

Hacker News gives "Unknown or expired link" Often when I click "More" - btc_man


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Todd
I've been noticing it more frequently as well. It has changed the way I use
HN. Now, I quickly scan the first page and open interesting stories in tabs.
Then I quickly click More and do the same. Wash, rinse, repeat two or three
times depending on how busy I am.

Another related issue: the expired page is remarkably stark and unfinished in
comparison with the rest of the site. A minor nit, but since it shows up so
often, it doesn't look great to the uninitiated.

~~~
malingo
I've often resorted to doing the same thing, but one problem with that is
having to go back to the HN site to find the story to vote on it or comment.
If a large number of people are pushing stories out to new tabs and ultimately
ignoring the HN site after that, might it begin to affect the voting / ranking
?

~~~
nantes
And so, I have resorted to opening both the article and the discuss link, as
you can still vote from there.

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mhlakhani
From what I recall, this is because the 'More' link is implemented using
closures, which get garbage collected after a while. So if you take too long
and a GC has happened in the meanwhile, the link will be broken.

~~~
nxn
Seriously? Having 'paging' tied to the GC in this way, or any way at all for
that matter, does not sound like a good idea to me.

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masterzora
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=163755>

It's been an known issue for years.

~~~
georgemcbay
It has been a known issue for years, yes, but it is getting worse. Presumably
an increase in HN users is making it hit whatever threshold triggers the
closure flush much more quickly than it used to.

These days the links often expire for me within a couple of minutes (YMMV
depending upon how close to 'prime time' you read Hacker News).

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tebeka
Same here. Making my noon reading of HN pretty annoying. (Read front page, hit
more, get expired, go back, reload, hit more ...)

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techaddict
I was just commenting to a co-worker this morning that I have been receiving a
lot of expired link errors lately and that HN's session expiration time must
be short.

What language is HN written in?

I leave HN open in two tabs all day: one for the newest articles and one for
the top articles. Article links to other sites don't expire because they're
direct links to an external page. However, most internal links do expire if I
haven't refreshed the page in an hour or so.

~~~
someone13
HN is written in Arc - a Lisp dialect coded by PG. You can see it here:
<http://arclanguage.org/>

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M1573RMU74710N
It's annoying, but overalI don't mind it.

What I will kill for though is a simple "return to homepage" link...or better
yet a timed redirect...on the expired page.

I often browse with my laptop on the coffee-table and a wireless mouse in my
hand and it's a pain to have to reach forward and hit the backspace button (or
go all the way up to the back button) AND click the link at the top again.

Seriously, this is something that gets me EVERY DAY, and it's frustrating.

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laconian
I'm curious about this too. Why not fix such an obvious issue? Even if the
workaround isn't perfect, a more graceful failure mode would be preferable.

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kschua
I find this extremely irritating too.

The way I overcome it is by using "Read It Later"
(<http://www.readitlaterlist.com>) to bookmark the interesting ones during my
initial early morning scan.

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danhood
Happens to me all of the time - it's pretty annoying. It would be great if HN
used pretty URLs (e.g. <http://news.ycombinator.com/news/2>), or at least URLs
that didn't expire.

~~~
kelnos
The problem is, "what is page 2"? Ok, so it's "items 31 through 60." But that
changes, very frequently. So when you hit the main page (results 1-30), HN has
to remember what 31-60 is at that particular point in time, so when you later
hit the More link, it can give you 31-60 for a time in the past.

Obviously it can't remember an infinite number of these, there's a limit, and
how quickly you hit that limit probably depends on a combination of how many
people are hitting the home page, and how often the order of items in the list
is changing.

When HN was younger, you wouldn't see the expired link message that often, as
fewer people were hitting the site, and the item order changed less
frequently.

At least that's my theory.

~~~
bmm6o
> The problem is, "what is page 2"?

Sure, most solutions to this problem will involve compromises and won't be
perfect, but just about anything would be an improvement over the current
situation.

~~~
kelnos
Yeah, good point. Considering that I have to go back to the front page and I
lose the "older" page 2 results anyway, it'd be far preferable to just send me
to a newer page 2. Could likely pretty easily implement that with a fallback
query param, so the link could be something like "?fnid=foo&startitem=31" or
whatever. If the fnid is no longer valid, fall back to the startitem param.

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msredmond
Yes, I've noticed this too -- it seems like it happens when I "take too long"
looking at a New page. Since it doesn't seem to happen to me much on the home
page, so maybe tied to the number of items posted since landing on a page?

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ojosilva
I think this alternative, HN styled, Techcrunch site got paging right:
<http://tcfast.com/>

Maybe HN should follow the lead.

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jigs_up
I've only been using HN a short while, and even though this issue is terribly
annoying, I will stay for the interesting articles.

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theitgirl
I have noticed this too. It is annoying. I just refresh the page and it works
fine.

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tedsbardella
There should be a link to this article at the top of the page.

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zentechen
Who's the programmer?

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matmann2001
Can we fix it?

~~~
mkopinsky
Agreed! We're a bunch of hackers; publish on github and let us do our thing!

~~~
kelnos
<https://github.com/nex3/arc>

