Personally the only problem I have with the current UI is that I have to hit the arrow at the bottom to expand for more comments. Kills my ability to CTRL/CMD F and find keywords.
Ah ok. Actually we've mostly turned pagination off lately because recent performance improvements (not the big ones - those are still coming!) made it possible. But I forgot to turn it off when I restarted the server today, and with the big QE thread burning hot at the moment, we should maybe wait a while.
I agree that it's annoying and it will be a happy day when we can turn it off properly.
oh, that's great news. pagination always got in the way when tracking new comments because when switching to the next page the order of the comments may have changed, and i see comments on the second page which i already read on the first, and i wonder which comments i am missing because they moved from the second to the first page by the time i switch pages.
Yes, it's actually a hard problem to solve when the content isn't ordered chronologically. The front page(s) have the same issue. With /newest and other chronological feeds, of course, getting pagination correct is easier—though you still have to account for new items having shown up in the meantime.
I think this is a relatively new feature - HN used to show all comments, but the feature very frequently caused a lot of load on the servers which would cause HN to go down.
