Medium's Technology Stack • Hacker News Board

Re: Medium's Technology Stack

#11

Post by dang » Sun, Oct 25, 2015, 9:04 PM UTC

abetusk wrote: post #10

I hope this doesn't come off as negative, I'm honestly curious: Why are there so many Medium stories on HN? There seems to be at least one story a day on the front page if not more. They usually have very few comments and the content often seems a little bit of a mismatch from what normally gets on the front page. I'm happy to ignore the stories and skip over them but to me that's not the point. Is someone gaming the…

medium.com stories are penalized by default on HN, as are most sites that produce solid articles amid a lot of fluff. (If it were only fluff, we'd ban the site.) The penalty can get lifted by moderators or by software.

You may be underestimating the sheer quantity of articles people post from there (dozens a day), as well as the diversity of topics in them. I took a quick look and the 6 most successful medium.com posts from yesterday were all technical. (You can check this for yourself by clicking on the domain name next to the story title, which shows you all the posts from that domain.)

Re: Medium's Technology Stack

#12

Post by noir_lord » Sun, Oct 25, 2015, 9:04 PM UTC

abetusk wrote: post #10

I hope this doesn't come off as negative, I'm honestly curious: Why are there so many Medium stories on HN? There seems to be at least one story a day on the front page if not more. They usually have very few comments and the content often seems a little bit of a mismatch from what normally gets on the front page. I'm happy to ignore the stories and skip over them but to me that's not the point. Is someone gaming the…

I don't think there has to be a conspiracy, Medium hosts a lot of high quality long form content which is a natural fit for the demographic here is all.

I like a lot of the medium stuff that's posted and it's one of the nicest in browser reading experiences around.

Re: Medium's Technology Stack

#13

Post by noir_lord » Sun, Oct 25, 2015, 9:04 PM UTC

abetusk wrote: post #10

I hope this doesn't come off as negative, I'm honestly curious: Why are there so many Medium stories on HN? There seems to be at least one story a day on the front page if not more. They usually have very few comments and the content often seems a little bit of a mismatch from what normally gets on the front page. I'm happy to ignore the stories and skip over them but to me that's not the point. Is someone gaming the…

I don't think there has to be a conspiracy, Medium hosts a lot of high quality long form content which is a natural fit for the demographic here is all.

I like a lot of the medium stuff that's posted and it's one of the nicest in browser reading experiences around.

Re: Medium's Technology Stack

#14

Post by frou_dh » Sun, Oct 25, 2015, 9:29 PM UTC

orthoganol wrote: post #3

> The Stack That Helped Medium Drive 2.6 Millennia of Reading Time > For a site as seemingly simple as Medium, it may be surprising how much complexity is behind the scenes. It’s just a blog, right? You could probably knock something out using Rails in a couple of days. :) > In past lives I’ve raced snowboards, jumped out of planes, and lived in the jungle. Looking past the annoying, "look how cool we are" tone, I do…

Don't think it counts as looking past when you still feel the need to announce specific sentences you don't like.

Re: Medium's Technology Stack

#15

Post by ktu100 » Sun, Oct 25, 2015, 9:58 PM UTC

On this topic, I would like to get a book's recommendation on how to build a full stack product like this. Something more technical with war stories.

My background: I'm a very strong iOS engineer with decent Python and JS skill. However my backend skill is limited at: building a Flask app with custom end points. It will talk to a single sql instance. I'm completely oblivious to memcache, load balancer, different AWS services. My plan is (surprise surprise) to quit my day job next year to pursue my own project and I would like to gather enough best practice and understanding of a full stack app.

Thank you!

Re: Medium's Technology Stack

#16

Post by wyclif » Sun, Oct 25, 2015, 10:50 PM UTC

In past lives I’ve raced snowboards, jumped out of planes, and lived in the jungle

I'm so glad the author added that line, signalling his credibility. I'm even more impressed by Medium's stack when I know the guy responsible for it skydives. The coolness of this dude is overwhelming me now.

Re: Medium's Technology Stack

#17

Post by jorams » Sun, Oct 25, 2015, 11:02 PM UTC

wyclif wrote: post #16

In past lives I’ve raced snowboards, jumped out of planes, and lived in the jungle I'm so glad the author added that line, signalling his credibility. I'm even more impressed by Medium's stack when I know the guy responsible for it skydives. The coolness of this dude is overwhelming me now.

While I don't particularly like your tone, I found the inclusion of that entire paragraph surprising. The paragraph immediately before it states:

> Where the quality of the idea matters, not the author’s qualifications.

It is then followed by the paragraph you talk about, specifically meant to showcase the authors's qualifications.

Re: Medium's Technology Stack

#18

Post by pramodliv1 » Sun, Oct 25, 2015, 11:26 PM UTC

> We like the type-safety without the verbosity and JVM tuning of Java.

I've never worked on large-scale services, but I'm a fan of articles and talks on scaling. Is there any reason why I often read about JVM tuning, but never come across V8 tuning, or Go runtime tuning or CPython tuning?

Re: Medium's Technology Stack

#19

Post by bigdubs » Sun, Oct 25, 2015, 11:27 PM UTC

pramodliv1 wrote: post #18

> We like the type-safety without the verbosity and JVM tuning of Java. I've never worked on large-scale services, but I'm a fan of articles and talks on scaling. Is there any reason why I often read about JVM tuning, but never come across V8 tuning, or Go runtime tuning or CPython tuning?

or .net runtime tuning.

Re: Medium's Technology Stack

#20

Post by tolien » Sun, Oct 25, 2015, 11:39 PM UTC

pramodliv1 wrote: post #18

> We like the type-safety without the verbosity and JVM tuning of Java. I've never worked on large-scale services, but I'm a fan of articles and talks on scaling. Is there any reason why I often read about JVM tuning, but never come across V8 tuning, or Go runtime tuning or CPython tuning?

Can't speak for V8/Go/CPython but the JVM has a lot of knobs to turn (quick look at enterprise instances I've been responsible for: max/initial heap size, max/initial permgen size, max/initial newgen size, enable/disable dump on OOM, enable/disable GC logging, enable/disable compaction), some of which also depend on implementation (e.g. the IBM JVM used to have a different default GC policy which favoured fewer but longer collections and some of the parameters behaved subtly different from Sun's).