[smanek]

pg: I have fair bit of lisp dev experience. If, as a weekend project, I modified the HN src to use postgres and memcache would you consider using it in production? Obviously, I don't expect carte blanche prior agreement, but I wouldn't want to invest the time unless I thought it was plausible the work could actually help.

I would expect it to solve most of your performance problems for the foreseeable future (at the very least, by letting you scale horizontally and move the DB, frontends, and memcaches to separate boxes - plus ending memory leaks/etc by moving most of the data off the MzScheme heap).

The obvious downside is that it would use your (or someone at YC's) time. First to merge the changes I make to http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc3.tar into the production code, then to buy/setup some extra boxes and do the migration. We're probably talking, roughly, a day. It also has the unfortunate side effect of costing HN's src some of its pedagogical value, since it adds external dependencies and loses 'purity'.

Been looking for an excuse to learn arc for a while now ...

[marcusmacinnes]

I suspect there's good reason why HN is still using this old codebase. YC after all is not short of the cash needed for a complete revamp.

The site is very much hacked together, but works... In a lot of ways, this reflects the hacker ethos of getting something up and running quickly at low cost while still producing value.

A revamp might have negative impact too by attracting a wider, more mainstream audience which could possibly dilute the purity of the community here.

[Osmium]

> dilute the purity of the community here

Careful now :) It's not like there's anything stopping HN attracting a wider audience anyway; there's no restriction on who can register. Anyone can come and join in, which (in my opinion) is as it should be.

[marcusmacinnes]

Of course. I'm not suggesting that there should be any limitations on who can join, but as the community moves more mainstream, quality will dilute. As the site is rather un-sexy right now, it seems to attract those who are genuinely interested. Remember what happened to Digg...

[Tsts]

Any1 can come, but if he has a different opinion than PG on politics, "he" gets silent banned.

[veemjeem]

There's also the usual engineer estimation: "Oh, it will probably take a day to rewrite the code. We'll deploy it and it will probably work just fine in production."

Any engineer that has live code has made this mistake before.

[smanek]

Just to clarify, it will definetly take me more than a day to write/profile/test the changes (especially since I'll be learning arc in the process).

My hope is that it will only take a day or so to deploy it, once it's ready.

[JoeCortopassi]

Very generous offer, but I would argue that HN's slow performance is a feature, not a bug. The average drive-by person, that is attracted to sensationalist articles and titles, simply doesn't have the patience for the slow load times of every page. The user that is seeking intelligent conversation, however, is more than willing to have 5+ second wait times if they know that they will be getting valuable content. Couple that with page load times having consistent slow load times, rather than surges of performance, and I wouldn't put past PG to build a delay into page loads to act as a sort of filter. Even if it's unintentional, I would still argue that is still useful in driving out some riff-raff

[xvolter]

I also believe that Hacker News runs on a small stack of services developed by some past companies from Y Combinator.

I would agree that there is also little to no desire to make Hacker News "the news place" - where it supports thousands of posts a second and is extremely popular. In general Hacker News is used (and the hope is to stay that way) by startups and people interested in startups - it's slowly growing out to include more types of people - marketing, companies, blog posts who just want a lot of hits, etc - and not many people want to purposely support that.

[eps]

This probably better belongs to a private email.

[wglb]

The downside of this is that now there are many more moving parts to carry forward.