hackernews

HN is written in Arc, a Lisp/Scheme variant. HN source (news.arc) is actually distributed with the language: https://github.com/wting/hackernews/blob/master/news.arc Lisps tend to blur the distinction between application code, library code, and framework code somewhat, at least with well-designed applications.

HN is basically an instance of the arclanguage's example app, 'news.arc'. See: https://github.com/wting/hackernews

I think it is. Googling got me this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1390685 https://github.com/wting/hackernews

Have you seen this? https://github.com/wting/hackernews

A quick glance at https://github.com/wting/hackernews/blob/5a3296417d23d1ecc90... indicates that publications are delayed by this many minutes before being publicly visible. Thought the code in the repo is 4 years old and could be outdated and I really just spent 2 minutes looking at it, including the googling for the code.

...the "destroying" part seems like a pretty good thing imho. Setting some forests on fire to make room for some new sprouts seems pretty appealing :) "Community destruction" in the online landscape is pretty much a synonym for "pushing people towards better communities where they are better off anyway"... So a good thing. (And I don't see the place of Wikipedia and donations in this. Wikipedia is obviously not selling any in-app purchases and the software they run on is "open source". HN is also "true free". Even their platform is open-source: https://github.com/wting/hackernews not that this should count that much. And donations are obvious not profit, they are not even taxed as such. No ambiguity here.)

> but right on the policy: not only did you not make it up, it's in the FAQ! Linked at bottom of every page. Haha, my bad! I actually did try to search around for it, but it didn't occur to me to check the FAQ. I even checked the github mirror of the code [0] (no idea how up-to-date it is), but I can't read Arc very well. It just goes to show you could probably plaster rules like that as a header over the entire website and people like myself would still look in the wrong place :P I have read the FAQ before, so that's probably where I "heard it", but I didn't think to check it this time. [0] https://github.com/wting/hackernews

The voting code in the copy of Arc HN runs is not public (the rest of it is - https://github.com/wting/hackernews/blob/master/news.arc) because apparently business decisions are made off of it and it would be trivial to game it. That said, I'm fairly certain it involves some kind of "keep the ball afloat" algorithm, where more upvotes in a smaller time period gives it a higher internal score than a slower sequence of upvotes would. This post has been upvoted very slowly, and I theorise this is why it's on page >2.