7 ms·

I don't want to come off as a troll or anything, but is the technological mediocrity of this site intentional (e.g. "Unknown or expired link.")?

by bjork 14y ago

xnxn 14y ago
HN works as well as it needs to.
- Helianthus 14y ago
  ... which is a really terrible way to run something effectively. Basically, it means it'll fail whenever it suddenly needs something predictable but previously unneeded.
  - SkyMarshal 14y ago
    ... which will drive away everyone overly impressed by flashy features and/or who like to whine about every little unimportant thing, like a social news site being down briefly, or not being able to see karma scores. Working as intended probably.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
  - xnxn 14y ago
    I think we just have different expectations. I see HN as a YC-hosted water cooler - nothing more. It's not important to me that it be bug-free or fast or even up all the time. YMMV.
tptacek 14y ago
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.
- chacham15 14y ago
  A little bit of humor to brighten your day: http://stackoverflow.com/a/235790/516813 http://stackoverflow.com/a/235790/516813
knome 14y ago
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.
pg 14y ago
Sort of, in the sense that we intentionally focus all our attention on the things that matter.

I don't want to come off as a troll or anything, but is the technological mediocrity of this site intentional (e.g. "Unknown or expired link.")?

by bjork 14y ago

I don't want to come off as a troll or anything, but is the technological mediocrity of this site intentional (e.g. "Unknown or expired link.")?

xnxn 14y ago

HN works as well as it needs to.

Helianthus 14y ago
... which is a really terrible way to run something effectively. Basically, it means it'll fail whenever it suddenly needs something predictable but previously unneeded.
- SkyMarshal 14y ago
  ... which will drive away everyone overly impressed by flashy features and/or who like to whine about every little unimportant thing, like a social news site being down briefly, or not being able to see karma scores. Working as intended probably.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- xnxn 14y ago
  I think we just have different expectations. I see HN as a YC-hosted water cooler - nothing more. It's not important to me that it be bug-free or fast or even up all the time. YMMV.

tptacek 14y ago

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.

chacham15 14y ago
A little bit of humor to brighten your day: http://stackoverflow.com/a/235790/516813 http://stackoverflow.com/a/235790/516813

knome 14y ago

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.

pg 14y ago

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