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by mcassagnes 4011 days ago
Do you have any source for this? I'd love to know more about how they re rank items incrementally.

Do they actually update every single row in the database every 5 minutes? It seems too slow.

2 comments

Source: dang is one of the employees of Y Combinator who help run HN.

Dang--might be good to have some way to indicate that so new folks understand your special role in the community here

HN doesn't use a database. There are no rows. Just one process on one server with everything in memory. Data is lazy loaded from flat files on-demand.
I assumed that in memory they had something structurally resembling a relational database but they might not. It would never even occur to me to not use a database for something like this.
Thank you. I did not expect that!