Hacker News gives "Unknown or expired link" Often when I click "More"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2760187

by btc_man • 15 years ago

58 28 15 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

msredmond• 15 years ago

Yes, I've noticed this too -- it seems like it happens when I "take too long" looking at a New page. Since it doesn't seem to happen to me much on the home page, so maybe tied to the number of items posted since landing on a page?

techaddict• 15 years ago

I was just commenting to a co-worker this morning that I have been receiving a lot of expired link errors lately and that HN's session expiration time must be short.

What language is HN written in?

I leave HN open in two tabs all day: one for the newest articles and one for the top articles. Article links to other sites don't expire because they're direct links to an external page. However, most internal links do expire if I haven't refreshed the page in an hour or so.

someone13• 15 years ago

HN is written in Arc - a Lisp dialect coded by PG. You can see it here: http://arclanguage.org/

tebeka• 15 years ago

Same here. Making my noon reading of HN pretty annoying. (Read front page, hit more, get expired, go back, reload, hit more ...)

mhlakhani• 15 years ago

From what I recall, this is because the 'More' link is implemented using closures, which get garbage collected after a while. So if you take too long and a GC has happened in the meanwhile, the link will be broken.

nxn• 15 years ago

Seriously? Having 'paging' tied to the GC in this way, or any way at all for that matter, does not sound like a good idea to me.

masterzora• 15 years ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=163755

It's been an known issue for years.

georgemcbay• 15 years ago

It has been a known issue for years, yes, but it is getting worse. Presumably an increase in HN users is making it hit whatever threshold triggers the closure flush much more quickly than it used to.

These days the links often expire for me within a couple of minutes (YMMV depending upon how close to 'prime time' you read Hacker News).

matmann2001• 15 years ago

Can we fix it?

mkopinsky• 15 years ago

Agreed! We're a bunch of hackers; publish on github and let us do our thing!

kelnos3• 15 years ago

https://github.com/nex3/arc

stuartcw• 15 years ago

May the Source be with you!

Todd• 15 years ago

I've been noticing it more frequently as well. It has changed the way I use HN. Now, I quickly scan the first page and open interesting stories in tabs. Then I quickly click More and do the same. Wash, rinse, repeat two or three times depending on how busy I am.

Another related issue: the expired page is remarkably stark and unfinished in comparison with the rest of the site. A minor nit, but since it shows up so often, it doesn't look great to the uninitiated.

malingo• 15 years ago

I've often resorted to doing the same thing, but one problem with that is having to go back to the HN site to find the story to vote on it or comment. If a large number of people are pushing stories out to new tabs and ultimately ignoring the HN site after that, might it begin to affect the voting / ranking ?

nantes• 15 years ago

And so, I have resorted to opening both the article and the discuss link, as you can still vote from there.

danhood• 15 years ago

Happens to me all of the time - it's pretty annoying. It would be great if HN used pretty URLs (e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/news/2), or at least URLs that didn't expire.

kelnos3• 15 years ago

The problem is, "what is page 2"? Ok, so it's "items 31 through 60." But that changes, very frequently. So when you hit the main page (results 1-30), HN has to remember what 31-60 is at that particular point in time, so when you later hit the More link, it can give you 31-60 for a time in the past.

Obviously it can't remember an infinite number of these, there's a limit, and how quickly you hit that limit probably depends on a combination of how many people are hitting the home page, and how often the order of items in the list is changing.

When HN was younger, you wouldn't see the expired link message that often, as fewer people were hitting the site, and the item order changed less frequently.

At least that's my theory.

bmm6o• 15 years ago

> The problem is, "what is page 2"?

Sure, most solutions to this problem will involve compromises and won't be perfect, but just about anything would be an improvement over the current situation.

underwater• 15 years ago

Well currently the pagination implemented using a closure so there is obviously some state that is kept on the server and used to calculate what should appear when "next page" is clicked.

Why can't the link to page 2 include the data that would be available to the closure? That way the client is responsible for keeping track of the user's session, and not the server.

Edit: Here is the source: https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc#L948 Looking at that has made me realise I can't read Lisp.

laconian• 15 years ago

I'm curious about this too. Why not fix such an obvious issue? Even if the workaround isn't perfect, a more graceful failure mode would be preferable.

jigs_up• 15 years ago

I've only been using HN a short while, and even though this issue is terribly annoying, I will stay for the interesting articles.

M1573RMU74710N• 15 years ago

It's annoying, but overalI don't mind it.

What I will kill for though is a simple "return to homepage" link...or better yet a timed redirect...on the expired page.

I often browse with my laptop on the coffee-table and a wireless mouse in my hand and it's a pain to have to reach forward and hit the backspace button (or go all the way up to the back button) AND click the link at the top again.

Seriously, this is something that gets me EVERY DAY, and it's frustrating.

zentechen• 15 years ago

Who's the programmer?

kschua• 15 years ago

I find this extremely irritating too.

The way I overcome it is by using "Read It Later" (http://www.readitlaterlist.com) to bookmark the interesting ones during my initial early morning scan.

theitgirl• 15 years ago

I have noticed this too. It is annoying. I just refresh the page and it works fine.

ojosilva• 15 years ago

I think this alternative, HN styled, Techcrunch site got paging right: http://tcfast.com/

Maybe HN should follow the lead.

tedsbardella• 15 years ago

There should be a link to this article at the top of the page.

Hacker News gives "Unknown or expired link" Often when I click "More"

Related Stories