To play Devil's advocate, while I agree with you, in reality it happened multiple times (last one, 2 minutes ago while writing a comment in other HN entry) where I am writing the response but then would like to have a peek at the chain of comments I'm responding to.
Using the phone that's very annoying. I have to long press on the entry's link on the header, open in a new tab, recheck the message trail, and go back to the first tab to end writing.
So simoly as that, I could think of lots of times where a SPA-style dropdown editor box inserted in the conversation view, would be more useful than the current HN's reply page.
If the reply page contained the whole discussion, though, the problem would be equally solved too. So I'm not saying that an SPA would be 100% better, just mentioning an example that occurred to me.
Using the phone that's very annoying. I have to long press on the entry's link on the header, open in a new tab, recheck the message trail, and go back to the first tab to end writing.
So simoly as that, I could think of lots of times where a SPA-style dropdown editor box inserted in the conversation view, would be more useful than the current HN's reply page.
If the reply page contained the whole discussion, though, the problem would be equally solved too. So I'm not saying that an SPA would be 100% better, just mentioning an example that occurred to me.