4 ms·

Ask HN: What software does YC run on?

• krapp 11y ago
  The language is Arc[0], a lisp dialect co-developed by pg. Hacker News itself appears to be a proprietary fork[1] but the language and original forum implementation are open source. Hacker News doesn't use a database, rather, flat-files and code running in RAM. The site began as a proof-of-concept for Arc but has understandably become something a bit bigger, and as a result people are sometimes shocked and bemused at how anti-modern it appears. There are a couple of other HN clones running what I believe is the same software, like datatau[2] however I don't have any idea about other popular applications of the language, if there are any. Kogir, dang and others can fill you in on juicier details, and feel free to use the email in the contact link below. I feel like this has come up often enough and is an interesting enough subject that it belongs in the FAQ. [0] http://arclanguage.org/ http://arclanguage.org/ [1] AFAIK, the staff doesn't share the various changes they've made to the algorithms publicly because there's apparently real money riding on ranking on the front page for startups and entrepreneurs, and they want to avoid gaming the system. [2] http://www.datatau.com/ http://www.datatau.com/
  • gus_massa 11y ago
    > The site began as a proof-of-concept for Arc but has understandably become something a bit bigger, and as a result people are sometimes shocked and bemused at how anti-modern it appears. Many of these details are explicit design decisions. For example, about flat files (from http://www.paulgraham.com/vwfaq.html http://www.paulgraham.com/vwfaq.html ) > What database did you use? > We didn't use one. We just stored everything in files. The Unix file system is pretty good at not losing your data, especially if you put the files on a Netapp.
    • jcr 11y ago
      Though it is most likely still flat files, storage is no longer Unix FS on NetApp. It seems to currently be FreeBSD ZFS [1] on top of hardware RAID [2] [1] https://twitter.com/HNStatus/status/583694734792597505 https://twitter.com/HNStatus/status/583694734792597505 [2] https://twitter.com/HNStatus/status/583940393433083904 https://twitter.com/HNStatus/status/583940393433083904
      • gus_massa 11y ago
        You are right. The quote was about ViaWeb, the previous startup of pg. He copied a lot of the details of the ViaWeb implementation in Arc.
• infamouscow 11y ago
  Running on FreeBSD with ZFS. [1] [1] https://twitter.com/HNStatus/status/575914887190159360 https://twitter.com/HNStatus/status/575914887190159360
• listp_nil 11y ago
  YC not HN.
• argonaut 11y ago
  Altman is clearly referring to the internal software used to run YC the organization, not just HN. In other words, the internal dashboards, CRM-like software, CRUD apps for organizing events and appointsments, etc. Stuff that other companies would probably just use Google Apps, Salesforce, Atlassian, etc. for (YC might even use some of those). I seriously doubt they are running this stuff on Arc and flat files.
  • listp_nil 11y ago
    Exactly. Wanted to know about the backend details of YC not HN.