HN works as well as it needs to.

I don't want to come off as a troll or anything, but how do you expect us to deal with all the parens in the language you built this site in? It's like, all parens.

It is intended. I, too, dislike the manner of creating links as keys into a hash of memory resident continuations for exactly this reason. It's just not a good way to structure things. It can be made to work, obviously, but it's far from an ideal setup.

I believe the smalltalk-based "seaside" server works analogously.

In fairness, it doesn't tend to bother often, most of my ( and presumably most of all ) traffic being directed to the harder links, none of which use the "fnid" keys. The continuations appear to be used for links that are hiding information ( indexes into current ranking, user-ids for flagging, etc ). It just stings when you click something after coming back to a page and it throws it back in your face.

Sort of, in the sense that we intentionally focus all our attention on the things that matter.