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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28478379

by njsubedi • 5 years ago

55 16 5 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

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?

kichimi• 5 years ago

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

mosselman• 5 years ago

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

Cerium• 5 years ago

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

njsubedi• 5 years 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.

heinrichhartman• 5 years ago

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

ziftface• 5 years ago

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.

krapp• 5 years 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.

ranguna3• 5 years ago

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?

dang2• 5 years ago

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

midrus• 5 years ago

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

So disappointing.

ranguna3• 5 years ago

No caching?

Interesting.

dang2• 5 years ago

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

dave_sid• 5 years ago

AWS lambdas

noxer• 5 years ago

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

solarkraft• 5 years 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.

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

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