You can kill me, but I find it somewhat ironic that the functionality championed in the Arc Challenge is directly responsible for the most annoying bug on Hacker News. :)
Why does HN generate unique URL's for the 'more' pages?
21–30 of 44 posts
Re: Why does HN generate unique URL's for the 'more' pages?
#22Aigh, you beat me to it.
pg, please fix this. It drives me batty that after a page is open for a little while the "more" link breaks. That should never, ever, ever happen.
Re: Why does HN generate unique URL's for the 'more' pages?
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
"The nature of Lisp really lends itself to continuation-based programming." This comes up occasionally on HN. I've never seen anyone say anything positive about it. It seems like a software detail that's unnecessary exposed to users. It doesn't make the site better, it makes it worse.
I completely agree, but I wouldn't mind it nearly so much if the "expired link" page at the very least had a link to the home page.
Or to the next page.
Re: Why does HN generate unique URL's for the 'more' pages?
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
"The nature of Lisp really lends itself to continuation-based programming." This comes up occasionally on HN. I've never seen anyone say anything positive about it. It seems like a software detail that's unnecessary exposed to users. It doesn't make the site better, it makes it worse.
I completely agree, but I wouldn't mind it nearly so much if the "expired link" page at the very least had a link to the home page.
I added a suggestion to that effect on the Feature Request thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363) a while ago, but it slipped off into the long tail of comments pretty quickly:
Re: Why does HN generate unique URL's for the 'more' pages?
#25It's done on purpose as a concrete example of how _not_ to code a social news aggregator.
If I were coding a site like this, I'm certain 'how to handle next page links' would be near the top of the problem list. I am also quite certain I would not pick a solution that gives an empty white page with 'link expired' on it.
Re: Why does HN generate unique URL's for the 'more' pages?
#26It's called a continuation. Continuations are essentially closures being passed around to represent state (hence "fnid"), check the Wikipedia page on them for a proper, computer sciencey definition. The nature of Lisp really lends itself to continuation-based programming. Sometimes (like on HN) it's used in web applications. In the context of web applications, it's a different approach than, for example, REST/MVC. It…
Reddit does not use a similar mechanism. Here's an example of one of their next page links: http://www.reddit.com/?count=100&after=t3_q1sxk The count is the number of stories to skip, the after is the id of the last story on the previous page.
I don't see how that improves anything. If you click that link, you still see "nothing here".
Re: Why does HN generate unique URL's for the 'more' pages?
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reddit does not use a similar mechanism. Here's an example of one of their next page links: http://www.reddit.com/?count=100&after=t3_q1sxk The count is the number of stories to skip, the after is the id of the last story on the previous page.
I don't see how that improves anything. If you click that link, you still see "nothing here".
The point isn't that it's an improvement, the point is that it's completely different. It's the "standard" way of doing pagination (limit + offset), not a continuation.
Re: Why does HN generate unique URL's for the 'more' pages?
#28Not only that, but it seems to be paginating comments at an absurdly low count, I went back to reference an old thread and I went 5 pages in before I got tired of looking for the right comment. That and I've been bitten by "expired" links three times today alone, once while I was trying to submit a comment.
Re: Why does HN generate unique URL's for the 'more' pages?
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reddit does not use a similar mechanism. Here's an example of one of their next page links: http://www.reddit.com/?count=100&after=t3_q1sxk The count is the number of stories to skip, the after is the id of the last story on the previous page.
I don't see how that improves anything. If you click that link, you still see "nothing here".
I'm not claiming it's an improvement.
Re: Why does HN generate unique URL's for the 'more' pages?
#30Btw, for all those who are talking about continuations: