I believe the implementation is learning towards sticking all the comments on one page, but of course I'm not the one designing this ;)

Never. Be at peace.

I fully agree. Especially on a site that literally only has comments.

> So you are adding endless-scroll?

Not necessarily. I seem to remember that HN used to be without pagination, all the comments were just listed on one page (without any JS to load more comments etc) but servers started to struggle when HN got more users which led to sometimes too many comments, so they added the pagination.

Somehow I associate this with the thread when Steve Jobs died, but not sure how accurate that is. My memory is kind of sucky.

What is endless about it? You’d assume there will be a finite amount of comments when you load the thread page, and the new implementation can just render that.

Pardon me; nothing is further from my mind. See replies elsewhere in this subthread.

Oh I certainly didn't mean HN would do infinite scrolling. That'd be gross, too complicated, and would contradict the old-web style of the site. But if we can just generate entire pages quickly enough, I don't see why we wouldn't go back to doing that.

Strong agree here. Infinite scrolling is painful. I would rather be given an ENTIRE page to scroll as I see fit.

Why would it be infinite? Just load all the comments at once! Show me everything.

Modern caching strategies mean it wouldn't be any database load or concerning computational overhead? I'm no expert on HN-scale sites though.

Anyway, my 2 cents is I'd prefer everything loaded at once, no pagination, no infinite scroll.

People frequently think that their comment has been deleted because it doesn't show up on the first page. We introduced it as a performance workaround, so if performance recovers, I'd rather stop. If rendering the whole page causes other trouble, we can reconsider the problem from scratch.

Why would pagination be a good idea? From my perspective, there's no downside (HN is exclusively text and fetching+rendering the entire first page of comments for this submission takes the same amount of time on my computer as rendering a no-comment submission) and several upsides (no need to open several tabs to see all comments, no need to make several more round trips and wait several more seconds per page of comments, no "attention cliff" where comments on the n+1th page are significantly less noticeable than those at the bottom of the nth page, allow pagination to be handled by user agent/browser instead of being enforced by server).

This was my first interpretation (and question), too

I'm assuming that what he means is that they'll replace the need to click on a link with the 'infinite scrolling' that you see on Fb, etc.