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I used to be a heavy Flickr user and I remember clicking around one day and thinking, "I can visualize the sql calls being made to generate these pages". That didn't feel too great.

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No idea what you're talking about. I can visualize the SQL calls being made to render this HN comment thread. So what?

I don't think this website uses SQL at all. :-)

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-Hacker-News-technology-sta...

is there a reason or benefit to do that?

File system storage is much easier to reason about if you can't lean on a library, you can simply use the underlying OS. HN was built with a homegrown Lisp called Arc, and so can't rely on a vast community to provide a proper ORM.

Community support is why I write my personal projects with Ruby and not something like Arc. I don't want to have to reinvent everything just to get something basic done.

That means the site is very predictable, what's not great about that?

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