I'm using the windows black theme(black background, white letters) , and forced refresh didn't solve it. Is there something else to do , or it needs to be changes at the server ?
I don't recall off the top of my head -- does a ?1 on the end of a URL force re-fetching always, or would the browser re-fetch news.css?1 once and then subsequently use the cached version?
If it always forces re-fetch, then an alternative is to bake the timestamp or hash into the filename (so news-1382794165.css), and update the html generation to point to the new timestamp/hashed file name. Then the browser will fetch newly generated css (etc) exactly once (modulo cache eviction/clearing), and without a force-refresh.
You rewrite all /Static/<vXX>/* URLs on the serverside to /Static/*. You could create a helper function which inserts the version number in URLs for static files, and use relative paths for images in the CSS file.
Maybe an update across css js htlm not synced up due to caching issues?
Evidence: enforcing a full reload (ctrl-r in chrome) reloads the page and the arrows reappear.
Also in the last few days the word "upvote" used to flash on the page before being replaced by the arrow indicating some css/js sorcery at work ;)
You should also do CSS versioning if you are pushing to a live website, like main.css?v=2 or something so that users (well, mainly nitpicky clients) will always see the latest.
In Chrome at least, having the devtools panel open[0] disables {all,most,some,infuriatingly inconsistent} parts of the cache system, so every refresh is a 'hard refresh'[1].
[0] Might be an option in the dev-tools settings, but I think it's enabled by default.
This is true, and I always have that option checked.
But if I am on a site that seems to be loading the old cached stuff during my regular browsing of the internet (not building stuff) I always open dev tools and refresh to do a "hard" refresh.
But learning that CTRL-F5 does the same thing is really neat, and I feel very silly at the same time!
I normally append "?v=1.5" to my css and javascript files to allow for easy cache updating. Then just manually increase the version when you've made changes.
Is it the result of HN becoming more popular? More readers and same size front page means more readers per post, so more votes per post, so an individual accumulates karma more quickly?
Forced refresh should help.