That's not really true - only in the case where the changes are ambiguous.
I've worked on very hairy Git repos and haven't really felt blocked, even when some crazy merge conflicts happened.
I was surprised that the post numbers appear to be sequential, and that there would be ~30M. Over 15 years of HN, that's ~5K posts/day, and about 200 new posts/hour. Things accrue. I'd estimate that HN is well north of 300K readers/day ... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9219581
edit - it looks like each comment has its own item id. So posts are both new items and comments. That makes more sense to me in terms of scale.
About 4 years for the next 10M from there to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20000000
Approx. 2.5 years for the 10M after that to the current total number of posts and comments we have today.
That's pretty interesting to me.
I wonder if growth will continue, and for how long HN will be able to sustain its excellent signal to noise ratio.
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11111111
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12345678