Afaict, HN is still running on a rusty potato. The software's written well, so it doesn't need to run on more than that. (What's going to happen to it? Someone links to it from HN?)
The potato with multiple eyes works to serve one of the more important and trafficked properties on the Internet.
I like HN, but it's really only important within a very niche subset of the Internet, and it also doesn't have much traffic. There's like a single post submitted every two minutes. That's not much.
Nonetheless, i suspect that HN probably is quite efficient, just based on what I know about dang. Even so, the parent claim was that it was popular and important, not that it was efficient
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/s2dvr4/the_...