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.
It's been an known issue for years.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe HN should follow the lead.
