Er, that doesn't seem like a good reason to downgrade the UI of something important. I don't know how much money it takes to keep HN running, but would just buying ten times as much computing power really be a significant expense for YCombinator, compared to the dealflow from HN?
I suspect the bottleneck isn't cost so much as the mental bandwidth to switch hosts, etc. It would be a context switch for PG/RTM/bringing someone else up to speed on arc. HN's just naturally lagging other priorities.
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Farther in the future: HN's arc webserver uses simple flat files for storage, so moving from one host to two is probably a big context switch as well. I wonder what the current server's specs are, and how long we have until that kinda-sorta-Y2K-like barrier.
How about displaying the comments "shallower": if some discussion ("a branch in the comments") goes too deep, maybe that's what doesn't have to be on the same page, as it's obviously something where a lot of arguments and counterarguments occur, and not something where the biggest insight is to be expected.
Such comment handling would however certainly motivate people to "post without the parent."
I'd very much welcome that. My gut feeling is that on quite a few posts, discussion seems to stick to the first comment. I'm assuming that starts to happen as soon as this top-level comment has enough upvotes to quickly displace any new postings.
I think preventing such "sticky" threads from clobbering the first pages of comments may add some decent value to the discussion. Especially in brining in different aspects and povs, perhaps sometimes yielding a more balanced discussion.
Is there some way the HN community could help with the load, or some pathological behavior that a lot of us are doing that could be replaced by behavior that's easier on the server(s)?