I normally frown upon people getting too hung up on page design on HN, but this one I gotta admit is a real WTF'er. When you "scroll" down, it's doing page loads, and filling up browser history. Back back back back back back. Worse still, you think you've backed through all those page loads, and you find out it's one of those sites that keeps you from backing out of their site! We used to call this "breaking the back button" and Google used to discourage it.
I got smacked with the broken back button too. Had to close the tab, re-load HN and find my place again.
I'm going to guess this is probably not intentional on their end. They're probably aware of the issue, but likely it's a side-effect of an architectural decision that was made previously and hard to un-make now.
