Thanks for the comments. I'm also interested in the infrastructure. Does HN run on dedicated hardware, shared VPS, AWS, Azure, etc.
It's running on a Lisp Machine under (next to?) dang's desk. It used to be under pg's desk.
:-p
Ask HN: Is the Hacker News source code public?
21–30 of 63 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is the Hacker News source code public?
#22Hacker news was originally written by Paul Graham in Arc. Arc is a Lisp-inspired programming language also written/invented by PG at the same time and Hacker News programmed in it to (also) prove it works. Arc did not catch on outside of Hacker News. Arc is free and open source. Regarding Hacker News, itself: "Ask PG: Why don’t you open source HN? (2013): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5006037 PG's response is:…
It's still missing modern privacy features, such as the "right to be forgotten".
If you email HN mods they are fairly reasonable is what I've heard.
Re: Ask HN: Is the Hacker News source code public?
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The reason HN lacks x cool feature is not that I expend no energy on the site, but that I expend all my energy on what users actually care about, which is not features but the content. said pg, on a forum in which users constantly complain about missing features...
really? like what? I like hn precisely because of its minimalistic approach.
Pagination. I'm sure most people don't know that you can click on "More replies" at the bottom of the page to read more comments. At least I didn't know at first and spent many years reading only the first page.
Edit: It's actually "More" not "More replies".
Re: Ask HN: Is the Hacker News source code public?
#24Hacker news was originally written by Paul Graham in Arc. Arc is a Lisp-inspired programming language also written/invented by PG at the same time and Hacker News programmed in it to (also) prove it works. Arc did not catch on outside of Hacker News. Arc is free and open source. Regarding Hacker News, itself: "Ask PG: Why don’t you open source HN? (2013): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5006037 PG's response is:…
>The reason HN lacks x cool feature is not that I expend no energy on the site, but that I expend all my energy on what users actually care about, which is not features but the content. said pg, on a forum in which users constantly complain about missing features...
Some users will always complain about something.
edit: They also generally all complain about different things.
Re: Ask HN: Is the Hacker News source code public?
#25I always assumed that someone had lost the source for the iOS app and that’s why we’re stuck with the broken thing.
There's an app? Why?? It's the plainest of websites. I've been using it on android and iPhone for years without ever thinking "oh boy this would be better with an installable update able app asking me permissions and doing who knows what on my device". I assume any apps out there would be 3rd party scrapers...
I use https://github.com/weiran/Hackers because it’s nice to read on, but then to comment I have to use the site, so yea lol
If there was a dark mode on the site I’d just use that
Re: Ask HN: Is the Hacker News source code public?
#26Hacker news was originally written by Paul Graham in Arc. Arc is a Lisp-inspired programming language also written/invented by PG at the same time and Hacker News programmed in it to (also) prove it works. Arc did not catch on outside of Hacker News. Arc is free and open source. Regarding Hacker News, itself: "Ask PG: Why don’t you open source HN? (2013): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5006037 PG's response is:…
>The reason HN lacks x cool feature is not that I expend no energy on the site, but that I expend all my energy on what users actually care about, which is not features but the content. said pg, on a forum in which users constantly complain about missing features...
It's a love-hate thing. Most people (myself included) love how simple HN is. The only thing I wish I could have is: Being able to search through content I've saved or upvoted. I don't know if I care for any other changes. In my case, it would allow me to find "that article I saw years ago that I cant quite remember" and liked comments would be nice to be able to filter through too. Basically the search engine HN uses at the bottom only goes through public items.
Re: Ask HN: Is the Hacker News source code public?
#27I always assumed that someone had lost the source for the iOS app and that’s why we’re stuck with the broken thing.
There's an app? Why?? It's the plainest of websites. I've been using it on android and iPhone for years without ever thinking "oh boy this would be better with an installable update able app asking me permissions and doing who knows what on my device". I assume any apps out there would be 3rd party scrapers...
Most 3rd apps use the Hackernews API https://github.com/cheeaun/awesome-hacker-news https://github.com/HackerNews/API
Re: Ask HN: Is the Hacker News source code public?
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
really? like what? I like hn precisely because of its minimalistic approach.
Pagination. I'm sure most people don't know that you can click on "More replies" at the bottom of the page to read more comments. At least I didn't know at first and spent many years reading only the first page. Edit: It's actually "More" not "More replies".
Really? Interesting, also explains why some mods (I think dang does it) make a stickied post explaining this in big enough threads. Maybe putting a message at the top of threads with multiple pages with its own div / table style would suffice.
Re: Ask HN: Is the Hacker News source code public?
#29I don't see it mentioned in another comment, so I'll add that part of why it's not public is probably to hide how exactly some things like "shadow banning" work, or the exact secret sauce to make the front page, etc.
Re: Ask HN: Is the Hacker News source code public?
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The reason HN lacks x cool feature is not that I expend no energy on the site, but that I expend all my energy on what users actually care about, which is not features but the content. said pg, on a forum in which users constantly complain about missing features...
really? like what? I like hn precisely because of its minimalistic approach.
Option to set colours for more than just the top bar and … that’s about it