HN wouldn't exist without Arc, so it's pointless to argue about this. But I love talking about it so I'm going to anyway.

The feedback loops between the language, the HN software, and the living system of the community go very deep. I could write a lot about that. It's one of the most interesting things about the project, though unfortunately not visible. The software just works its Lispy magic behind the scenes, remaining small and malleable. It's still only 15k lines of code, including the language implementation, and that code does a lot.

On performance, it's pretty cool that Arc has managed to run HN through 12+ years of growth without much optimization. It's a good sign, not a bad one, that we're only doing major rework for performance reasons now. HN is far from Reddit-scale, but still: the application runs on a single core. (Though we do cache pages for logged-out users and serve those from an Nginx front end.)

As long as we're on the topic, consider this: the software for both HN and YC was just a single Arc program (and not a large one) for the first 9 years of their existence, during which they went from nothing to massively successful to industry-changing. Written by one person, programming part-time. That is a staggering achievement. The power of using the right language for your project goes far further than most people dream. Our imagination about this is crippled by path dependence, social proof, and the conditioning that comes from only ever doing things the same few ways, like those fish in experiments (which may be urban legends?) who stick to their corner of the aquarium even after a glass barrier has been removed. The solution space of software and programming is so much larger than most of us want to imagine that it is. Sad.

I'm not saying that everyone should use Arc—language/programmer fit is a key part of language/project fit. But when all three variables align, incredible things become possible. Not only HN, but YC would not exist without Arc. Another case that came up recently was Cloudflare; very different language, project, and programmer, but a similar story (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22883548).

No.

It probably could be done in the current version, just not done well.

What would numbered pages look like?

Arc has a public fork called Anarki[1], which is built on Racket[2]. The Anarki version of the forum differs from the Arc forum, which differs from HN's own custom instance, which is closed because of various YCombinator business reasons.

[0]http://arclanguage.org/

[1]https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki

[2]https://racket-lang.org/

As I've explained many times in these conversations, we're happy to delete specific posts and to redact identifying information. What we don't allow is wholesale deletion of account history. You disagree with that—you've said so dozens of times—and this has now become repetitive and your behavior has become abusive. Actually, it became abusive months ago, including with surprisingly vicious comments in email. We try give people the benefit of the doubt and cut them slack for as long as we can, but I don't see what else to do at this point but ban your account and ask you to stop.

Of course, a truly Evil™ company would have both options available: a visible icon for transparently pinned comments, but also the ability to invisibly pin a comment to influence readers. There is no real foolproof method, unfortunately.

Planning to add sorting and voting (If this interests people)

We have an experimental feature to highlight new comments if you or anyone wants to give it a try - email hn@ycombinator.com. But you'll still have to scroll through the pages to find the new ones.