists instead of timestamps too etc.
- danielweber 12y agoIf I take 20 minutes to browse the first 30 links, and then click "next", do I really want "next 30 as of 20 minutes ago"? If I'm on the second page and hit reload, what's the expected behavior? "Second 30 as of 20 minutes ago" or "second 30 right now"? I can kinda-sorta see how this implementation might be better in some corner-case, but it overalls leads me to having a confused state about just where I am in the stream.
- Kluny 12y agoI definitely want the the second 30 as of 20 minutes ago. If I wanted the fresh thirty, I'd refresh the page.
- Domenic_S 12y ago> users do care Disagree. Reddit & (the old) Digg both use a naive implementation that repeats stories and they have/had millions more users than HN (and nobody complained).
- Kluny 12y agoI seem to recall that people complained constantly. Reddit at least, if you click the "more" link, at least half the time you would get "there doesn't seem to be anything here." And you bet people complained about that one.