Everything we’ve seen so far suggests they didn’t (don’t?) have the best tech people working for them, but they do have a lot of money at their disposal. This looks really over-provisioned compared to the reported size of their site, there is no caching layer that I can make out, I bet they are using those forty i3s to host user content as blobs in a database. If they added a couple varnish servers and moved the user…
I'm surprised that they don't have better tech people. HN has a fair number of people expressing support. I'd have thought that they'd be able to attract some engineering volunteers.
Would be a fun technical challenge but current people might be defensive about what they built, could end up being more politics then progress.