3 ms·

I’d love to know more about what running a site like HN involves, would be great to get a write up of what it’s like running something like this at this scale (

by andy_ppp 10mo ago

I’d love to know more about what running a site like HN involves, would be great to get a write up of what it’s like running something like this at this scale (and what kind of traffic you guys get)!

alwa 10mo ago
I can’t put my finger on anything within the last decade, but I seem to recall it running in something close to its current form on a single core on a single server for a long time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229522 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229522 Re: traffic, dang said (2022): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33454140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33454140 I took it as a good reminder that the hard part is the human part: that high-overhead features and UI fripperies are nice but not necessary (or sufficient) to keep a community healthy and vibrant over the decades. (And on the subject of the human side, if you didn’t catch Anna Wiener’s 2019 profile, it’s here: https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/the-lonely-work-of-moderating-hacker-news https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th... )
- tempest_ 10mo ago
  The other reality is that as much as this industry is up its ass about scalability you can run a very very busy site on a single machine now a days. A lot of people out here designing their blogs like its 1989.
  - andy_ppp 10mo ago
    This is completely wrong, everyone knows you should rewrite everything in microservices immediately :-D
- ilamont 10mo ago
  From dang's 2022 comment about traffic: The most interesting number is the 1300 submissions because that hasn't grown since 2011 - it just fluctuates. Everything else has been growing more or less linearly for a long time, which is how we like it. I find that surprising, as 2011-2022 covers an exponential rise in SEO spam and "growth hackers" attempting to drive traffic and links. Or was 1,300 the number of non-flagged submissions?
  - dang 10mo ago
    Nope, total submissions. And it's still very much within that same window!

alwa 10mo ago

I can’t put my finger on anything within the last decade, but I seem to recall it running in something close to its current form on a single core on a single server for a long time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229522 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229522 Re: traffic, dang said (2022): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33454140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33454140 I took it as a good reminder that the hard part is the human part: that high-overhead features and UI fripperies are nice but not necessary (or sufficient) to keep a community healthy and vibrant over the decades. (And on the subject of the human side, if you didn’t catch Anna Wiener’s 2019 profile, it’s here: https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/the-lonely-work-of-moderating-hacker-news https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th... )

tempest_ 10mo ago
The other reality is that as much as this industry is up its ass about scalability you can run a very very busy site on a single machine now a days. A lot of people out here designing their blogs like its 1989.
- andy_ppp 10mo ago
  This is completely wrong, everyone knows you should rewrite everything in microservices immediately :-D
ilamont 10mo ago
From dang's 2022 comment about traffic: The most interesting number is the 1300 submissions because that hasn't grown since 2011 - it just fluctuates. Everything else has been growing more or less linearly for a long time, which is how we like it. I find that surprising, as 2011-2022 covers an exponential rise in SEO spam and "growth hackers" attempting to drive traffic and links. Or was 1,300 the number of non-flagged submissions?
- dang 10mo ago
  Nope, total submissions. And it's still very much within that same window!