Hacker News Reader

Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

He was playing with Lisp before he was wealthy and also while becoming wealthy. HN's software, which runs on Arc, used to run YC too. It was all one codebase. Only after pg retired did YC move the business parts of the software out of Lisp, and it got a lot bigger and more complicated in the process—as any Lisper would expect.

View on HN

At first it was not just all one codebase, but all one thread. If HN was busy, all our internal software would run a little slower.

have you thought about publishing the full source from then? The HN source was dense but very educational, and it would be really interesting to see internal tools written in arc.

You wouldn't learn much more from reading it, because (to an almost comical extent in retrospect) the internal code was just like HN. In fact, not just like; it was mostly the same code.

Interesting, am I reading this the right way that the larger YC organization's codebase is an outgrowth of the message board tech? You guys post updates on investments/ideas for what startups should be doing just like news links are shared on HN, but actually on HN/not visible to other normal-HN users?

That was once true, but it's all been rewritten.

Bigger and more complicated and handled many more users.

I was in the room when the decision was made, and it wasn't about more users.

That's the kind of thing people say because they assume it must be so. If you do that about unconventional things, which this software was/is, you'll simply reproduce the conventional view.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com