41–50 of 142 posts
The first complaints are from 1575 days (over 4 years) ago, including about the more button breaking, so I am guessing pg has no interest in fixing it.
Hacker News is open source, so it seems as if nobody is interested in fixing it. Or are there fixes and pg has rejected them?
The HN server uses a table of closures to implement those links (the id code for the closure is the bit after fnid= in the url). When the HN server starts running out of memory, it drops entries from this table. When your browser asks for an entry that is no longer in this table, you get the "Unknown or expired link" error. This is a crazy design, but unless someone would like to patch the source code and get PG to a…
It's not crazy at all, it greatly simplifies development to use callbacks for actions rather than manually encoding the necessary state into the URL. Techniques such as this are what enable a single developer to be so productive by automating boring and time consuming stuff.
1. Open Hacker News
2. Go to lunch
3. Come back from lunch and click next
Every. Time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hacker News is open source, so it seems as if nobody is interested in fixing it. Or are there fixes and pg has rejected them?
Or it's so ingrained in the architecture of the software that a fix isn't possible without completely rewriting it and changing the entire design philosophy.
To see the potential, look at this code snippet from an academic paper on the topic. The web server presents a form asking for a number, then presents a form asking for another number, then displays their product. This technique makes event-driven web applications feel (to the programmer) like sequential imperative programs.
;; main body
‘(html (head (title ”Product”))
(body
(p ”The product is: ”
,(number→string (∗ (get-number ”first”) (get-number ”second”))))))
It's an artefact of the way in which news.arc (actually srv.arc) uses functions for links. Here's the key code: (= dead-msg* "\nUnknown or expired link.") (defop-raw x (str req) (w/stdout str (aif (fns* (sym (arg req "fnid"))) (it req) (pr dead-msg*)))) If the fnid (function ID) isn't in the fns* list then you get the dead message. (def flink (f) (string fnurl* "?fnid=" (fnid (fn (req) (prn) (f req))))) In many place…
I'm really not convinced it's a good architecture, even if it is "nice".
I've been wondering about this for a long time, but just as a data point if anyone cares, it has reached the point recently that HN is basically unusable for me a lot of the time, and I really am starting to give up on trying and spend more time elsewhere instead. Perhaps one visitor is no great loss -- I'm hardly the personality around here that someone like patio11 is -- but I hope my contribution is constructive,…
When writing comments, always make a copy of your text before hitting submit (CTRL+A, CTRL+C). A good strategy for any text form on the web.
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lazarus-form-...
Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/loljledaigphbcpfhf...
I've been wondering about this for a long time, but just as a data point if anyone cares, it has reached the point recently that HN is basically unusable for me a lot of the time, and I really am starting to give up on trying and spend more time elsewhere instead. Perhaps one visitor is no great loss -- I'm hardly the personality around here that someone like patio11 is -- but I hope my contribution is constructive,…
On the other hand, new users who might not be accustomed to The Way We Do Things Around Here would be more likely to get upset at the superficial inconveniences and leave.
It's probably even the case that improving the site or adding features to it would work against its best interests by making it more accessible. HN's implementation is such that the more traffic it sees, the more frequently those errors will occur -- and as an unexpected side-effect, the popularity and instability of the site will work against each other until equilibrium is reached.
A small barrier to entry like Reddit's spartan design or MeFi's $5 fee can go a long way toward delaying the onset of the entertainment-seeking masses.
PG is using a really cool programming technique that I'm afraid is ahead of its time relative to current hardware. An upgrade to the HN server should allay the problem. To see the potential, look at this code snippet from an academic paper on the topic. The web server presents a form asking for a number, then presents a form asking for another number, then displays their product. This technique makes event-driven web…
Using closures to store state on the server is a rapid prototyping technique, like using lists as data structures. It's elegant but inefficient. In the initial version of HN I used closures for practically all links. As traffic has increased over the years, I've gradually replaced them with hard-coded urls.
Lately traffic has grown rapidly (it usually does in the fall) and I've been working on other things (mostly banning crawlers that don't respect robots.txt), so the rate of expired links has become more conspicuous. I'll add a few more hard-coded urls and that will get it down again.