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Comment by alankay1 | Hacker News Reader

-- I was surprised that the HN list page didn't automatically refresh in my browser (seems as though it should be live and not have to be prompted ...)

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Au contraire, I'm happy that the last-seen-state is preserved and I'm given the option to refresh to see the current state should I chose to.

It certainly helps when reading long replies, that's for sure. I do think a mini-update box with "click here to load" like on stackoverflow for replies or edits would be an interesting idea.

Of course, the 90's style is pretty hacker-hipster as well...can't deny that.

HN feels old school. That's why I like it. (I'm considered a fossil by all of my 20, 30-something colleagues.)

How old are you? "Old school" to me is what could be done at Parc, etc. ... (hint: quite a bit more than on this website ...)

Imagine: 1. trying to read something long, or 2. going off to a follow a link and to come back and respond, only to find that the page has been refreshing while you looked away. Now you have to scroll about to find the place you were at in order to respond or to continue reading the comments.

How about a little model of time in a GUI?

This is maybe the most Alan-Kay-like response so far. Short, simple, but a tiny bit like a message from an alternate dimension. "No, no, I'm not asking you to build the also-wrong solution someone else has tried. I'm saying: solve the problem.

Also feels like worse-is-better vs. the right thing. How much engineering effort and additional maintenance would be required to develop and support such a time-model? A lot. Alas, let us re-create software systems to be radically simpler so that we can do the right thing! Still waiting for Urbit and VPRI's 10k line operating system ... but that's what Alan stands for in our industry: "strive to do the right thing," or as you put it, "solve the problem".

That sounds like a feature. HN doesn't have features, only necessities.

This is the way Facebook is now... Not an improvement. It's not designed for following threads, and it looks like they don't care.

Legend is, this forum runs on an abandoned LISP implementation.

Most things around here are not how they should seem.

Yep- arclanguage.org.

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