HN Explorer

HN bug - number of comments only listed after comments loaded

1 points by devmonk ↗ HN
Just noticed this morning that some of my submissions in my submissions list had "comments" next to them without the number of comments. After clicking on comments and refreshing, or clicking on comments and going back to the submissions list and refreshing, it showed the number of comments next to the "comments" link.

3 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 22.1 ms ] thread
rewind
I doubt it's a bug. PG is probably just minimizing what's cached outside of the most current and/or most viewed submissions. If a user views it, then it gets cached (for awhile, at least). Just guessing though.
devmonk
Understood, but:

- I personally like to see the number of comments to see if the number of comments had changed.

- It didn't seem to work this way before, so I think it might be new, or it was restarted and just hadn't loaded yet, maybe?

- This behavior isn't intuitive.

- It was distracting to reload the same page with the same backing data and get two different results (once without number of comments, once with number of comments on topic I'd just viewed).

So, it is a (minor) bug, imo, even if it makes for a faster, more scalable page load. Speed is awesome and speed is king, but don't do things that are distracting or unintuitive to the user.

rewind
I don't disagree with you. I'm just not surprised. The goal of the site is definitely not to make it easy to see and understand everything that's going on and why. Features seem to be community-centric, not user-centric.