Paul Graham Knows How To Scale

I wouldn't do an attack on Paul that directly (I like his essays), but I agree about this site and the Google snafu.

The 'more' button is just lame (and annoying, intentional or not) and that Google thing was quite weird; what technical person tries blocks Google search engines via ips? But one? Because it overloads their site? It's quite insane if you think about it. It also makes no sense in this 'big scale' world.

I would love a contest for bigmouths who think they can do better than Paul to make a HN clone which scales and have the functionalities needed without 'weird bugs'. Version that handles all HN traffic first without problems for long periods of time wins. Next stop, Reddit :) I know on both sites there are plenty of people (Disclaimer: I am one of these persons) who think they can do better than both, so let's make that interesting so we can have some fun.

I want to point out a few things:

1) How important is Hacker News towards YC's bottom line?

2) How much is PG's time worth?

3) How much time would it take to fix YC's software so it will scale properly?

My guess is that #1 is moderate, #2 is high, and #3 is even higher. If that's the case, then of course he's going to go with a quick fix.

I almost feel like the HN community would like to be unlisted on Google. It adds to the exclusivity and elitism the site seems to breed.