But HN has a persistent bug where the next button on the first page expires and doesn't work. That's the difference between doing something for work and doing something for fun.
There's the same 'feature' which works against insightful commentary. Spend too long crafting a response, get "unknown or expired link". Not particularly endorsing of a considered, pensive response.
Surely there are better ways. For example, you keep track of which posts a user has already seen, and when they hit the next page button, show them the X most highly ranked posts that they haven't yet seen. Breaking the link is just the easiest way to deal with the problem.
Actually I don't think any of the outages have been caused by this. The prospect does add an edge of excitement to programming though. Gamification for programmers!
Good catch. But strictly speaking that wasn't doing development in the repl, but repairing data. The live server is the only place you can repair data on the live server.
Yep. That's the kind of thing which is fun for hn but wouldn't be a good idea at all on a financial system -- where you optimize for least bad likely worst case, not best best case.
Wow, I guess that gives me an excuse when I'm too lazy to test on a dev server. "Well, PG live edits HN"