I'm not buying the argument that if HN has good stories and comments people will keep coming back and if they come back, it means they want a next page button that fails. A doesn't imply B.

If frequent expiration is to remain a feature, would it be possible to have a preference setting allowing us to put the first four pages or so on our front page? Then we could read whatever looks most interesting among the first 120 items instead of the first 30 before we get that expired next button we supposedly don't mind.

And to share everything I also use a theme for HN. It makes the design a little more as a flat design and with bigger letters which is especially what I wanted. https://github.com/gabrielecirulli/hn-special

but I always use vanilla HN because I'm fond of it and the UI is pretty much the best for me.

That said, it would be very cool if users could implement their own custom CSS natively like you can on http://yayhooray.net

I personally detest browser extensions and I don't like how they slap custom CSS over the top of sites like make-up. Even those who aren't up for fiddling with style sheets could share in what others make.

Honestly, it gives HN a bit of charm, and it's never ever really bothered me.

'Inconvenienced' is broad word. Plenty of people eventually get the hang of driving a motorcycle with the front-brake in the "wrong" spot, and are no longer inconvenienced by that. But it is not truly dangerous or troublesome in the way that having the control pedals in a Car were to be put in the wrong place (eg swap the throttle and brake pedal location). So, in this case its more an inconvenience of having some learning curve; it's not the more dangerous or nefarious inconvenience of something that is truly troublesome, random, or wasteful.

I suspect that fixing expired links would improve HN's front-page story quality. I seem to recall patio11 or tptacek once saying if you really want to help out HN, you should sit on the New page and upvote stories. That's too much of a pain for me, but if I could get to pages 2-4 without friction, I'd see more non-front-page stories I could upvote. This would help good stories make it to the front page or stay there longer. So perhaps making things easier for users would also help HN. It may even make it easier for content-rich stories to compete against link-baity ones. What if fixing expired links kept HN from becoming like Reddit?

I read an article. I upvote it if needed. I read the comments page. I then refresh the page before making any comments. Once i've finished reading and voting and commenting i close the pages and move to the next article.

Fixing the new page is relatively easy, and it could free more closures to the other pages, so it increase the time that the links live before expiring.

I also sometimes use the “filtered 2+ new page”: http://hnapp.com/filter/d3a308f2ac9a071c0bf174e0c1a8fd22 , i.e. someone else thought that it is interesting. It’s not so painful and it’s also good for days where a single new saturate the front page.