nix-book VS anarki

This seems more approachable than NixOS/Guix, which I see as state or the art for declarative hosts.

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/documentation-team-flattening-... aims to flatten the learning curve for NixOS.

We're onto the pedagogy thing. Check out the Nix book efforts: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/documentation-team-flattening-....

Regarding the language and "configurations" specifically, you might like what we do with Nickel: https://github.com/tweag/nickel. Research project showing a potential future for Nix.

Wouldn't say there's a steep learning curve for the language itself, it's pretty easy to get a grasp around it imo. Here's a helpful page I used to quickly get familiar with the language: https://github.com/tazjin/nix-1p

What's rather messy about Nix is nixpkgs with its helper functions all over the place alongside pretty shallow / non-existent documentation (which is unrelated to the language). Thankfully they've started to work on that recently: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/documentation-team-flattening-...

yess https://github.com/NixOS/nix-book

there are efforts to better document the whole ecosystem (https://github.com/NixOS/nix-book)

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