I would bet on technical reasons. From what I've read HN uses some unusual caching and optimization strategies - part of how the Arc application was optimized after initial development. I have no idea if this is the case here but it seems plausible - there is (outdated) source available[0] so you may be able to take a look for yourself.
[0] Mirrored at https://github.com/wting/hackernews
In Tell HN: Hacker News Profile Leak (Fixed)wting
hackernews
Arc2013–2026
wting / hackernews
hackernews
Hacker News web site source code mirror.
90Distinct people
99Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
656GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Hacker News web site source code mirror.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
- arclanguage/anarki · linked in 4 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 4:01:40 AM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year99 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2013-01-04 06:10:04 UTC to 2026-03-02 19:38:40 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 16 | 0 | 16 |
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 14 | 0 | 14 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 12 | 1 | 11 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 8 | 0 | 8 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 9 | 0 | 9 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 8 | 0 | 8 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 9 | 1 | 8 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 7 | 0 | 7 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 1 | 4 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
Note
Instructions copied from the original download site.
The files from the tarball in step 2 have been copied into this repository.
Original Instructions
Install version 372 of MzScheme. (Don't use the latest version. Versions after 372 made lists immutable.)
Get http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc3.tar and untar it.
Type mzscheme -m -f as.scm and you should get an Arc prompt.
If you ^C an Arc program, you'll get the Scheme REPL. Use (tl) to get back to the Arc REPL.
If you have questions or suggestions, post them on the forum.
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
14 sourcesYou could start from the lobste.rs source, available here: https://github.com/jcs/lobsters
There is a mirror floating around of news.arc[1], the original version of HN from pg, but it's pretty dated and missing tons of the secret sauce.
[1]https://github.com/wting/hackernews
In Show HN: HN Follow – Follow Your Friends on HNTake a look here: https://github.com/wting/hackernews/blob/f221fcb07db5fd23570...
CMD+F karma
In Ask HN: How does the HN karma system work?Thanks
another issue
this - https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki
or
this? - https://github.com/wting/hackernews
In Ask HN: Is the source code for HN freely available?It looks the cookie format is just user={hash}, and looking at an older version of the code it matches that up to data loaded from a file called arc/cooks
https://github.com/wting/hackernews/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=...
In Who am I?At a guess (after 1 min grep), this is the original code (from an old copy of the HN src). afaics, that's the code to render the entire table for all the stories (plus the 'more' link), including the html (note the inline 'tr' tags etc).
https://github.com/wting/hackernews/blob/master/news.arc#L92...
The point is that all the variable you want for rendering "page 2" are right there in scope.
A closure can capture those, so you don't have to do any extra work serialising them, sending them to the browser, validating them on return, etc.
Closures can seem odd the first time you come across them, but they're pretty mainstream these days (perl, python, ruby, C++, C#, golang all have them (some of them for a very long time :-), as well as the more traditionally-functional languages).
There's more info here and it's the sort of topic you'll get
Read the rest
lots of answers from in HN. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closure_%28computer_programming...
Exactly an hour, in fact: https://github.com/wting/hackernews/blob/master/news.arc#L11...
In Bash bug: apply the unofficial patch now (CVE-2014-6277)I understand the problem scenario with ext3/ext4 journalling you're referring to here and below.
However, HN runs on FreeBSD, and my understanding is that the combination of soft-updates + journalling there actually do provide atomic rename, even in the case of catastrophic failure. McKusick talks about it here: http://www.mckusick.com/softdep/suj.pdf
Also, just to anchor the discussion a bit, the HN code does use the "write foo.tmp; mv foo.tmp foo" trick all over the place. (Or at least, the most recent version of news.arc I've seen does.)
https://github.com/wting/hackernews/blob/master/arc.arc#L841
In Tell HN: The site was offline. What changed?No, I honestly know next to nothing about web apps programming. I do know there exists decent-looking support for web apps for Rust, Haskell, and Scheme (Racket, but Racket isn't compiled to a binary), but I don't have the knowledge base to assess how good web programming is in these languages, if it's even good at all. I know this website is written in Arc (a Lisp). https://github.com/wting/hackernews
In My Opinionated Guide To GoIt was open-sourced at least two years ago[0]. I believe it hasn't been since to prevent gaming of the system, but I don't remember where I heard that.
[0] Based on this handy Github repository: https://github.com/wting/hackernews
Original: http://arclanguage.org/install
In An Update on HN CommentsLooks like the same platform, the code is available here: https://github.com/wting/hackernews
In Ask HN: Is there a science news platform like hacker news?Isn't (part of/some version of) hn already open source?:
http://arclanguage.org/install
https://github.com/wting/hackernews
Is the current hn very different from the arclang forum?
In Show HN: Pumpkin – An open-source HN clonehttps://github.com/wting/hackernews
... though obviously the real thing isn't open source, as pg and kogir have made numerous changes they're not releasing and AFAIK they're not taking pull requests on news.ycombinator.com (but they do have a bug tracker @ https://github.com/HackerNews)
Odd that in all this time no one seems to have forked the original code and iterated on it. Deployed it, sure, but not (say) fixed any of the bugs that annoy people about HN, or made it better.
In Show HN: Pumpkin – An open-source HN cloneNot really related but any update on releasing the HN code again?
[the current release is pretty old: https://github.com/wting/hackernews]
In Tell HN: Server Status