A praise of Hacker News' cache settings

9 pointsby jFriedensreichقبل 3 سنوات2 comments

I hope this often overlooked goodness never changes: When you read an article from hackernews and go back to the front page you always get the version that you started with without realoading or forcing display of posts that came up in the meantime. The user is in control when to see updates (just reload). This allows usage patterns like reading just "one front page per day" and prevents getting lost for people with ADHD.

More sites used to work like this and i considered this basic cache setting but everything i checked now completely loses its state on back navigation or worse forcefully hides the things that were on the page when it was last seen to pump up engagement but totally destroying any sense of groundedness and persistence.

A nice side effect is when you read an article on the train and lose internet you can still go back and scan post titles that are interesting to read when back online. This behavior seems to be more and more broken everywhere else and its painful to watch.

2 comments

perilunarقبل 3 سنوات

What cache settings? All I see is:

  HTTP/1.1 200 OK
  Cache-Control: private; max-age=0

Not an expert, but doesn't this imply that the page should refresh but isn't forced to?

sifexقبل 3 سنوات

I believe the post is about the server-side caching, or “re-calculation” of post rankings, not client-side browser caching.