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by 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 ?

3 comments

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.
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.
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.

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.
Good recommendation, didn't think of that. I will do like that from now on. Thanks.
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?
I think that it appears for users that are not logged in.