I think it's a feature not a bug.
It seems to stop the second page becoming stale, forcing you to refresh and get a new copy of the front page first preventing you from viewing outdated content.
It seems to stop the second page becoming stale, forcing you to refresh and get a new copy of the front page first preventing you from viewing outdated content.
This comes at a cost though, because the server must cache all the possible second pages that might be requested. So HN makes a compromise and caches them for an hour or so. If you wait an hour, it will have been evicted from the cache and the error will appear.
I often and up just closing discussions having a "more"-link since it tends to frustrate me one way or another. I wish there was an option to disable "more"-links entirely (or is there?) I can see how it's useful for small screens but full-size on a 27"+ screen or in portrait mode (my preference for browsing the web) I think seeing 500+ comments on one page would be totally fine :-)
(Ideally, after reloading it, new submissions would be highlighted, one can only dream)
In my personal instance: I would be much more of a contributor to HN If I didn't have this problem on a daily basis.
Usually it happens after I have tabs open, go get some food, come back, and I need to start my browsing on HN all over again as a result, usually this only happens once, because I say fuck it and go elsewhere.
What are the pro's that make this con worth it? I'm not seeing it, its just a big massive pain in the ass.
Wouldn't a minimum fix be a simple htaccess redirect for failed links?
As page refresh usually works then a redirect to the referer (ie send you back to the page you're on) would seem like it should work most of the time: of course it should preferably give some feedback to indicate what has happened.
I don't know the inner workings, but from what I understand - data gets invalidated by its "key" and new pages with new keys are generated so that the page content remains "fresh" - so no htaccess rule is going to help you with a problem like that.
It sounds like there is some serious changes required to fix this so it behaves like conventional pagination, which I'm guessing is why it has not been fixed.