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Hacker News now runs on top of Common Lisp
- rcarmo 1y agoHmmm. Does that mean we'll get dark mode now?
- dang 1y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23199062 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23199062
- rcarmo 1y agoThat thread is 5 years old, and nothing really came out of it. The genius solution in there is probably this one: @media (prefers-color-scheme:dark){body{filter:invert(1) hue-rotate(180deg)}} ...which you can try by doing this in the browser console: const styleElement = document.createElement('style'); styleElement.type = 'text/css'; styleElement.textContent = "@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) { html { filter: invert(1) hue-rotate(180deg); } }"; document.head.appendChild(styleElement); But I get that there are a lot of opinions. Just try one, put up a vote over a week, do it over 4-6 weeks, settle on the one that has the best feedback...
- brudgers 1y agoThat thread is 5 years old This might be what we are up against: https://norvig.com/21-days.html https://norvig.com/21-days.html https://paulgraham.com/hundred.html https://paulgraham.com/hundred.html
- rcarmo 1y agoI’m all for stability and all (heck, I still use vanilla vim), but some things are… necessary.
- rwmj 1y agoCan't you use tampermonkey or a similar tool that lets you apply your own stylesheet?
- quotemstr 1y agoThe OP isn't really asking for a "dark mode" like a literal reading of his comment might suggest. He's asking for an officially supported dark mode that evolves with the site and doesn't break random functionality one day. It's easy to use Stylist or TamperMonkey to make a dark mode that works at one instant of time. It's much harder to maintain one indefinitely in the face of constant changes made by developers not concerned with breaking your work, which they probably don't even know about.
- SoftTalker 1y agoI think there was a vision early in the evolution of the web that user-supplied stylesheets would be a lot more commonly used than they turned out to be. Things like colors, contrast levels, font sizes, are often matters of personal preference, and the browser (in theory) is the common place to manage those. Each site should not have to reinvent this feature.
- johnisgood 1y agoIt is possible to have this feature built-in to the browser. I am surprised it has not been implemented yet (?).
- altairprime 1y agoThere was a Chrome experiment for it when I looked last year; it worked well in some cases and was just as bad at Google Sheets as every other generic darkmode solution.
- randallsquared 1y agoBrowsers used to commonly support user stylesheets. Chrome removed it a long time ago, and I'm not sure what the status of that is in Firefox now. The issue is that there's no single common use case for them, and if there were, it would be simpler to build it in. But maintaining that level of flexibility has a continuing cost...
- yyx 1y agouBlock origin filter: ! Hacker News dark mode news.ycombinator.com##html:style(filter:invert(90%) hue-rotate(180deg)) news.ycombinator.com##body:style(background: white)
- rcarmo 1y agoDoes not work in embedded browsers in RSS readers. We need a proper site CSS, not client-side patches.
- cess11 1y agoThere is an API somewhere, could wrap that with whatever you feel like.
- rcarmo 1y agoThat’s not really the point, my RSS reader’s in-app browser couldn’t deal with that.
- satiric 1y agoConsidering Hacker News thinks font-size:9pt is acceptable for body text in 2025, don't hold your breath.
- krior 1y agowhats wrong with that?
- satiric 1y agoIt's too damn small. Firefox automatically scales it up to 12px (as does Chrome I think), and even then I zoom in to 130% to get the font to 15.6px. On the home page the text that tells you who the poster is, how many upvotes and comments, etc, is gray text on a gray background, at 7pt font. Again, Firefox and Chrome scale this up to 9.33pt, which again, is too small for me to read comfortably on a 24 inch desktop monitor without zoom. (I accept that 120% would be fine; that brings up the main font size to 14.4pt. Wikipedia seems to use 14pt and that's totally fine for me. But still, neither me nor the browser should have to scale up the website.) Even at 130% zoom, on the home page I can see 20 posts at once. I understand complaints that reddit went too far in the other direction, but that doesn't mean they should throw accessibility out the window for this site.
- simoncion 1y ago> Firefox automatically scales it up to 12px... Only if you've told it to. My Firefox settings have "Minimum Font Size" set to "None". Perhaps scaling up to 12px is a default? (Edit: Also, are you sure you're not thinking of 12pt? IIRC, points are DPI-independent units and (AIUI) the traditional way of specifying font sizes in computerized typography.) Despite my age, I still have eyes that are good enough to easily read the font sizes you're complaining about. A hugely important part of a User Agent is that it provide overrides for site design choices that the Agent's user has decided will benefit them. It's a good thing that UAs let folks like you choose a minimum-possible font size. It's an equally good thing that UAs let folks like me choose to see the choices that designer made that others criticize.
- Tijdreiziger 1y agoI use the awesome “Dark Reader” browser extension, which gives you dark mode on any website.
- rcarmo 1y agoDoes not work in in-app browsers.
- justsomehnguy 1y agoAsk your browser for the reading mode
- rcarmo 1y agoThat does not prevent a big white flash in the middle of the night, and does not work inside all in-app browsers.
- mdaniel 1y agosbcl is a workhorse. I wonder if the Racket folks didn't consider the Arc under production workloads general purpose enough to fix. I actually don't know of any other projects that use Racket in anger I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for Armed Bear because that JVM library ecosystem is enormous https://github.com/armedbear/abcl https://github.com/armedbear/abcl
- dang 1y agoThe Racket folks have always been most helpful and never turned down a request to fix anything.
- mdaniel 1y agoApologies that may have come across as more accusative than I intended. I was just surprised that whatever missing(?) feature or behavior that would cause one to move off of Racket wouldn't be of interest to other Racket users
- brobdingnagians 1y agoMy assumption is that creating a compiler and runtime to match sbcl isn't in scope for racket, so it wouldn't be polite to request racket to do so :) there were probably other benefits of similar orthogonal features, where racket users don't necessarily need it, but another language/runtime already has it because that's where people who need that go
- BoingBoomTschak 1y agoIsn't Racket using the (also) very fast Chez Scheme underneath?
- cess11 1y agoSBCL is disgustingly performant, and while Racket is fine for most applications you'll still notice sometimes that it's executed on a VM and hasn't prioritised speed to the same degree.
- varbhat 1y agoSo, Hacker News was not rewritten in Common Lisp. Instead they reimplemented the Arc Runtime in Common Lisp.
- Aurornis 1y ago> Much of the HN codebase consists of anti-abuse measures that would stop working if people knew about them. We’ve all heard about how “security through obscurity” isn’t real security, but so many simple anti-abuse measures are very effective as long as their exact mechanism isn’t revealed. HN’s downvote and flagging mechanisms make for quick cleanup of anything that gets through, without putting undue fatigue on the users.
- quotemstr 1y agoThings called "security" that don't follow Kerckhoffs's principle aren't security. There are a lot of things adjacent to security, like spam prevention, that sometimes get dumped into the same bucket, but they're not really the same. Security measures uphold invariants: absent cryptosystem breaks and implementation bugs, nobody is forging a TLS certificate. I need the private key to credibility present my certificate to the public. Hard guarantee, assuming my assumptions hold. Likewise, if my OS is designed so sandboxed apps can't steal my browser cookies, that's a hard guarantee, modulo bugs. There's an invariant one can specify formally --- and it holds even if the OS source code leaks. Abuse prevention? DDoS avoidance? Content moderation? EDR? Fuzzy. Best effort. Difficult to verify. That these things are sometimes called security products doesn't erase the distinction between them and systems that make firm guarantees about upholding formal invariants. HN abuse prevention belongs to the security-adjacent but not real security category. HN's password hashing scheme would fall under the other category.
- tptacek 1y agoThis is simply not true. At the highest levels, security is about distributing costs between attackers and defenders, with defenders having the goal of raising costs past a threshold where attacks are no longer reasonable expenses for any plausible attacker. Obfuscation, done well, can certainly play a role in that. The Blu-ray BD+ scheme is a great case study on this.
- quotemstr 1y agoA definition can't be right or wrong. We're using different definitions of the word "security". What would you call the rigorous invariant-based conceptualization I call "security"?
- codr7 1y agoDefinitely makes more sense than Racket imo, Common Lisp is a lot more pragmatic and SBCL is like magic.
- anthk 1y agoGood, sbcl it's great for CL. And now with current CLX from QuickLisp (the one with daily releases, I can't remember it's name) MCClim runs snappy even under Intel n270 ATom machines. Under ECL it almost runs snappy, but the performance gain it's astronomical. From a really laggy UI to instant rendering. EDIT: UltraLisp for QuickLisp.
- dhqgekt 1y agoWhen we will get to see the code of clarc? I hope that there is no "business logic" relevant to running HN in the language implementation, is there?
- javawizard 1y agoThat's addressed in the article. There absolutely is: > Much of the HN codebase consists of anti-abuse measures that would stop working if people knew about them. Unfortunately. separating out the secret parts would by now be a lot of work. The time to do it will be if and when we eventually release the alternative Arc implementations we’ve been working on.
- dhqgekt 1y agoI am asking about the core language implementation. No need to publish the whole source code of HN, just the part of source code of clarc.. You do not have "anti-abuse measures" in the language implementation and runtime, do you? Is it that hard to seperate a language implementation and code written in the language?
- dang 1y agoYou're right. The Clarc code and the rest of the HN codebase are separate. (Well, mostly. Almost entirely.) More here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44099560 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44099560.
- dang 1y agoI think the (anonymous? I can't find a name) author of the OP slipped slightly at the end of that otherwise-impeccable sequence of quotes. That last comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21546438 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21546438) was responding to a question about open-sourcing the entire HN codebase, not just the Arc implementation. Open-sourcing HN wouldn't work because of the anti-abuse stuff, etc. But open-sourcing the Arc implementation (i.e. Clarc) would be much easier. The way to do it would be to port the original Arc release (http://arclanguage.org/ http://arclanguage.org/) to Clarc. It includes a sample application which is an early version of HN, scrubbed of anything HN- or YC-specific.
- AndrewKemendo 1y ago> Much of the HN codebase consists of anti-abuse measures that would stop working if people knew about them. Unfortunately. separating out the secret parts would by now be a lot of work The business logic in encoded into the original structure, making migration to anything different effectively impossible - without some massive redesign. This, I think more than any response, indicates why the philosophy of “it’s working don’t touch it” will always win and new features” requests will be rejected. HN didn’t depaginate based on user desires, it was based on internal tooling making that feature available within the context of the HN overall structure. HN has zero financial or structural incentive to do anything but change as little as possible. That’s why this place, unique in the internet at this point unfortunately has lasted. HN is not *trying* to grow, it’s trying to do as little as possible while staying alive; so by default, it’s more coherent to maintain because its structure isn’t built for it and changing the structure would break the encoded rituals (anti-abuse measures). Something to think about when you’re trying to solve for many problems like “legacy code” “scaling needs” etc… it all comes back to baseline incentives
- exe34 1y agoHonestly I don't understand why more things aren't like this. I don't need a revamped landing page for my GP/council/department/directorate/organisation/etc - just finish the previous version with the features that were promised. I don't need another half-assed version that will also be abandoned at 40-50%.
- AndrewKemendo 1y agoBusiness incentives HN is odd in that it’s subsidized by a hyper capitalist who still has at least a romantic concept of the “early” internet My assumption is that HN will die when the current leadership turns over because while HN does help marketing/intel for YC it’s a cost center All cost centers eventually get closed
- exe34 1y ago> All cost centers eventually get closed This needs to be the epitaph of humanity. I propose we start a crowd fund to get it carved in big letters on the moon!
- jgrahamc 1y agoAs someone who runs a website based on the Arc code that was opened sourced... I'd love to be able to use Clarc.
- g8oz 1y agowhat is the site?
- jgrahamc 1y agohttps://twostopbits.com https://twostopbits.com I use the HN Arc code, but the site is about retro computing and gaming.
- justsomehnguy 1y agoDamn you, you reminded me [again] of the delightful days of FeedDemoning Maybe I should find a way to have APOD every day again.
- zoogeny 1y agoHacker News is a perfect example of the "Worse is better" mantra applied to social engineering. I mean, slashdot had more features and functionality in the late 1990s. What makes HN work is the tight focus and heavy moderation.
- dang 1y agoFinally a Lisp system wins the worse-is-better crown!
- keeganpoppen 1y agooh man... this comment is just so, so incredibly apt.
- dotancohen 1y agoIt's also by the guy who mods here.
- 90s_dev 1y ago"Incidentally, very few people grasp the amount of effort Daniel Gackle expends running HN now, and what an amazing job he does." -Paul Graham, https://x.com/paulg/status/1282055086433284103 https://x.com/paulg/status/1282055086433284103
- 90s_dev 1y agoMy comment definitely has more points than the two above it, but it's lower, even though that pattern isn't true with my other comments. Probably because Daniel manually demoted it as part of his manual/automatic hybrid moderation tooling, and probably for the sake of being humble about the amount of work he does for HN. Which I think is an interesting example of my other comment's point about how dang probably moderates HN. I'd be curious whether I'm very far off with this Daniel.
- owl57 1y ago
- brundolf 1y ago> [Clarc] is much faster and also will easily let HN run on multiple cores This was all running on a single core??
- quotemstr 1y agoModern CPUs are stupid fast when you use them the right way. You can take scale-up surprisingly far before being forced to scale out, even when that scale out is something as modest as running on multiple cores.
- thatwasunusual 1y agoBased on context, you are insinuating that a discussion board like HN _can_ be hard on the CPU alone? If so, how? My guess would be _also_ be that the CPU would have little to do by itself, but that I/O would take the brunt?
- grg0 1y agoNegotiating TLS handshakes is one way. But I'd imagine the rest is largely IO-bound like you said. It still puts into perspective what a big pile of dogshit consumer software has become that stuff like this comes as a surprise. Also, the last time I checked, Let's Encrypt also ran on a single system. As did the Diablo 2 server (I love reading about these anecdotes.) For every incremental change in HW performance, there is an order-of-magnitude regression in SW performance.
- bawolff 1y agoServers can also serve small text files out of memory incredibly fast.
- sgarland 1y agoIf nothing else, handling interrupts from the NIC to pull packets out of its receive buffer, though that should be usually be isolated to a couple of cores. Also, re: I/O, the CPU usually also has to handle interrupts there, as well as whatever the application might be doing either that I/O.
- dang 1y ago> Arc was implemented on top of Racket Originally on MzScheme, then later PLT Scheme. It was ported to Racket by the great kogir, IIRC.
- kragen 1y agoAren't MzScheme, PLT Scheme, and Racket the same thing?
- dang 1y agoYes, but for me each name denotes the thing as it was when it was called that. (This conversation has turned unexpectedly ontological!)
- altairprime 1y agoWelcome to HN :)
- froh 1y agothis made me crack, you _do_ know who you welcomed to HN, do you? and I saw the smiley but I have to know if it was intentional or accidental:-)
- altairprime 1y agoYes :D
- kragen 1y agoI always wonder whether it's really the same conversation anymore when that happens.
- rurban 1y agoThey were all based on MzScheme, yes. But nowadays Racket runs on the fastest scheme, chez. HN runs now on SBCL, which is much faster and also multi-threaded.
- nickpeterson 1y agoRandom question, how big is hacker news? It’s plain text so I’d imagine it’s reasonably compact?
- brudgers 1y ago<back of napkin> Based on the current id, about 45,000,000 items. Assuming 1KB per item, about 45GB. So with code and OS, probably it would fit on a $10 thumb drive without compression. </back of napkin> If I am within a couple of orders of magnitude, it is hard for me to see a benefit from compression.
- johnisgood 1y ago> Much of the HN codebase consists of anti-abuse measures that would stop working if people knew about them. Unfortunately. separating out the secret parts would by now be a lot of work. The time to do it will be if and when we eventually release the alternative Arc implementations we’ve been working on. Is this a case where security through obscurity is good, or bad? Legit question. I am curious to read the responses it may prompt. I found this though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27457350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27457350 > There are a lot of anti-abuse features, for example, that need to stay secret (yes we know, 'security by obscurity' etc., but nobody knows how to secure an internet forum from abuse, so we do what we know how to do). It would be a lot of work to disentangle those features from the backbone of the code. The question still stands for curiosity!
- electroly 1y agoAbuse of this sort isn't a security issue in the network sense. i.e. the security of Hacker News is not imperiled by people creating spam accounts, but nonetheless we want to stop that.
- dang 1y agoThe OP got everything right except that bit. This is a reason for not open-sourcing HN (the application), but it doesn't relate to open-sourcing Clarc (the language implementation). We could do that without revealing any anti-abuse stuff. More at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44099560 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44099560.
- kayodelycaon 1y agoObscurity is extremely good at filtering out low to medium skilled griefers. It won’t stop anyone who is highly motivated, but it will slow them down significantly. Hacker News is small enough that obscurity would give moderators enough time to detect bad actors and update rules if necessary.
- johnisgood 1y agoIs HN really that small, considering "HN hug of death"? If it really is small, then hey, we may have already talked! :)
- Fraterkes 1y agoLook, I like the way HN looks but there aren't many sites that essentially look like bare html but still struggle with displaying more than 300 comments.
- mdp2021 1y agoWhat do you mean? With the current internals, a 300 posts HN page would weigh ~500kb; different ones will hardly be more compact. Where is the «struggle»?
- busymom0 1y agoNot sure about 300 comments but a post with 5300 comments takes about 10 seconds to load: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43208973 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43208973 In March this year, HN changed pagination behavior. Previously, one needed to paginate through pages to read more than X comments. Around March, they now serve all comments at once. A post having over a thousand comments is extremely rare so not a big deal.
- tanjtanjtanj 1y agoThat page took well under 2 seconds to load on both desktop and mobile for me (wall clock).
- busymom0 1y agoFor me it consistently takes 8-10 seconds. Back in March, I reported it to dang too.
- krapp 1y agoHN has been known to fail in the past with heavy or high velocity threads to the point that dang has asked people to log off en masse to reduce server load. That shouldn't happen for a simple text forum.
- gtirloni 1y agoI assume it's worth it to keep it in Arc and not rewrite in something more widely available, is that so?
- Xeoncross 1y agoThe article makes it sounds like Dang also helps with the codebase. There must be others, but Dang is the one I've seen for years at this point. I've beeing a part of many online communities as both a member and moderator. However, Hackernews is the community that I've been apart of for the longest and the one that brings me the most joy. Dang, is there anything random people like me can do for you? Can I at least buy you a coffee or something?
- someperson 1y agoKeep in mind Hacker News (formerly Startup News) is effectively a loss-leading advertising arm of Y Combinator, which at this point is one of the most successful investment firms in the world. And HN founder and original author Paul Graham is (at least on paper) billionaire, not merely the decamillionare he used to be. Though it's still good for it to be a self-funding project even if that means accepting donations.
- ksec 1y ago> Initially called Startup News or occasionally News.YC., it became known by its current name on August 14, 2007.[4] Oh I have been on HN since 2008 and didn't know that.
- dang 1y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html
- bwilliams18 1y agoIs there a canonical definition of hacker as described in this post and (at it's best) this community? I always feel strong gravitation to this term, but also feel nervous about embracing it because of it's criminal connotations in common parlance.
- 1y ago
- kosolam 1y agoIs this open source software that I can run my own hacker news as well?
- krapp 1y agohttp://arclanguage.org/ http://arclanguage.org/
- lamer3 1y ago[flagged]
- Tistel 1y agoIs it still Paul Graham/Robert Morris working on it? Skimmed the article but did not see a ref. need to check out what it adds to CL: http://arclanguage.org/ http://arclanguage.org/
- dang 1y agoAlas, they moved on long ago.
- monkeyelite 1y agoIs the bel project still alive?
- kristianp 1y agoJust a note on the grammar of this: "HN runs on top of SBCL since a few months". "since a few months" sounds wrong, it isn't idiomatic english. Consider replacing it with: "HN has been running on top of SBCL for a few months now."
- chmod775 1y agoIt sounds wrong because "since" is generally combined with a point in time, but "a few months" is a duration, not a date. Also the first paragraph switches tense forms, which makes it stand out even more. Rewriting it to "since a few months ago" seems to be the easiest way to fix this, though my favorite way to express the the same thing is "as of a few months ago". It should be noted that the author, like most people you're likely to interact with in this bubble, is not a native speaker of English. What matters is getting the message across - which they did. You'll end up not being very productive if you spend your time pointing all of these little slips out.
- kmstout 1y agoI have routinely noticed this sort of construction since a few years [1]. Does it correspond to standard usage in other languages? If so, which ones? --- [1] See what I did there? Eh? Eh?
- chmod775 1y agoIn German you might say "seit drei Monaten", translating word-for-word to "since three months", but meaning "for three months now". The author in this case is French, where saying "depuis trois mois" is perfectly fine (as far as I know). English, where that construction sounds weird and at least needs some helpers around it to exist, is a bit of an odd one out. It is kind of odd that we can say "for three months" to say that something took three months, but we can't say "since three months" to refer to something that has been going on as of three months ago.
- christophilus 1y ago
- cadamsdotcom 1y agoRewrites are definitely not “always a bad idea” as Joel Spolsky once said. What they are is highly situational. HN has a bunch of factors that make it amenable to a rewrite. It has gigantic scale, not a ton of complexity at a business level, and what it “is” is pretty slow moving at this point. That means it’s not a great example to justify a rewrite at work :) that said the success does prove rewrites are possible. Bravo on shipping!
- eurleif 1y agoBut they didn't rewrite HN; they created a different implementation of the language it's written in.
- quantadev 1y agoHacker News has so little capability, almost any experienced developer using a modern AI Coding Agent could replicate the entire thing in a weekend, and perhaps in a single day. I'm not saying it's bad, or criticizing anyone. I mean it does what it does, and it works, and people like it. But no one should care what technology they're using because there's just nothing impressive going on from a technical perspective.
- d3ckard 1y agoGood software tends to resemble an iceberg - what you see is just a small bit of what's actually in there. I wouldn't be so hasty in assumptions here.
- quantadev 1y agoI should've been more clear that my claim was only about the ability to post messages, have them stored in a database, and then have a tree-view that displays and edits the posts. That's 99% of what users do right? That entire functionality could be done by an AI Agent nowadays in about 10 minutes.
- tauoverpi 1y agoThe question would be how many security exploits and other edge cases would be included in that.
- quantadev 1y agoDoesn't matter. You could replicate the basic functionality of Hacker News in a single Coding Agent Prompt. Sorry, I'm not wrong. I've been writing web apps since 1998. Just today I implemented a similar tree view, with ability to create, edit, rename, move files and folders in a TypeScript react web app, and my app that I wrote today is a vastly more sophisticated GUI than Hacker News. lol.
- 1y ago
- ggm 1y agoNot saying "security by obscurity never works" but am saying it's a shame the defensive wall of anti-spam/abuse depends on some secrecy, because it's a low wall. If the concern with knowing the secret sauce is how easy it would be to defeat, then its a low wall. But, as long as it stays secret, it's doing it's job. I'm not an infosec professional, or a competent LISP coder, I'm not in a position to say what's better. This is just what pros in the field say to me. (It's mentioned in the article)
- hyperman1 1y agoIf dang is listening: I'd like your comments on how to pull this off. Replacing the engine of a live site without some old forgotten part breaking is hard to accomplish. I rarely see this kind of thing happen without a week of frantic bug fixing and users grumbling.
- alexpham14 1y agoThe success of Hacker News doesn’t come from flashy features, but from a community that consistently produces high-quality content. That said, I can’t help but wonder if there are any updates to the UI/UX in the works, LOL.
- DonHopkins 1y agoYou should have rewritten it in sh and called Sharc, or BASIC and called it BArc, or PHP and called it PHarc, or ML and called it MLarcy. Or license it under GPL-3 and call it Gnarc!
- lynx97 1y agoRegarding the "worse is better" discussion: At least its definitely better accessibility-wise. HN is about the last well-known site that allows interacting with it, including writing comments, with plain old Lynx. I am well aware that most web devs do not care anymore these days, and they have their reasons for sure. However, its still nice to see sites that refuse to go for SPA. It makes them so much more useable for people like me (blind). A big THANK YOU to the site maintainers, its one of the last corners of the net where interesting stuff happens which is still accessible.
- jmathai 1y agoAccessible UX results in good UX. I use a modern browser and appreciate how reliably Hacker News works. It's a great example of less is more when it comes to UX.
- pona-a 1y agoWell, I think proper font scaling would do wonders for making HN more accessible. As things stand, I have to zoom to 120% to read the text. I recall WebKit making a special case in its font rendering logic just for HN.
- lynx97 1y agoI can't speak to the font sizing. If I could change anything, I'd replace the table design with a plain ordered-list (ol). Simply because it is the proper semantic tag, and reading the table is unnecessarily verbose with modern browsers and a screen reader. Somehow ironically, Lynx fails to render the table as a table, so the main page is still nicely readable with it.
- adr1an 1y agoI can recommend the browser extension "modern for hacker news". Some features are premium (no subscription though) but only the defaults gives SO MUCH ux like font size, spacing between lines, text width. Another great accesibility feat is the APIs for this web. I use upvoterate listing from quality news as front page. To sum it up, opening the tab previews under Zen Browser made my experience feel like the coolest SPA, haha.
- udev4096 1y agoI cannot believe how people are praising a centralized, heavily censored links site. Take a look at HN's privacy policy, they sure do make money from monetizing every single thing you say and also fingerprint you all the time. We should have a decentralized link sharing site
- krapp 1y agoLemmy or Mastodon, depending on how you want to do it.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jaza 1y agoCentralised and heavily censored, yes, but AFAICT the censoring by-and-large respects free speech and diversity of opinion, while effectively stopping spam / abuse, and thus maintaining the high quality of content that keeps us all coming back. And surely HN is way less monetised (and therefore way more trustworthy) than virtually every other links site / every social media platform out there?
- krapp 1y agoDepends on what you consider "monetization." Are there ads? Not explicitly, but YC startups do advertise themselves in threads here, and aspiring entrepreneurs do use visibility on HN (both to users and YC) as part of their strategy. If you think this is just a forum of nerds engaging in organic conversation and intellectual diversion, you'd be mistaken. Your attention is currency here as much as anywhere.
- youareabitch 1y ago[flagged]
- youareabitch 1y ago[flagged]
- miki123211 1y agoAre there any other popular (>10k DAUs) sites that still use an esoteric, homegrown tech stack? If you have worked on them, what do you think, is it a legacy mess nobody wants to touch, or a pleasure to work with? PG made an assertion once that websites (in contrast to desktop software) are free to use any stack of their choosing, as long as it can take in HTTP requests and output JSON or HTML. This intuitively seems to be true, especially so with how powerful modern machines can get, but it seems like it hasn't increased stack diversity much. The advantages of boring technology and "resume-driven development" seem to outweigh whatever gains you may get from using something custom.
- reaperducer 1y agoAre there any other popular (>10k DAUs) sites that still use an esoteric, homegrown tech stack? If you have worked on them, what do you think, is it a legacy mess nobody wants to touch, or a pleasure to work with? I do. It's absolutely lovely. We can make decisions based on what's best for the user, and not based on what the latest fad is. In the time I've been in charge of this company's web sites, we've reduced cost drastically, improved reliability, and cut time to production in half. Hiring can be problematic, because there's a lot of people out there who can't think through problems; or only know how to do x in one tool, and are unwilling/unable to learn something else. The big keys are: We're not a tech company, so management doesn't care what we do, as long as it gets done. We build a lot of our own tools, so they fit perfectly into our workflow, which makes them and us more efficient. And we don't have to have 99.999999% uptime for no reason. Management is OK if the web sites are slow or unavailable for a few minutes each week, as long as they're back to normal in less time than it takes for someone to call and complain. And our clients love to call and complain.
- -__---____-ZXyw 1y agoLisp supremacy approaches! I'm reminded of definitively the most extreme writing on programming I've ever read, here https://llthw.common-lisp.dev/introduction.html https://llthw.common-lisp.dev/introduction.html, including but in no way limited to claims such as: > The mind is capable of unconsciously understanding the structure of the computer through the Lisp language, and as such, is able to interface with the computer as if it was an extension to its own nervous system. This is Lisp Consciousness, where programmer and computer are one and the same; they drink of each other, and drink deep; and at least as long as the Lisp Hacker is there in the flow, riding the current of pure creativity and genius with their trusty companions Emacs and SLIME, neither programmer nor computer know where one ends and the other begins. In a manner of speaking, Lispers already know machine intelligence---and it is beautiful. Has any other language produced such thoughts in the minds of human beings? Maybe yes, but I don't know of one. Maybe Forth, or Haskell, or Prolog, but I haven't found similar writing. Please do share.
- mark_l_watson 1y agoI agree, and it gets even better: while low level ML support in Common Lisp does not match Python libraries, now it often does not matter because LLMs are not embedded in applications, then are often accessed via a HTTP request.
- mannyv 1y ago68k assembly is like that.
- ChoGGi 1y agoDang! Thanks dang!
- mandeepj 1y ago> Hacker News now runs on top of Common Lisp > there’s now an Arc-to-JS called Lilt, and an Arc-to-Common Lisp called Clarc. > But Clarc’s code isn’t released, although it could be done: > Releasing the new HN code base however wouldn’t work: I'm not sure if I follow all that. If the Clarc is not released, then how does HN run on it?
- diggan 1y ago> I'm not sure if I follow all that. If the Clarc is not released, then how does HN run on it? The same person who writes Clarc also deploys HN (assumption, but seems dang does can do both :) ), so using unreleased software is just a matter of navigating to the right local directory.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- netdevphoenix 1y agoThat's great, but I think they should improve the responsiveness. It's still a bit wonky. You can see it on the top right corner if you narrow the screen and then widen it
- diggan 1y agoI'm sure if you came up with a tiny diff of the CSS that would improve the user experience without degrading anything else, and send it to hn@ycombinator.com, they can get it deployed :)
- netdevphoenix 1y agoSure, if they paid for diffs. I don't think they do. Dev time is not free :)
- everybodyknows 1y ago> anti-abuse measures that would stop working if people knew about them A heavy lesson in that for other implementors of discussion-forum cum blog-comment systems.
- cmod 1y agoHacker News is the url I use to test most fussy connections because it's so light, and will load under even the slightest trickle of data. When I was doing research in Ghana, it was the only site I could get to reliably load for news in the field, and thus spent a month reading only HN (good luck getting the _New York Times_ to load without a gigabit connection). Appreciate how it stays — and has stayed — svelte and fast throughout the years.
- mbac32768 1y agocould probably have saved themselves a lot of trouble and asked Claude to rewrite it in C++
- ryanbrick05 1y ago[dead]