Hacker News: Unknown or Expired Link

https://github.com/rahulkmr/musings/blob/master/ruby/sinatra...

This has been discussed to death. Apparently you have to deal with it and it's not going to be fixed.

However, if anyone is curious about why it's happening, this is what the arc code is doing http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3098863

If you don't follow arc, here is a python and ruby approximation of the arc challenge http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3098863

https://github.com/rahulkmr/musings/blob/master/python/closu...

jgrahamc 4959 days ago

I've wondered at times if PG isn't deliberately leaving this problem in place so that people who get annoyed by it are filtered out as users of the web site.

> I've wondered at times if PG isn't deliberately leaving this problem

Since you know about the implementation(I haven't looked closely), won't it need a complete overhaul to take closures out of equation? Or implement some sort of closure serialization(on-disk maybe)? Is there a third option where pg just bangs at the keyboard for a couple of hours, and done?

ZeroGravitas 4959 days ago

Just a home link or a page with the banner would be nice, so you don't have to faff about with your browser to get back to the homepage.

rythie 4959 days ago

It's funny, if Hacker News was the product of a startup it would have been redesigned, A/B tested and tons of features/tweaks added. Any growth would be seen as the result of those actions, however HN has grown anyway despite being stagnent for 5+ years.

Makes you wonder what all the software development really achieves, or if HN would be bigger still if they had done that - or if PG wants HN to be bigger at all.

pasbesoin 4957 days ago

pg puts his time and effort into managing the community, rather than the page controls.

He's repeatedly, periodically made comments on efforts to improve moderation, filtering, ranking, etc. And those efforts are evident in their effect upon content.

"Stagnant" is not an accurate description.

Finally, HN is a tool -- a tool for communication. In that respect, it works pretty well, and is actually somewhat UNIX-y, I'd argue. (E.g. leaving notifications to external add-ons, private communication to email et al., etc. HN focuses on its core purpose of posts, comments, and ranking (public discussion).)

P.S. This is, obviously, just my observation and opinion, FWIW.

P.P.S. Sorry -- rereading the parent comment, I think we are more like-minded than I first thought.

One might say pg has focused on the message, rather than the presentation. Which has worked rather well. Although I think I and some others are also just fine with the presentation -- readability over eye candy, and with the effort put into other aspects of the site.

And... as some have observed, sometimes it is suspected or outright apparent that supposed "limitations" are actually a feature. For example, limiting disruptive, low S/N back-and-forth commenting.

I guess I've written all this in part for the benefit (if any) of some newer members who happen to read this. Experiencing HN over a longer period of time, I've found perhaps (presumptively) somewhat deeper insight into pg's and the moderators' approach and management.

rythie 4957 days ago

I wasn't implying he had done the wrong thing particularly, graphic redesigns can be expensive and it's not clear how much value they add, he has clearly avoided them.

In my own experience I've found if you don't make at least small changes that people can see, early adopters think no one is working on the product and go away - because they perceive nothing will ever improve. This effect doesn't really apply to community or social networks though for the reasons you said.

ssebro 4959 days ago

Yip. I wonder if it makes more sense to focus on bd (for hn, this was building the YC brand) once you reach some measure of product market fit... Very interesting observation.

harold 4959 days ago

How are you measuring growth on HN? Userbase? Pageviews?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3098756

> why wouldn't they use (searchable) permalinks? I'm assuming there's a reason for this, as its not the easiest way to do things.

It's straight forward, but not when you are using closures and continuations.

fotoflo 4959 days ago

So... hacker news chose to let their product be limited by an engineering issue?

Must we discuss the same thing that was discussed in the thread I posted the link to? Nothing new has happened since the last thread.

user24 4959 days ago

HN isn't their product, it's a neat side feature.

As they're serving that <body> they could easily serve a "this link has expired, view the new front page" with a link to the homepage and possibly a list of other top pages (like "new" or whatever).

Even if it's not going to be fixed then it could still be improved with, it seems, almost no work.

Mind you I've seen offers to fix it for free (requiring someone the owners trust to review the code I guess) that have apparently been rejected so it's presumably a chosen outcome.

JimWestergren 4959 days ago

Those kind of links are a great irritation for me when browsing and reading HN.

Instead of http://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=KnmhPyrF1t Why not for example: http://news.ycombinator.com/news?page=2 ?

sp332 4959 days ago

Because things on the front page might have been pushed to page 2 by then, and things on page 2 might have been promoted to page 1, or aged to page 3, etc. The way it works now, all the ordering is fixed when you load the page 1, and page 2 will still be the same page 2 whenever you get around to clicking on it.

yafujifide 4959 days ago

A solution would be that when your page 2 expires then you should be redirected to the most up-to-date page 2 rather than being told page 2 doesn't exist.

Teckla 4959 days ago

Those kind of links are a great irritation for me when browsing and reading HN.

My work around for the "unknown or expired link" bug is to open page 1 of HN, then immediately open pages 2, 3, and 4, but in separate tabs.

That way, I never run afoul of that bug, and opening tabs is really easy in every modern browser.

I'd be interested to know how other people work around the bug.

brianshaler 4959 days ago

Whenever I see it, I just leave. If you drop by every day or so, the 2nd and 3rd pages tend to be pretty redundant anyway.

JimWestergren 4959 days ago

Good recommendation, didn't think of that. I will do like that from now on. Thanks.

etcet 4959 days ago

There is actually a http://news.ycombinator.com/news2 but I don't know in which cases it's linked from the front-page. I have seen it though, maybe it's at times with high traffic?

b409ba0801cd21 4959 days ago

I think that it appears for users that are not logged in.

diminoten 4959 days ago

I'm fairly certain HN itself isn't actively developed.

If I remember correctly, there was quite a bit of teeth-gnashing over the state of password storage on HN awhile back, and it took the moving of mountains before things were changed (were they ever changed?).

calinet6 4959 days ago

Why would it be? It works well enough and it's not worth anything to add features. It's PG's experiment.

So the community here is PG's toy?

runjake 4959 days ago

He said "experiment", not "toy". Spin it however you want, but nobody's forcing you to be here.

He did say experiment but that implies that PG wishes to manipulate the site in order to observe outcomes - when you manipulate something without due regard to the possible detriments it is known as "toying with" that thing. Ergo I asked the question as to whether PG's goal was merely to observe the community and manipulate it with no regard for the community itself or if it was perhaps something more lofty.

From what I've seen I think the community has grown organically out of the noble work of Ycombinator and that largely the tool of HN has been a relatively passive element in that growth. PG appears indifferent to HN as a tool - neither wanting to experiment with it, develop it, improve it, nor disregard it.

>nobody's forcing you to be here //

Nice.

Do you feel passive-aggressiveness is the way to build a valuable community?

It was not spin it was enquiry with an attempt to dig in to the nature of calinet6's statement: calinet6's response makes it apparent that the important feature of the statement was not the choice of the word "experiment" but instead the apostrophe-s, ie that HN belongs to PG. I feel that by asking the question in the way I did that I shortcut to this result.

[Aside: in general, would you say my presence as part of this community is to it's detriment?]

calinet6 4959 days ago

You are using his toy. Big distinction. You have not paid him anything, and are here by choice. He owes you nothing.

>You are using his toy. //

Thing is the community here IMO relies very little on the software - partly I think that is why it's the way it is, to keep out of the way.

HN is the interface to the community, it is not the community.

I have "paid" by being a part of the community and trying to add value to it as have most people here. Maybe I've often failed at that.

Digg I think were the last major website I used that considered it "their website" and failed to understand the ownership of the community and the vesting of value within the community that had built up around their site.

Your response along with that of the sibling I suspect doesn't represent how PG would have responded - but those responses rather remind me of those who bring a ball to a game of football. The ball is not the game, it is an essential part of it, it's presence at the right time is important but each player brings something to the game; the ball can readily be replaced. If all you have is the ball then you don't have a game of football. If the ball is absent then you can't easily play football but nonetheless a good game can still be made until a ball is located.

brudgers 4959 days ago

<non_authoritative_opinion>

HN is a minimum viable product.

What gets addressed are behaviors which damage the community.

These are not usually related to visible features of the site.

Community issues created by the "Unknown or expired link" were addressed by the addition of the "No Procrastination" feature.

</non_authoritative_opinion>

mkelley 4959 days ago

I totally agree, come on pg .... Unknown or expired link when I hit More after waiting too long... you can do better. I bet that is #1 on peoples wishlist for HN. That's actually perhaps the only problem I have with HN's design. Clean, simple, functional (except for that frequently annoying error message!!!) EDIT: spelling

flyinRyan 4958 days ago

I wouldn't get my hopes up for any kind of feature at all for this site. I think PG kind of regrets making it at all since sites like this are about <random small percent> valuable information about startups and <random much larger percent> waste of time (e.g. pretty much any political discussion at all). I doubt he wants to make it even easier to waste time here.

tucson 4959 days ago

How about some keyboard navigation shortcuts? (left-right arrows). It works on http://www.HnEasy.com.

francesca 4959 days ago

emacs style editing in the text box

daxelrod 4959 days ago

Shouldn't that be a browser feature, rather than every website creating their own different implementation?