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  1. OpenJev(openjev.com ↗)
    55comments
  2. Jemalloc 5.4.0(github.com/jemalloc ↗)
    49comments
  3. Microsoft exec called AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history'(techcrunch.com ↗)
    73comments
  4. The scourge of x86 emulation(fex-emu.com ↗)
    28comments
  5. Astra for Law(openai.com ↗)
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  6. Bonsai 2 27B: Near-Lossless Compression in a 9x Smaller Footprint(prismml.com ↗)
    136comments
  7. Replacing Pull Requests with Delta(zed.dev ↗)
    6comments
  8. Bend – A language that blocks AI mistakes via proof, on CPU and GPU(bend-lang.com ↗)
    230comments
  9. Qwen 3.8 Omni Flash(qwen.ai ↗)
    83comments
  10. Hister: A private search engine for the pages you visit and the files you keep(github.com/asciimoo ↗)
    170comments
  11. Wax motor(wikipedia.org ↗)
    72comments
  12. Pre-Greek: The lost language hidden within Ancient Greek(linguisticdiscovery.com ↗)
    41comments
  13. Fujitsu launches made-in-Japan next-generation CPU FUJITSU-MONAKA(global.fujitsu ↗)
    234comments
  14. When the fractional part of a float fixes your shader(crocidb.com ↗)
    2comments
  15. Dr Julius Neubronner's Miniature Pigeon Camera(publicdomainreview.org ↗)
    discuss
  16. A heap overflow and SSO misconfiguration to compromise OpenAI internal repos(hacktron.ai ↗)
    158comments
  17. Shapelearn Qwen 3.8 27B (13.1 GB VRAM)(byteshape.com ↗)
    12comments
  18. How to Write with an LLM(sockpuppet.org ↗)
    117comments
  19. Ask A Monk – A digital wilderness for thoughts with no immediate answer(askamonk.online ↗)
    24comments
  20. Flet 1.0 – Build cross-platform apps in Python(flet.dev ↗)
    59comments
  21. Telstra outage: The night a network decided the year was 2006(netnod.se ↗)
    29comments
  22. Speeding up gearhash on ARM64(sam.dev ↗)
    discuss
  23. Diplodocus, Long Thought Exclusively American, Turns Up in Spain(sci.news ↗)
    45comments
  24. How do we prevent mathemathics from devolving into the Medieval Era of secrecy?(mathoverflow.net ↗)
    110comments
  25. Why I didn’t sign the Fields medallists’ letter(gowers.wordpress.com ↗)
    371comments
  26. Apple detectives solved mystery of ancient tree and rewrote the history of fruit(scientificamerican.com ↗)
    12comments
  27. The most important product decision is what you don't build(liamnugent.me ↗)
    39comments
  28. Why Does the Universe Expand?(cosmicave.org ↗)
    60comments
  29. CrowdSec Source Code Leak(crowdsec.net ↗)
    49comments
  30. Show HN: Snapdrop: Instantly share files between devices. No setup, no signup(snapdrop.me ↗)
    39comments

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

55 pointsby 5y ago
16 comments
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?
5y agoHN ↗

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

5y agoHN ↗

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

5y agoHN ↗

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.

5y agoHN ↗

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

5y agoHN ↗

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.

5y agoHN ↗

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.

5y agoHN ↗

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?

5y agoHN ↗

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

So disappointing.

5y agoHN ↗

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

5y agoHN ↗

Caching on the same box as everything else is running?

I'm guessing the server must have a ton of RAM, but that's probably why the site is super fast.

5y agoHN ↗

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

5y agoHN ↗

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.