Suggestion to PG: infinite scrolling instead of "Unknown or expired link." | Hacker News Reader

Suggestion to PG: infinite scrolling instead of "Unknown or expired link."

17 pointshoodoof9 comments

HN would be well suited to an "infinite scrolling" UI, similar to dzone.com

Constantly getting the "expired link" message after pressing "more" is getting a little tedious. It feels like the HN architecture is broken around this.

I assume HN works this way because HN creates static pages which eventually get replaced with a new set of static pages as more items are submitted? Infinite scrolling would fix that because pages would not need to contain a consistent number of rows.

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No, please spare us from infinite scrolling. :(

However, I agree that it's annoying to have to reload the page before being able to click on the rapidly-expiring "More" link. I often click on a good number of stories on the front page, and by the time I've read them and get to the "More" link, it will have expired. Then when I reload the page, I'll have to rescan it since some new links will have shown up in the meantime. Then when I click on the "More" link... expired again!

How about a bit of caching? Maybe taking a snapshot of the top 5 pages or so every hour? It wouldn't be up-to-the-minute, but one would be able to scroll through a list of links with a consistent relative order (rather than reencountering the same links as they move up and down.) Maybe the cached version could be offered as a separate section of the site, up there with "new", "threads", "comments", etc.

Expired links are the result of Arc's web server reclaiming stale continuations. It's a side effect of creating a web application using a continuation-based server.

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...]

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.

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.

I see this site as an illustration of a lean web startup style applied successfully. I don't get the feeling that pg et al. are planning to spiff it up with a fancy UI any time soon. I agree there are some usability issues that could be improved.

I think it's the way it is because the order is constantly changing and thus an infinite list does not make sense.

If you're using Chrome or Firefox, there's a great extension called Autopager that retrieves the next web page in a sequence and loads it inline: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mmgagnmbebdebebbcl...

I discovered it a few months ago and can't imagine living without it anymore.

Very young person on the porch here...

but I really don't care for infinite scrolling on desktops.

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