HACKER Q&A
📣 njsubedi

What’s the server architecture of Hacker News?


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?

  👤 dang Accepted Answer ✓
It's still the same as what Scott described here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16076041

Number of daily requests has gone up closer to 6M

👤 heinrichhartman
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

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

👤 solarkraft
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.

👤 Cerium
Some recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27452276
👤 kichimi
It's a single WRT54g running OpenWRT on an admins DSL connection.
👤 dave_sid
AWS lambdas