For what it's worth, I was able to get arc and the HN source up and running in about 20 minutes using instructions I found by googling. I'm not a Lisp hacker, and my only real exposure to anything Lisp was reading The Little Schemer a few years ago...I didn't even do most of the exercises. I was also able to customize it in a few small ways with another hour or so of tinkering (mostly cleaning up style sheets and stripping out inline HTML).
Just saying...I do think Slinkset is probably the right choice for most such concepts.
Or, the reddit source, if you wanted to go big (it's a lot harder to deploy the reddit source, but it's a lot more powerful). It took me about an hour to get it up and running. And customizing it seemed much more intimidating.