[moduspol]

To me the comparison just isn't there. The user experience here could be identical to how it was in the '90s. It's certainly something to marvel at to some extent, but a lot of us could get a pretty high level of elegance in our backend if our user experience had no reason to change for 10+ years.

[ahartmetz]

The user experience is very simple and that's a good thing, too. I much prefer HN's UX over Reddit's, which is painfully slow on mobile and noticeably slower on desktop browsers.

[sillysaurus3]

To see how quickly HN changed in the old days, skim the feature requests thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363

Some feature requests were a matter of days, like user profiles: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=481

A brief essay on some HN design decisions: https://pastebin.com/bSW5dfRQ (from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8424502)

I think the arc codebase is worth studying and understanding, primarily so that you can extend its simplicity into your own projects. The reason HN was such a success is because it handles so many cases in the same way: Stories, comments, and polls are all the same thing: items. If you want to add a new thing, you just create a new item and add whatever fields you want.

These rapid prototyping techniques have downsides, but the cure is to keep in mind what you can't do. (For example, you can't rename item keys without breaking existing items, so be sure to choose good names.)

Like emacs, HN's design is borne out of simplicity and generality. It's what you get when you write the next most important feature as quickly as possible, then cut as much code as possible, every day. Both halves are equally important.

It's fine to say that our modern applications are so much more complicated that the old lessons don't apply. And in extreme cases, that may be true. I don't think SpaceX has the luxury of rapid prototyping their software.

But the typical app is CRUD. For those, data processing flexibility is perhaps the most important factor in whether you can write new features quickly. And since code is data, a lisp master can write systems with a shocking number of features in shockingly few lines of code. (See Jak'n'dexter: https://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/03/12/making-crash-ba...)

[outworlder]

> I think the arc codebase is worth studying and understanding

Are you talking about the source code for ARC, or for Hacker News?

It would be interesting to see how ARC is being employed on such a high profile site. I expect that some algorithms won't be freely available so as not enable people to game the site, but the rest would be interesting to see.

I could find any source for Hacker News though.

> And since code is data, a lisp master can write systems with a shocking number of features in shockingly few lines of code

You don't even have to be a master. So much bikeshedding has been spent over the decades. We are still going back and forth on data interchange formats...

[e12e]

> I could find any source for Hacker News though.

Current hn code (as in the actual code that delivers this comment) isn't open AFAIK (partly because of the shadow banning, filtering etc code.

But there's a full "news" site in Arc source - old and more maintained/evolved:

https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/blob/master/lib/news.a...

http://arclanguage.org/install

[sillysaurus3]

Whoops, that's Anarki, not Arc.

pg's and rtm's original arc3.1 is on the "official" branch: https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/tree/official

news.arc is the old HN source code. You can run it by following the steps in how-to-run-news.

(Run it with "mzscheme -f as.scm" though, not mzscheme.)

[marcosdumay]

Most sites have very little need to change once they get a correct target population fit.

That they keep changing (many times against express complaints of their users) is not reason for excusing them a bad experience.