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Comment by WoodenChair | Hacker News Reader

Whatever you think of the site itself, this is prime HN content. A kid in high school starts a site that scales to 1,000,000 registered users while working on it during nights and weekends in college. If the founder is on here, what tech stack did you use and how long had you been programming before you built it?

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He uses "vanilla PHP/HTML/MySQL":

https://x.com/AnTheMaker/status/1530851239310802947

I call CSS, HTML, Apache, MySQL and PHP the CHAMP stack for a reason. ;)

So the same stack as 20+ years ago… good job, kid.

vDOM bros hate this one simple trick.

The web stack “they” don’t want you to know about

Love this comment

But does he run it on Linux?

Almost certainly

Edit: I said this because he's using PHP, MySQL, and I assumed Apache. But now I see in another comment that he's using ColdFusion, and indeed the server returns an X-Powered-By ColdFusion header. So now I'm confused. PHP on ColdFusion? Or maybe he’s just having the server return a bogus ColdFusion header as a nod to MySpace?

It's pretty easy to check if a page is a PHP page: just add a .php suffix, it'll work most of the time depending on where the files are placed in the web directory (also technically depending on how the site implements URL rewrite rules):

* https://spacehey.com/index.php

* https://spacehey.com/browse.php

* https://spacehey.com/reset.php

Here you can see that /help/ is a directory on the filesystem, as it appends a slash at the end:

* https://spacehey.com/help -> goes to https://spacehey.com/help/

and can also be confirmed by trying index.php at that path:

* https://spacehey.com/help/index.php

That’s a fancy fingerprint you’ve got there

An important question is what percent of those accounts are bots?

Was launched on HN 3yrs ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25245740

(not the founder!) Looks like it's built on ColdFusion

Wait, that still exists / still gets used for new projects today? Wow, I'm feeling teleported back to the 2000s.

We have several legacy products still running on CF, all running rock solid, but also all ported to Lucee these days. I still like CF but I'm an old fogey that started with it in the late 90's Allaire days. I often wonder if it had been open source from its inception if it would have grown faster than PHP. It really was a 'swiss army knife' of web development. It's still around here and there but mostly in larger corps that don't blink at Adobe's crazy licensing fees. Most everyone else in the communities I talk to has jumped to Lucee.

Peep this, I stumbled on it randomly last week and also was surprised that it still seems to be around and kicking. It’s basically a Rails for cold fusion lol.

https://www.coldbox.org/

"Well actually" a relevant discussion hit the front page yesterday:

Lucee: A light-weight dynamic CFML scripting language for the JVM - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41409434 - Aug 2024 (37 comments)

And it’s using Silk icons.

I’m working with it every day. It’s pretty capable even today. Server side rendering is in!

That’s strong commitment to sticking with the original tech stack if it’s not just reskinned the error pages

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