hackernews

"Otherwise" was the operative word in my (slightly sarcastic) example. :) Avoiding all caps for emphasis means you sometimes have to change "Faa" back to "FAA" after submitting a story about the Federal Aviation Administration. And avoiding grammatically-incorrect or all-lowercase headlines means you sometimes have to change "Strcmp()" back to "strcmp()". HN's software is no longer open source, but at one time, this is how it processed titles on initial submission: https://github.com/wting/hackernews/blob/master/news.arc#L15... (This function does add capitals as well as remove them.)

And at any rate, #1 on HN is not the product of any simple rule like "most upvotes per unit time with some decay function applied." There is significant judgment in expressed in the way that stories are ranked. The source code as of 2012 was enough to demonstrate this, but in my understanding yet more judgment has been applied since then. https://github.com/wting/hackernews/blob/master/news.arc

"ad-hoc filesystem based solution" is the closest of your definitions, I think. Last time I saw/heard, HN was built in Arc, a Lisp dialect, and use(s/d) a variant of this (mirrored) code: https://github.com/wting/hackernews Check out around this area of the code to see how simple it is. All just files and directories: https://github.com/wting/hackernews/blob/master/news.arc#L16... .. the beauty of this simple approach is a lack of moving parts, and it's easy to slap Redis on top if you need caching or something. There is a modern maintained variant at https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/tree/master/apps/news as well if you want to spin up your own HN-a-like and have the patience. File syncing between machines is pretty much an easily solved problem. I don't know how they do it, but it could be something like https://syncthing.net/ or ev

Re: niche languages—Hacker News is written in a dialect of Lisp called Arc: - https://github.com/wting/hackernews - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language)