[tjpick]

side effect is a kind way to put it.

Serving links that break in such a short time is a bug. I'm sure there's plenty of simple ways to make that link work as expected. I haven't looked at the Arc code, but I have implemented pagination dozens of time. Never with links that expire though.

The continuation style seems to imply that "next page" means "the next page of results from the time you requested the initial page". Which doesn't really have to hold true. It'd be better to just give the users more links. (As I said previously in a feature request)

Not that I believe infinite scroll is the right solution though.

[edit: This reply doesn't really convey the rage I feel when I get one of those expired links. I'd tear limbs off a developer for that...]

[reynolds]

When a page is requested, some of the links (fnid=X) map to functions on the server that are held in memory. The id (X) is a key that is associated with a continuation for a specific "session".

It's not a bug, but a feature of Arc and other continuation servers. If continuations aren't reclaimed by the server (and those links invalidated), the server runs out of RAM.

[oomkiller]

In angers me slightly when I get an expired link, but I like getting expired links rather than items from other pages that I've already seen, like reddit. That is truly maddening.