Hacker News Reader

Comment by Chirono | Hacker News Reader

  On the backend, Hacker News runs on one core, and Graham calls this a “remarkable feat of scaling.”

Wow, Really? I'd say that is pretty remarkable, yes. Is there anywhere that goes into more detail about this?

View on HN

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229364

There are a few details here. I don't know jack about servers and stuff but this was the only place I knew it was mentioned. From what I gather in the thread it is impressive.

More specifically: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229548 (pasbesoin's comment)

I think it's also notable that HN is written in Arc, a Lisp dialect of pg's own devising. [1] All those "?fnid"s in the URL are pointers to functions.. Some sample code (HN might have morphed quite a bit from it - no idea) linked to in one of the comments referred to by hfsktr is on github. [2]

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_%28programming_language%29

[2]: https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/lib/news.arc

That's actually a remarkable feat of not scaling.

Scaling is surely about handling demand, which HN seems to do a decent enough job of.

It's an impressive feat of scaling by the engineers at Intel et al. :)

Doesn't he have to reset the whole thing every week though? How long would it last if he didn't?

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