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Fix HackerNews Issue #11, which is driving us all crazy: Unknown or expired link

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Re: Fix HackerNews Issue #11, which is driving us all crazy: Unknown or expired link

#22
post #6

Technically i understand its importance but in terms of UX this thing is terrible. For a non English speakers, they usually take some time to reply and most of the time they end up with `expired link`. I doubt the user who wrote very big comment (usually highest rated comment in that thread) use HN editor, I guess they first write in the word processor and then copy it here since the amount of time it involved in wri…

For a non English speakers, they usually take some time to reply and most of the time they end up with `expired link`. I doubt the user who wrote very big comment (usually highest rated comment in that thread) use HN editor, I guess they first write in the word processor and then copy it here since the amount of time it involved in writing comment is not sufficient. I use the HN edit box. On mobile, I take care to co…

And you are okay with it?

Re: Fix HackerNews Issue #11, which is driving us all crazy: Unknown or expired link

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a non English speakers, they usually take some time to reply and most of the time they end up with `expired link`. I doubt the user who wrote very big comment (usually highest rated comment in that thread) use HN editor, I guess they first write in the word processor and then copy it here since the amount of time it involved in writing comment is not sufficient. I use the HN edit box. On mobile, I take care to co…

And you are okay with it?

Of course. Their time is limited, and they spend it on more important matters: how to get better stories, how to detect voting rings, how to eliminate randomness of whether stories are upvoted during their short time in the /newest queue, etc. I'm happy they spend their time working on what matters; unknown/expired link is a nonissue in comparison.

Re: Fix HackerNews Issue #11, which is driving us all crazy: Unknown or expired link

#26
post #12

The reason this happens is that the link is actually a reference to a live closure[1] held in memory on the server. Notice how the URL has `fnid=...`? Well fnid is short for function ID. There isn't an obvious way to fix this without dramatically changing the way pages are rendered. The reason the link expires is probably that the garbage collector picks them up after a timeout interval. I remember this was something…

Just making a redirect to the latest front page, or nth page of the latest rendering closure would already much better.

Is there any obvious reason why this isn't done?

Re: Fix HackerNews Issue #11, which is driving us all crazy: Unknown or expired link

#28
mzscheme-372 4-life.

Honestly it's nice to see an esoteric correct approach. If you're using a web "app" you shouldn't expect anything but a toy anyway. The only place it ever actually bothers me is paginated topics.

Probably the most straightforward way to 'fix' this would be to serialize delimited continuations to disk, but who knows if it would be easy to import that functionality into Arc.

On the other hand, C-a C-c C-r .. the mousing is by far the hardest part.

Re: Fix HackerNews Issue #11, which is driving us all crazy: Unknown or expired link

#29

It is hard to convince someone to fix what you see as a bug, when the author of the software is really so proud of this "feature" he's filed a patent on it: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/67iza/patent_on...

That's one of those ideas that seems so cool, and then you try it at your real job and get fired because pages fail to load. Must be nice to sell your site before you have you scale it up. Or be so popular you can ignore bad user experience.

Re: Fix HackerNews Issue #11, which is driving us all crazy: Unknown or expired link

#30
post #14

It's not driving me crazy because I'm using AutoPager to load the continuation pages before they expire.

I wish I'd known about AutoPager before I spent all that effort writing a Greasemonkey script that does essentially the same thing. The script's on my Github account (in my profile) if anyone wants to use that instead of installing an extension; in any case, thanks for the heads-up.
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