Is the Hacker News source code public?
Is the Hacker News source code and infrastructure public? I'm interested in web application security and performance and was hoping I could learn more about HN's source code and infrastructure.
Hacker 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:
I don't have time to manage such a project. I don't think it's necessary anyway. 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.
I assume the current version is still written in Arc (Paul Graham created the language) but differs from that version.
Thanks for the comments. I'm also interested in the infrastructure. Does HN run on dedicated hardware, shared VPS, AWS, Azure, etc.
Yes, it is kind of public, at least one version of it. You can find it here as it's bundled with Arc, the language HN is coded in: http://arclanguage.org/install
I 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.
how did they make it so fast? I'm always surprised by its loading speed
I always assumed that someone had lost the source for the iOS app and that’s why we’re stuck with the broken thing.