HN prefers the most substantive variant of any story. User comments pointing to better urls for a story are helpful—so helpful, in fact, that I'm working on a bit of software to semi-formalize them, so we'll be more likely to see them all. It should be ready soon, and we'll post about it.
The trick would be to do so in a way that fits the minimalist spirit of Hacker News. We're loathe to change the site in ways that add clutter. Our bias is in favor of using the existing mechanisms where possible. Often the best ways of doing so are surprisingly if not embarrassingly low-tech.
Yes, that's a problem whenever you redirect or unify ongoing threads. It's a tradeoff. We'd rather have the best stories on the front page. In most cases, comments eventually grow around the new content.
In this case, though, the space elevator content does come from the real article, so these comments are on topic. The original url was basically self-blogspam—full of links back to the long piece.
Wouldn't be possible (worth) to split a converstion and make it a first page post on it's own, if:
-it's not directly related to the thread (hijacking)
-a certain cuantity of upvotes are received,
-and a minimum converstion lenght is reached?
Some times very interesting topics or meaningful comments are lost on moderate or low (to first page standart) interest news.
HN prefers the most substantive variant of any story. User comments pointing to better urls for a story are helpful—so helpful, in fact, that I'm working on a bit of software to semi-formalize them, so we'll be more likely to see them all. It should be ready soon, and we'll post about it.