from Hacker News

Hacker News: Unknown or Expired Link

by fotoflo on 11/15/12, 2:48 PM with 38 comments

• by irahul on 11/15/12, 4:07 PM

  This has been discussed to death. Apparently you have to deal with it and it's not going to be fixed.

  However, if anyone is curious about why it's happening, this is what the arc code is doing http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3098863

  If you don't follow arc, here is a python and ruby approximation of the arc challenge http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3098863

  https://github.com/rahulkmr/musings/blob/master/ruby/sinatra...

  https://github.com/rahulkmr/musings/blob/master/python/closu...

• by jgrahamc on 11/15/12, 3:46 PM

  I've wondered at times if PG isn't deliberately leaving this problem in place so that people who get annoyed by it are filtered out as users of the web site.

• by rythie on 11/15/12, 4:24 PM

  It's funny, if Hacker News was the product of a startup it would have been redesigned, A/B tested and tons of features/tweaks added. Any growth would be seen as the result of those actions, however HN has grown anyway despite being stagnent for 5+ years.

  Makes you wonder what all the software development really achieves, or if HN would be bigger still if they had done that - or if PG wants HN to be bigger at all.

• by irahul on 11/15/12, 2:51 PM

  http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3098756

  > why wouldn't they use (searchable) permalinks? I'm assuming there's a reason for this, as its not the easiest way to do things.

  It's straight forward, but not when you are using closures and continuations.

• by JimWestergren on 11/15/12, 2:55 PM

  Those kind of links are a great irritation for me when browsing and reading HN.

  Instead of http://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=KnmhPyrF1t Why not for example: http://news.ycombinator.com/news?page=2 ?

• by diminoten on 11/15/12, 3:31 PM

  I'm fairly certain HN itself isn't actively developed.

  If I remember correctly, there was quite a bit of teeth-gnashing over the state of password storage on HN awhile back, and it took the moving of mountains before things were changed (were they ever changed?).

• by brudgers on 11/15/12, 8:20 PM

  <non_authoritative_opinion>

  HN is a minimum viable product.

  What gets addressed are behaviors which damage the community.

  These are not usually related to visible features of the site.

  Community issues created by the "Unknown or expired link" were addressed by the addition of the "No Procrastination" feature.

  </non_authoritative_opinion>

• by mkelley on 11/15/12, 3:08 PM

  I totally agree, come on pg .... Unknown or expired link when I hit More after waiting too long... you can do better. I bet that is #1 on peoples wishlist for HN. That's actually perhaps the only problem I have with HN's design. Clean, simple, functional (except for that frequently annoying error message!!!) EDIT: spelling

• by flyinRyan on 11/16/12, 8:35 AM

  I wouldn't get my hopes up for any kind of feature at all for this site. I think PG kind of regrets making it at all since sites like this are about <random small percent> valuable information about startups and <random much larger percent> waste of time (e.g. pretty much any political discussion at all). I doubt he wants to make it even easier to waste time here.

• by tucson on 11/15/12, 3:11 PM

  How about some keyboard navigation shortcuts? (left-right arrows). It works on http://www.HnEasy.com.

• by brianobush on 11/15/12, 4:19 PM

  The solution is to logout, then it works as intended.