Is there a description of the file layout HN uses to store data?

Question

As far as I know, HN uses no DB and just writes all data to plain text files.Does this still hold true?Is there a description of the layout somewhere? I wonder if it is just one file per comment and the name is the id. And what the internal structure of those files is.I think it would be a very interesting example of a successful Web2 style project that writes to files instead of using a DB.

yababa_y · Accepted Answer

Current HN is a mystery but you can look at Anarki, which descends from its implementation, or older version of Arc. Yes, files are named by id, the contents are a sexp encoding nested tables (so, lists of lists of &hellip; key value pairs)https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/blob/master/apps/news/...

avian · Answer

There are old copies of the source code floating around. You can study them to figure out how the data is stored.See links in this thread:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28155134

Is there a description of the file layout HN uses to store data?

Current HN is a mystery but you can look at Anarki, which descends from its implementation, or older version of Arc. Yes, files are named by id, the contents are a sexp encoding nested tables (so, lists of lists of … key value pairs)
https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/blob/master/apps/news/...

There are old copies of the source code floating around. You can study them to figure out how the data is stored.
See links in this thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28155134