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.
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 ?
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well currently the pagination implemented using a closure so there is obviously some state that is kept on the server and used to calculate what should appear when "next page" is clicked.
Why can't the link to page 2 include the data that would be available to the closure? That way the client is responsible for keeping track of the user's session, and not the server.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.