If YC is full of such great product people and hackers, why wouldn't they use (searchable) permalinks? I'm assuming there's a reason for this, as its not the easiest way to do things.
Instead of http://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=KnmhPyrF1t Why not for example: http://news.ycombinator.com/news?page=2 ?
My work around for the "unknown or expired link" bug is to open page 1 of HN, then immediately open pages 2, 3, and 4, but in separate tabs.
That way, I never run afoul of that bug, and opening tabs is really easy in every modern browser.
I'd be interested to know how other people work around the bug.
Makes you wonder what all the software development really achieves, or if HN would be bigger still if they had done that - or if PG wants HN to be bigger at all.
He's repeatedly, periodically made comments on efforts to improve moderation, filtering, ranking, etc. And those efforts are evident in their effect upon content.
"Stagnant" is not an accurate description.
Finally, HN is a tool -- a tool for communication. In that respect, it works pretty well, and is actually somewhat UNIX-y, I'd argue. (E.g. leaving notifications to external add-ons, private communication to email et al., etc. HN focuses on its core purpose of posts, comments, and ranking (public discussion).)
P.S. This is, obviously, just my observation and opinion, FWIW.
P.P.S. Sorry -- rereading the parent comment, I think we are more like-minded than I first thought.
One might say pg has focused on the message, rather than the presentation. Which has worked rather well. Although I think I and some others are also just fine with the presentation -- readability over eye candy, and with the effort put into other aspects of the site.
And... as some have observed, sometimes it is suspected or outright apparent that supposed "limitations" are actually a feature. For example, limiting disruptive, low S/N back-and-forth commenting.
I guess I've written all this in part for the benefit (if any) of some newer members who happen to read this. Experiencing HN over a longer period of time, I've found perhaps (presumptively) somewhat deeper insight into pg's and the moderators' approach and management.
In my own experience I've found if you don't make at least small changes that people can see, early adopters think no one is working on the product and go away - because they perceive nothing will ever improve. This effect doesn't really apply to community or social networks though for the reasons you said.
> why wouldn't they use (searchable) permalinks? I'm assuming there's a reason for this, as its not the easiest way to do things.
It's straight forward, but not when you are using closures and continuations.
Even if it's not going to be fixed then it could still be improved with, it seems, almost no work.
Mind you I've seen offers to fix it for free (requiring someone the owners trust to review the code I guess) that have apparently been rejected so it's presumably a chosen outcome.
Since you know about the implementation(I haven't looked closely), won't it need a complete overhaul to take closures out of equation? Or implement some sort of closure serialization(on-disk maybe)? Is there a third option where pg just bangs at the keyboard for a couple of hours, and done?
If I remember correctly, there was quite a bit of teeth-gnashing over the state of password storage on HN awhile back, and it took the moving of mountains before things were changed (were they ever changed?).
However, if anyone is curious about why it's happening, this is what the arc code is doing http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3098863
If you don't follow arc, here is a python and ruby approximation of the arc challenge http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3098863
https://github.com/rahulkmr/musings/blob/master/ruby/sinatra...
https://github.com/rahulkmr/musings/blob/master/python/closu...
HN is a minimum viable product.
What gets addressed are behaviors which damage the community.
These are not usually related to visible features of the site.
Community issues created by the "Unknown or expired link" were addressed by the addition of the "No Procrastination" feature.
</non_authoritative_opinion>
