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Given how little attention Paul Graham seems to give to HN's tech, I very much doubt there is anything sophisticated there. Apparently HN is a single-threaded A
by lobster_johnson 13y ago
Given how little attention Paul Graham seems to give to HN's tech, I very much doubt there is anything sophisticated there. Apparently HN is a single-threaded Arc process with in-memory state [1] and flat files, running on a single server.
It's so low-tech that HN runs a log tailer that bans your IP if it sees a "suspicious" number of requests, the threshold being something like 4-5 reqs within 1-2 seconds. Personally I don't do anything weird (I just browse in Chrome on my Mac and on my iPad), but still I manage to get my IP banned frequently. Instead of fixing the algorithm, Graham added a way to unban your IP [2].
A hypothesis was put forward recently that Graham has intentionally designed HN to be technologically backward to attract serious hackers and repel everyone else. In that light, everything -- the "unknown or expired URL" errors, the impossible-to-hit-without-zooming-on-a-mobile-device up/down arrows, the IP banning, the awful UI, etc. -- makes perfect sense. I am not convinced that it's all intentional, though.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3623268 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3623268
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4761102 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4761102
- philwelch 13y agoHN is the most ruthlessly prioritized software project I've seen. It wouldn't surprise me at all if pg thinks anti-flamewar Bayesian classification is more important than fixing the URL expirations.
- DanBC 13y ago> the impossible-to-hit-without-zooming-on-a-mobile-device up/down arrows, One unfortunate effect of these is that I tend to ignore the single downvotes, and rationalise those away as accidental clicks. Really, I need to train myself out of that. When I get a downvote I should re-read my post to see if I've been clear, and to see if I said what I meant, and if I still mean it.
- lobster_johnson 13y agoI have downvoted by accident only once in my time as a HN user, and it was on an iPad. These days, out of fear of clicking the wrong arrow, and because zooming in and out is a chore, I up/downvote sparingly when I am on a mobile device.
- redler 13y agoMy IP has been banned on occasion because I tend to read HN by opening a bunch of tabs. When my browser inevitably becomes unresponsive and has to be restarted, that rush of a couple of dozen new requests as the tabs all come back online triggers the ban. Makes me think twice when presented with Chrome's "restore the pages you had open" button. It's funny how the stability of modern computers and operating systems has allowed my reading and research habits to evolve toward the representation of state in the form of open browser windows and the groupings of tabs therein.
- mtdewcmu 13y agoIf there is a good reason for the rapidly-expiring links, I'd be interested to know. For me, it's the #1 biggest annoyance.
- claudius 13y ago> Personally I don't do anything weird (I just browse in Chrome on my Mac and on my iPad), but still I manage to get my IP banned frequently Me too, with s/Chrome/Opera/ and such. I avoided it by setting the maximum number of connections to news.ycombinator.com to 1 rather than the usual 128 in Opera, which seems to avoid this problem for me.