[bananas]

cp/tar/rsync/git/svn to name a few.

HN is apparently flat file based.

I actually have a 100% static site deployed in production. It is served off nginx, built with make, shell and sed (does some include processing and index generation) and is deployed with rsync from make and uses git for version control.

[chc]

The design of news.arc is notoriously quirky. Given the fact that paging is entirely based on continuations, I don't think "flat-file-based" covers it.

[bananas]

That explains a lot. I get the principle of why this might be done but boy is it ugly. You'd have to maintain state between pages. State is bad. Which probably explains all those link expired errors...