HN: Please fix the "More" link.
The link breaks down after few minutes and gives the message "Unknown or expired link."
And, yes, this has already been a properly filed (but ignored) "request" for at least a year or more. That's why I'm always glad to see it pop up as a regular post.
If HN is listening, here's the fix: Make the [more] link go to its best guess by TIME or by RANK (depending on which is being shown). Who cares if the sequence numbers match (i.e. 39 was last on the page, you click next and 44 is at the top of the page)? If that bothers anal retentive types then include a NEXTSEQ variable in the [more] link so the page can fake it. Again, who cares if my #44 is your #32? This is a news feed not a database-of-record.
Does this "paper over" the problem? Sure, but the user experience would be all the better for it. Just make [more] work please.
I agree its not a great way to do it (like @cpr suggested) I prefer reddit's "not bad" approach.
It's a bug. It could just as well say "500 internal error".
Author's name is not Knuth and he's still alive, so yes - it's a bug, not a feature.
Given that, the expectation is not for "the next batch of stories in line", it is for "the current stories ranked from #31-50 inclusive", the way that simply visiting news.ycombinator.com gives you the current stories ranked from #1-30.
Someone prematurely optimized this aspect of Hacker News and it became a bit of a nightmare to use in the pursuit of "correctness" -- this would be good if the notion of "correct" were in fact correct, but it is an ideological purity having nothing to do with the needs of the community at large.
Going to an empty page is simply a bug / broken behaviour.
It may not be a "development" bug, in that the error occurs due to faulty code, but it should certainly be filed as a bug and assigned to someone who addresses user experience issues.
(Which at Google would mean being thrown into a black hole... http://data.whicdn.com/images/25373715/4171_d7e8_thumb.gif)
Because any other behavior would be preferable. Seriously, anything. Seeing the page I just left again would be better.
Works like a dream.
The preferred way to request a feature is http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363
You could just take the reddit approach and get "close enough" on more links that have expired.
(Not that I'd want HN to become more like reddit. ;-)
The last I knew, HN was still running on a single box. And maintained by a small set of people. That seems to be pretty damned efficient, overall, and I'm willing to accept a few compromises.
One workaround is to load up the linked "More" pages immediately, into new tabs or in one or another other fashion. (Sometimes, a "hack" isn't about code, per se. But please don't overdo this and create needless server load.)
Anyhoo, there's some more detail and history in past HN comments, for anyone caring to dig -- through them, as opposed to the Arc source code.
/sarcasm
-Edited to be more accurate of the inside of my head/thought process
Think of an always up-to-date list divided in two pages, clicking on the second page would take you to a list of links that you might already have seen on the first page. Here, the second page is kind of "frozen" in time, aka the session and only displays the rest of the links.
I might be wrong though.
What I don't know is why a "news.ycombinator.com/page/2" url design couldn't be handled with a client-side session and cookie and still offers the same feature.