That's a fair point, although there's a few caveats (HN uses CloudFlare I think, and replace "database" with "filesystem" and it's still another component to de

That's a fair point, although there's a few caveats (HN uses CloudFlare I think, and replace "database" with "filesystem" and it's still another component to deal with). My counter-argument would be that HN is able to avoid a lot of the complexity due to the nature of what it does. Oftentimes the value in adding a new component is maintainability vs doing it the simple way, which is one of the tradeoffs I was referring to earlier. Imagine scaling Google Analytics.