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  1. Jemalloc 5.4.0(github.com/jemalloc ↗)
    38comments
  2. The scourge of x86 emulation(fex-emu.com ↗)
    24comments
  3. Astra for Law(openai.com ↗)
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  4. Bonsai 2 27B: Near-Lossless Compression in a 9x Smaller Footprint(prismml.com ↗)
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  5. Bend – A language that blocks AI mistakes via proof, on CPU and GPU(bend-lang.com ↗)
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  6. Qwen 3.8 Omni Flash(qwen.ai ↗)
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  7. When the fractional part of a float fixes your shader(crocidb.com ↗)
    1comments
  8. Hister: A private search engine for the pages you visit and the files you keep(github.com/asciimoo ↗)
    167comments
  9. Pre-Greek: The lost language hidden within Ancient Greek(linguisticdiscovery.com ↗)
    33comments
  10. Wax motor(wikipedia.org ↗)
    70comments
  11. Fujitsu launches made-in-Japan next-generation CPU FUJITSU-MONAKA(global.fujitsu ↗)
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  12. A heap overflow and SSO misconfiguration to compromise OpenAI internal repos(hacktron.ai ↗)
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  13. Shapelearn Qwen 3.8 27B (13.1 GB VRAM)(byteshape.com ↗)
    8comments
  14. Replacing Pull Requests with Delta(zed.dev ↗)
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  15. How to Write with an LLM(sockpuppet.org ↗)
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  16. Speeding up gearhash on ARM64(sam.dev ↗)
    discuss
  17. Why Does the Universe Expand?(cosmicave.org ↗)
    51comments
  18. Ask A Monk – A digital wilderness for thoughts with no immediate answer(askamonk.online ↗)
    23comments
  19. Flet 1.0 – Build cross-platform apps in Python(flet.dev ↗)
    56comments
  20. Telstra outage: The night a network decided the year was 2006(netnod.se ↗)
    23comments
  21. Diplodocus, Long Thought Exclusively American, Turns Up in Spain(sci.news ↗)
    41comments
  22. Why I didn’t sign the Fields medallists’ letter(gowers.wordpress.com ↗)
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  23. How do we prevent mathemathics from devolving into the Medieval Era of secrecy?(mathoverflow.net ↗)
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  24. CrowdSec Source Code Leak(crowdsec.net ↗)
    48comments
  25. Apple detectives solved mystery of ancient tree and rewrote the history of fruit(scientificamerican.com ↗)
    10comments
  26. The most important product decision is what you don't build(liamnugent.me ↗)
    37comments
  27. Fixing an NZXT Signal 4K30 part 2: the green/pink video bug(downtowndougbrown.com ↗)
    10comments
  28. Infinite-Parameter LLMs: Generating and Adapting Weights from Live Data(arxiv.org ↗)
    39comments
  29. Show HN: Snapdrop: Instantly share files between devices. No setup, no signup(snapdrop.me ↗)
    35comments
  30. How Uber Protects Against Retry Storms(uber.com ↗)
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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.