You said News.YC uses some kind of persistent hash structure for storing everything. This seems to me like Greenspun's Tenth Law except with Berkeley DB instead

You said News.YC uses some kind of persistent hash structure for storing everything. This seems to me like Greenspun's Tenth Law except with Berkeley DB instead of Common Lisp; I wouldn't want to write the logic to do what BDB already does much better and faster (I don't want to implement ACID transactions myself if I decide I need them).