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hackernews
Arc2013–2026
wting / hackernews

hackernews

Hacker News web site source code mirror.

Web Development
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
90Distinct people
99Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
656GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

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

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.

0510152013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 16 mentions; 0 submissions, 16 comments20132014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 14 mentions; 0 submissions, 14 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 12 mentions; 1 submissions, 11 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 0 submissions, 8 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 9 mentions; 0 submissions, 9 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 0 submissions, 8 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20192020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 9 mentions; 1 submissions, 8 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 0 submissions, 7 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 1 submissions, 4 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* 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
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC16016
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC14014
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC12111
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC808
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC909
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC808
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC918
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC707
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC514
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

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 GitHub

What Hacker News says

12 sources
e12e·Sep 30, 2015
That's not the code that currently runs hn - AFAIK it's the code that ran hn at some distant point in the past. I'm not quite sure what's the best current path for those that want to run their own hn, on (something similar to) arc probably anarki?: https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki Possibly arc-nu?: https://github.com/arclanguage/arc-nu At least it appears arc3.1 runs under racket (not sure how long that's been the case, but presumably for a while): $ racket -v Welcome to Racket v6.1. $ wget http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc3.1.tar $ tar xf arc3.1.tar $ cd arc3.1/ $ echo admin > arc/admins # WARNING: running random code from the Internet # downloaded over an insecure link is not a good idea! # But a checkout from https://github.com/wting/hackernews.git # *failed* to run under racket... $ racket -f as.scm Use (qui
Read the rest
t) to quit, (tl) to return here after an interrupt. arc> (load "news.arc") nil arc> (nsv) rm: cannot remove ‘arc/news/story/*.tmp’: No such file or directory load items: ranking stories. ready to serve port 8080 I don't know if https://github.com/wting/hackernews.git is a reflection of the updated hn source - I don't think it is. For one thing, if we look at: http://arclanguage.org/item?id=19174 "Ask Arc: How to add a toplabels in news.arc?" > On Hacker News, the ask and show pages are implemented just like the > front page, but they filter the item list based on title or whether or > not there's a link. > > And yes, that means they won't show items not already loaded into RAM ;) (defop ask ((p page)) (pagepage ranked-stories* p [and (askpage-filter _) _] "ask" "Ask")) > The magic is in askpage-filter: (def askpage-filter (s) (and (astory s) (blank s!url) (~begins (downcase s!title) "show hn"))) There's no -filter, in the github repo: https://github.com/wting/hackernews/search?utf8=&q=-filter&t...
In Two HN Announcements
i336_·Aug 2, 2015Submission

Ask HN: Why and how is Hacker News so fast?

I'm currently using an artificially-shaped 256k Internet connection (it resets in a couple days), and over the past few weeks browsing the web, I've very consistently found HN to be one of the fastest loading sites I've come across. I understand that HN is built on top of Arc (http://arclanguage.org), a Lisp variant, and that the code (https://github.com/wting/hackernews/blob/master/news.arc) uses flat files to store post and vote data. This is generally speaking quite an unusual/unexpected architecture for a site presumed to serve a consistently moderate load, but HN manages to do so remarkably well, presumably because the site itself is so incredibly lightweight. I don't think the minimal HTML is the only factor though, although it probably counts for the majority. I'm interested to understand as much as possible/practicable/relevant ab
Read the rest
out the server(s') configuration, uplink bandwidth, other tunables, etc, so I can get an idea of what makes HN so exceptionally responsive and "a cut above 99% of everything else". Does CloudFlare really make that much of a difference? :P I know there's some "secret sauce" in there somewhere, because virtually-verbatim clones of HN such as http://firespotting.com/ seem almost as fast... but just not as instantaneous as HN. (PS: On the occasions I get hit by it, my ISP's shaping config seems quite involved/nuanced, and I actually want to profile it because it's so catalyzing and would be very useful to apply to my own projects for "worst-case" testing. For the interested, the details I have thus far can be found here: http://serverfault.com/questions/709529/how-can-i-profile-my-isps-bandwidth-shapin…)
98 points · Open discussion
e12e·Jun 21, 2015
> Should anyone have insights/opinions on why Racket/Scheme aren't more used, please feel free to share them with us! Well, I'm not sure what happened to Arc, but I thought that was based off of plt-scheme/racket -- but never ported to recent releases. Which is a shame because racket has certainly improved a lot (possibly not in ways that matter for Arc). Does anyone know why/what the status is there? Additionally, while some(?) older(?) versions of hn is open source[1], being based off a dead(?) dialect of an outdated(?) scheme didn't really help. Other than that, running a really popular niche web site/forum in production should make Arc interesting, which in turn should make racket interesting. But that apparently didn't happen. Anyone know what hn currently runs (the stack - is it essentially an updated version of[1] -- or something e
Read the rest
ntirely different)? Other than that recent example of not becoming popular, I think that the focus on education has lead a lot of people to miss how good racket actually is, out of the box. It does seem to me to have some of the same challenges as other lisps when it comes to deployment -- it's not all that easy to see how to easily tag something for release, run it through CI and deploy it with some predictable success. Not really any technical limitation, more that it's just not obvious. And wasn't something that was highlighted by racket before, at least. [1] https://github.com/wting/hackernews
In Racket v6.2
malisper·Mar 17, 2015
Hacker News is actually written in a similar way[0]. Here is the code to generate the lists page[1] (the code is a bit outdated): (newsop lists () (longpage user (msec) nil "lists" "Lists" "lists" (sptab (row (link "best") "Highest voted recent links.") (row (link "active") "Most active current discussions.") (row (link "bestcomments") "Highest voted recent comments.") (row (link "noobs") "Submissions from new accounts.") (when (admin user) (map row:link '(optimes topips flagged killed badguys badlogins goodlogins))) (hook 'listspage user)))) [0] https://github.com/wting/hackernews/blob/master/news.arc [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/lists
In HTML as a programming language – unifying HTML with Erlang

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