hackernews VS anarki

this might help a little: https://github.com/wting/hackernews

I think it's a ratio of votes to time. I think as little as 4 votes can get something on the homepage if they come in fairly quickly.

The source code for hn is available if you want to go and look up the specifics. I'm not sure if this is the most up-to-date mirror, but the site doesn't change that often: https://github.com/wting/hackernews

Might not count as modern, but the original Reddit and HackerNews codebases:

- https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit1.0

- https://github.com/wting/hackernews (actually news.arc, based on old hn)

There's also this https://github.com/wting/hackernews -- which is a version of the source code to the site from sometime in the past.

"Otherwise" was the operative word in my (slightly sarcastic) example. :)

Avoiding all caps words means you sometimes have to go back and change "FAA" back from "Faa".

HN's software is no longer open source, but at one time, this is how it processed titles on initial submission: https://github.com/wting/hackernews/blob/master/news.arc#L15...

And at any rate, #1 on HN is not the product of any simple rule like "most upvotes per unit time with some decay function applied." There is significant judgment in expressed in the way that stories are ranked. The sourcecode as of 2012 was enough to demonstrate this, but in my understanding yet more judgment has been applied since then.

https://github.com/wting/hackernews/blob/master/news.arc

"ad-hoc filesystem based solution" is the closest of your definitions, I think. Last time I saw/heard, HN was built in Arc, a Lisp dialect, and use(s/d) a variant of this (mirrored) code: https://github.com/wting/hackernews

Check out around this area of the code to see how simple it is. All just plain files. A database, of sorts, but not in the way you might be expecting: https://github.com/wting/hackernews/blob/master/news.arc#L16...

There is a modern maintained variant at https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/tree/master/apps/news as well.

File syncing between machines is pretty much an easily solved problem. I don't know how they do it, but it could be something like https://syncthing.net/ or even some scripting with `rsync`. Heck, a cronned `tar | gzip | scp` might even be enough for an app whose data isn't exactly mission critical.

The old version in arc, mirrored at https://github.com/wting/hackernews/blob/5a3296417d23d1ecc90..., uses the file system as a database.

https://github.com/wting/hackernews/blob/5a3296417d23d1ecc90... shows the monotonically increasing number:

  (def new-item-id ()

It still is a single single-core server, dang references it frequently when there's unusually high traffic [0]. And the language you're referring to is Arc [1]. They do have caching for not-logged-in users, historically done through nginx [2]. From other comments in this thread, it sounds like they just temporarily put Cloudflare in front of that single server to block a DDoS.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38310213

[1] https://arclanguage.github.io/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26473226

Slashdot, reddit, and HN are similar in that the source code was available. For HN, as part of arc under the Artistic license. All 3 abandoned public source code releases.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/slashcode/

https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki

https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit

>Where is the HN source code right now? Free and Open?

Yes and no.

HN itself is running a proprietary fork of Arc Lisp, which you can find here[0]. The Arc maintainters don't take public PRs or feature requests, and HN itself has numerous changes to the codebase which aren't public for business reasons.

There is a public fork of Arc called Anarki[1] which has no direct connection to HN or Arc Lisp, and for which the community and development is... well... anarchic.

And given the general culture here around minimalism and stasis (not wanting to introduce new features for fear of entropy that would negatively affect the signal to noise ratio and push the site towards Eternal September) chances are it's not likely to happen.

But dang's email is at the bottom of the page if you want to ask him.

[0]http://arclanguage.org/

[1]https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki

The original version was open sourced (Perl artistic License) http://arclanguage.org/ There is an active fork in https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki but it's totally independent and the current conde in HN can be (very) different.

My guess is that it's very difficult to keep all the details of the secret sauce hidden. They change the details very often. For example the front page is ordered by points/time^1.6, but the 1.6 changes from time to time without notice (I think it was 1.8 for some time, perhaps it's 1.8 or something else now. Some people have analyzed the front page and got compatible results, but I don't remember the exponent they found and I'm too lazy to try).

You might find something useful here:

https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/tree/master/apps/news

It was published in the public version of 2009 https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/blob/9f2e1dd53b5b66bb4... Look for "contro-factor" (i.e. controversial-factor).

This is old code, and the mods make tweaks here and there without warning, so the details may have changed. (I'm not sure if gravity changed from 1.8 to 1.6 (???).)

I didn't test it personally, but it feels like HN is using something very similar. And there are a few black box analysis of the sorting of the front page that got similar results. Also, minimaxir is the kind of person that is probably running an script to use the HN API to verify the claims.

Absolutely. It's basically the "community version" of Paul Graham's Arc.

Not to mention arc/anarki (hn is/was written in arc - anarki comes with a "news" example app/forum):

https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/tree/HEAD#readme

arc [1] / racket implimentation of demystifycpp might be able to provide something 'usable' at the command line / straight up web browser html file.

[1] : https://arclanguage.github.io/