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I mostly follow HN, a successful tech forum that is written in a single lisp file and runs on a single server. It’s not surprising to find successful projects r

I mostly follow HN, a successful tech forum that is written in a single lisp file and runs on a single server. It’s not surprising to find successful projects run with a simple stack. The opposite is more surprising.

krapp 6y ago
Any application can be said to be written in a single file if you ignore all of the libraries and just dump everything else into a single file, HN included. That's not a rational measure of simplicity, elegance or efficiency.
- jermaustin1 6y ago
  What the parent and original post seem to be implying is that simplicity, efficiency, tech stack (or lack there of), isn't what drives success in a business, it is instead the customers paying. Sure having a modern infrastructure that is able to process thousands of requests per second is better than something that can only do a few hundred, but if you strip out a bunch of excess requests, you will process less per user, and thus reach the same level of scale on a less efficient stack.
  - madamelic 6y ago
    And save money + time. The most important part is people paying you money. Modern startup culture is full of inefficiencies + silly trappings (nice offices, drive to hire people, make things more complex, take more money from investors to stave off figuring out taking money from customers)
    - jermaustin1 6y ago
      100%. Shameless Plug - In fact, I'm currently building an "inefficient," "micro" web framework specifically so I can build more stuff, more quickly [1]. An entire app can be build in a single js file (with only one dependency... and it's 150 or so dependencies and sub dependencies). 1: https://github.com/jeremyaboyd/simplemvcjs https://github.com/jeremyaboyd/simplemvcjs
      - xchaotic 6y ago
        Interesting but the way you phrased it, doesn’t sell it particularly well - it seems to simply hide the underlying dependency complexity a few layers below. It’s still a node.js app with all the pros and cons of npm etc.
thesizeofa 6y ago
The fact that I keep reading posts on HN about how successful HN is makes me wonder how soon will this forum die off, infested by cultist "contrarians", wanna be philosophers and alt right fantasists, in favour of reddit - where most of the times I read either the exact same comments as here on identical posts, or better quality comments with far more evidence and without the usual non sense downvoting of dissent. But to the point specifically, " It’s not surprising to find successful projects run with a simple stack." - you are spot on. The "successful" HN crowd appears to favour overengineering or obscure tools, point which shows 90% are armchair philosophers who daydream of running a business, building a 0 to 1 start-up, and other things office workers imagine when they think building a webapp using GO, or Haskell will result in anything else but a line on a CV for yet another slave away job (potentially an open source project that no one wants too).
- arel 6y ago
  The cargo culting and contrarian smugness on HN can be very annoying. Not very representative of the entire real world of development.
- servercobra 6y ago
  What subreddits do you frequent? I've yet to find any that match HN's comments and content, but I haven't tried super hard.
Insanity 6y ago
It's a single lisp file? That's pretty cool, Is this public somewhere?
- CharlesW 6y ago
  The source appears to be http://arclanguage.org/install http://arclanguage.org/install.
- dang 6y ago
  Not sure where that idea came from but it has never been a single file. More at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24263568 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24263568
  - Insanity 6y ago
    Thanks dang! :-)
BoorishBears 6y ago
Surprising and noteworthy are not the same thing, but pretending they are definitely lets you make your non-sequitur reply seem like it addresses mine... It's noteworthy when tech projects are successful and simple, because in the industry there is a widespread tendency to try and replicate what "the big guys" are doing, and often times what they're doing is extremely convoluted. In other words, it is significant when projects buck this trend, because it goes against the mistaken belief that the only way to be "web scale" to replicate some of the most complicated tech stacks out there, making it worth calling out. Significant being a synonym for noteworthy in case that needs to be clarified... HN being an example of this doesn't somehow make every other example not noteworthy either if that was what you tried to say? - This concept has come up so many times I am, again, surprised anyone who is in the same tech industry as me does not realize it's a thing: https://blog.bradfieldcs.com/you-are-not-google-84912cf44afb?gi=9c2b0729a254 https://blog.bradfieldcs.com/you-are-not-google-84912cf44afb... https://programmerfriend.com/not-google/ https://programmerfriend.com/not-google/ https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-030-31646-4_13 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-030-31646-... Especially on Hacker News, a place where an immense amount of gnashing of teeth has happened over what the latest complicated tech stack that people convince themselves they need to make software that scales.
dang 6y ago
Currently 9 arc files containing 13k lines of code. If you throw in the language implementation it's 11 files and 15k lines.

krapp 6y ago

Any application can be said to be written in a single file if you ignore all of the libraries and just dump everything else into a single file, HN included. That's not a rational measure of simplicity, elegance or efficiency.

jermaustin1 6y ago
What the parent and original post seem to be implying is that simplicity, efficiency, tech stack (or lack there of), isn't what drives success in a business, it is instead the customers paying. Sure having a modern infrastructure that is able to process thousands of requests per second is better than something that can only do a few hundred, but if you strip out a bunch of excess requests, you will process less per user, and thus reach the same level of scale on a less efficient stack.
- madamelic 6y ago
  And save money + time. The most important part is people paying you money. Modern startup culture is full of inefficiencies + silly trappings (nice offices, drive to hire people, make things more complex, take more money from investors to stave off figuring out taking money from customers)
  - jermaustin1 6y ago
    100%. Shameless Plug - In fact, I'm currently building an "inefficient," "micro" web framework specifically so I can build more stuff, more quickly [1]. An entire app can be build in a single js file (with only one dependency... and it's 150 or so dependencies and sub dependencies). 1: https://github.com/jeremyaboyd/simplemvcjs https://github.com/jeremyaboyd/simplemvcjs
    - xchaotic 6y ago
      Interesting but the way you phrased it, doesn’t sell it particularly well - it seems to simply hide the underlying dependency complexity a few layers below. It’s still a node.js app with all the pros and cons of npm etc.

thesizeofa 6y ago

The fact that I keep reading posts on HN about how successful HN is makes me wonder how soon will this forum die off, infested by cultist "contrarians", wanna be philosophers and alt right fantasists, in favour of reddit - where most of the times I read either the exact same comments as here on identical posts, or better quality comments with far more evidence and without the usual non sense downvoting of dissent. But to the point specifically, " It’s not surprising to find successful projects run with a simple stack." - you are spot on. The "successful" HN crowd appears to favour overengineering or obscure tools, point which shows 90% are armchair philosophers who daydream of running a business, building a 0 to 1 start-up, and other things office workers imagine when they think building a webapp using GO, or Haskell will result in anything else but a line on a CV for yet another slave away job (potentially an open source project that no one wants too).

arel 6y ago
The cargo culting and contrarian smugness on HN can be very annoying. Not very representative of the entire real world of development.
servercobra 6y ago
What subreddits do you frequent? I've yet to find any that match HN's comments and content, but I haven't tried super hard.

Insanity 6y ago

It's a single lisp file? That's pretty cool, Is this public somewhere?

CharlesW 6y ago
The source appears to be http://arclanguage.org/install http://arclanguage.org/install.
dang 6y ago
Not sure where that idea came from but it has never been a single file. More at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24263568 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24263568
- Insanity 6y ago
  Thanks dang! :-)

BoorishBears 6y ago

Surprising and noteworthy are not the same thing, but pretending they are definitely lets you make your non-sequitur reply seem like it addresses mine... It's noteworthy when tech projects are successful and simple, because in the industry there is a widespread tendency to try and replicate what "the big guys" are doing, and often times what they're doing is extremely convoluted. In other words, it is significant when projects buck this trend, because it goes against the mistaken belief that the only way to be "web scale" to replicate some of the most complicated tech stacks out there, making it worth calling out. Significant being a synonym for noteworthy in case that needs to be clarified... HN being an example of this doesn't somehow make every other example not noteworthy either if that was what you tried to say? - This concept has come up so many times I am, again, surprised anyone who is in the same tech industry as me does not realize it's a thing: https://blog.bradfieldcs.com/you-are-not-google-84912cf44afb?gi=9c2b0729a254 https://blog.bradfieldcs.com/you-are-not-google-84912cf44afb... https://programmerfriend.com/not-google/ https://programmerfriend.com/not-google/ https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-030-31646-4_13 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-030-31646-... Especially on Hacker News, a place where an immense amount of gnashing of teeth has happened over what the latest complicated tech stack that people convince themselves they need to make software that scales.

dang 6y ago

Currently 9 arc files containing 13k lines of code. If you throw in the language implementation it's 11 files and 15k lines.