Skip to content

Top Best Ask Show New Jobs

Ask HN: What’s the server architecture of Hacker News?

55 pointsnjsubedi4y ago16 comments

I am curious about the overall architecture of Hacker News. After reading the recent thread about it’s expiring certificates, and the linked comments, I searched but couldn’t find an exact answer. So, what kind of hardware and software stack does HN run? Are there any CI/CD tools, analytics, et cetera?

16 comments

15 comments · 8 top-level

dang4y ago· 3 in thread

It's still the same as what Scott described here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16076041

Number of daily requests has gone up closer to 6M

midrus4y ago

So... No microservices SPAs with noSQL database on top of kubernetes in a monorepo?

So disappointing.

No caching?

Interesting.

dang4y ago

We use an Nginx front end for that. It all runs on the same box though.

heinrichhartman4y ago· 2 in thread

Tangent:

An (early?!) version of HN source code is available on GitHub [1]. It comes with a custom LISP dialect, ARC, that is itself running under MzScheme.

This architecture looks pretty arcane. Has anyone an idea what lead Paul, et. al. to write a custom LISP dialect for building a web forum? Is that a common thing for schemer's to do to get things done? Or does the ARC language predate the HN implementation? I am not sure.

[1] https://github.com/wting/hackernews

krapp4y ago

Someone can correct me if I'm wrong but AFAIK Hacker News was meant to be a MVP for the Arc language itself.

Also a more up to date version of the Arc forum can be found at https://arclanguage.org, and there is a public fork, Anarki at https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki which is not in feature parity with the former, which itself is not in feature parity with Hacker News.

I think I saw in one of his blogs that he used arc elsewhere. I imagine "arc.arc" and "html.arc" were relevant to other projects as well, so I doubt they were developed just for this.

Cerium4y ago· 1 in thread

Some recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27452276

njsubediOP4y ago

Thanks, this didn’t show up when I searched. Still no info about the architecture there, but Lisp still seems to be the man of the show.

kichimi4y ago· 1 in thread

It's a single WRT54g running OpenWRT on an admins DSL connection.

mosselman4y ago

I thought it ran on a 10 year old smart fridge.

noxer4y ago

It runs on a quantum AI blockchain and has recently been rewritten in rust /s

This knowledge is too powerful, no one can know!

Dan himself takes an amnesia pill whenever the project needs to be modified.

Jokes asides, I'm also very interested in knowing the infra of HN. Comments take a few seconds/minutes to actually appear so I'm guessing there's some queueing involved and probably a lot of caching on the articles?

solarkraft4y ago

Before I read up on it, let me guess: PHP or Perl.

Update: Oh damn. I took the primitive vibe as a sign the technology would be too. And well, it’s written in a language pg invented.

Other than that it does indeed seem very primitive, though (hosted on some Xeon FreeBSD server, for instance). The only (slight) magic seems to be in ranking/karma.

AWS lambdas

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse