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Ask HN: 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.
- hlasdjlfhalwjk 5y agoAn old version is available here: http://arclanguage.org/install http://arclanguage.org/install I assume the current version is still written in Arc (Paul Graham created the language) but differs from that version.
- krapp 5y agoThere is also anarki, the experimental public fork[0] of Arc and the forum. Like everything else, it differs from HN. [0]https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki
- MontrealRaised 5y agoHacker 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 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.
- krapp 5y ago>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. said pg, on a forum in which users constantly complain about missing features...
- datenarsch 5y agoreally? like what? I like hn precisely because of its minimalistic approach.
- oblio 5y agoHave they fixed quote wrapping?
- stackbutterflow 5y agoPagination. I'm sure most people don't know that you can click on "More replies" at the bottom of the page to read more comments. At least I didn't know at first and spent many years reading only the first page. Edit: It's actually "More" not "More replies".
- giancarlostoro 5y agoReally? Interesting, also explains why some mods (I think dang does it) make a stickied post explaining this in big enough threads. Maybe putting a message at the top of threads with multiple pages with its own div / table style would suffice.
- nsizx 5y agoI have never understood this. On websites, paginators are always at the end of pages. This one is there and it clearly says what it does. How can someone miss it?
- sokoloff 5y agoThe only thing I can think of is that pagination didn't originally exist, so users could have "learned" that if Ctrl-F didn't find a term, that it didn't exist in the comments (rather than didn't exist on this page of comments). That seems incredibly minor to me, though.
- krapp 5y agoOther sites design their UI to stand out. Paginators may be bolded, or in a different font. And there will usually be other visual cues like a "Page x of y" somewhere. Hacker News' primary color scheme is minimalist grey on grey, specifically so the UI doesn't distract from the content. As a result, people here develop feature blindness to the point that dang has to remind people that pagination even exists in most paginated threads.
- amelius 5y agoIt's still missing modern privacy features, such as the "right to be forgotten".
- giancarlostoro 5y agoIf you email HN mods they are fairly reasonable is what I've heard.
- voidfunc 5y agoThe mods are awesome on here in general compared to many comparably sized communities. Dang deserves a lot of praise. Thank you Dang.
- ReDeiPirati 5y agoStrongly agree! A big shoutout to Scott also!
- dredmorbius 5y agoScott's not here, man. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26999696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26999696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25055115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25055115
- kjaftaedi 5y agoRight to be forgotten is an old EU law, the new GDPR law is 'right to erasure' In the event you don't feel like deleting your own comments the mods will likely help you. A general best practice is to avoid posting personally identifiable information.
- farmerstan 5y agoYou can’t delete your comments after 2 hours.
- markus_zhang 5y agoI think it's pretty good. I only need one feature that is a piece of message that shows me which one of my comments has been replied when it happens. But then again I'm fine without it so I guess it's not necessary.
- tjhill 5y agohttps://github.com/wting/hackernews https://github.com/wting/hackernews
- redis_mlc 5y ago> I'm interested in web application security After taking a look, please remove the shadowban on my account for saying "What science?" because of the year-long b.s. about masks and vaccine side effects.
- travoc 5y agoI always assumed that someone had lost the source for the iOS app and that’s why we’re stuck with the broken thing.
- AndrewDucker 5y agoThere is no official HN app, for any OS. People have made multiple unofficial ones, using the API, though.
- Fragoel2 5y agoAnd many kinda work but are no longer mantained. Such is the fate of the iOS app previously mentioned and of Materialistic (Android)
- AndrewDucker 5y agoI use Materialistic. Is there a better one?
- aniforprez 5y agoI'm currently using Harmonic for Android after Materialistic irritated me too many times and while it's definitely got some issues, it works well enough for casual use
- tssva 5y agoI would be completely happy with Harmonic except for 3 issues and I'm not sure if the one can be resolved because every Android HN API using app I have tried has the same issue. The first issue is that long comments are difficult to type because the text box doesn't scroll the content. You end up typing blind. I'm already doing so now. The 2nd is that you can you can copy part of a comment. The 3rd and the one that I've experienced across clients is that dead comments are displayed. I would like to not see dead comments.akimg this a setting would be fine.
- 5y ago
- _wldu 5y agoThanks for the comments. I'm also interested in the infrastructure. Does HN run on dedicated hardware, shared VPS, AWS, Azure, etc.
- capableweb 5y agoYes, 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 http://arclanguage.org/install
- tyingq 5y agoI 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.
- newbamboo 5y agoI recall they pushed updates a month or so back. Forget why I know this; vaguely recall some hiccups being mentioned. So they seem to update it on the regular, maybe on a pro re nata basis.
- lovebes 5y agohow did they make it so fast? I'm always surprised by its loading speed
- sokoloff 5y agoPerhaps an equally (more?) relevant question is "why are other sites so slow?"
- Feoj 5y agoSimplicity. Clean HTML ("rendered" server side), straight forward CSS and little JavaScript.
- iamwil 5y agoI remember reading a couple years ago, that there's no database. It just reads stuff off disk, and then caches it in memory. It probably also helps that the html/css/js is minimal
- ryandvm 5y agoBy not having any features