There's a local non-technical solution in the site guidelines:
Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
I'm interested in whether a technical solution exists for the problem -- just so one could point to the Gobblesmack Browser or the RealBack extension in Chrome store (names obviously made up) whenever this comes up. That would cut down on the complaints as well.
Can the browser do this for me once it sees that a single button press sent me back to where I started? In AudioOne's case, it's /frontpage -> / -> /frontpage
It seems to work just fine in Firefox (on android, bit I would assume that doesn't matter). I see the pre-redirect page in the list when I hold back, but a single tap of back brings be back to HN.
I would imagine that it sees the `history.pushState()` or w/e without any interaction and knows that it's a dead state/page/(?).
Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.