HN user
We have put in a number of performance improvements, yes. The nice thing about those is that they also make the site snappier when it's not under load. Right now we have just over a million items in our CMS, plus our publicly available mailing list archives, which are much larger, even if they're less frequently referenced.
Well, we don't use a captcha either. If it were a choice between a captcha and a proof of work system, we'd have to reevaluate things. Luckily, for now, we're able to get away with a much lighter touch.
It's actually not bad form to share guest links on aggregators, for that reason — we're entirely subscriber-funded, and we get a lot of new subscribers coming in via subscriber links, which is why we keep offering them. It's always nice when one of my articles end up being shared widely.
Although we do tend to notice trends in what kinds of articles make it onto aggregators like HN and which ones don't; if you've enjoyed LWN's technical reporting, but you've been getting it all filtered through HN or lobste.rs, you might like to come look at the website directly and see some of the wider content mix that we work on.
Daroc here — I've gone ahead and applied two corrections to the article based on this comment. If you want to be sure that feedback or corrections reach us in the future (and not, as in this case, because I'm reading HN when I should be getting ready for bed), you're welcome to email lwn@lwn.net.
Thanks for the corrections, and for your work on Zig!
Hi — LWN editor here. We use <q> tags with some CSS to set off quotes from the main text. This _mostly_ works seamlessly, but a few browsers render "<q>something</q>" as ""something"". It's especially common if you copy/paste from the site.
I've considered dropping the outer quotes and using CSS before/after text to add them back in to the rendered page, but we have a huge back-catalog of articles doing it this way, and it's usually not much of an issue.
This is a new project of mine that I'm hoping will allow people more freedom in writing Minecraft mods. I would love any feedback you wonderful people feel like giving.