Hacker News now runs on top of Common Lisp

Well, I think proper font scaling would do wonders for making HN more accessible. As things stand, I have to zoom to 120% to read the text. I recall WebKit making a special case in its font rendering logic just for HN.

I can recommend the browser extension "modern for hacker news". Some features are premium (no subscription though) but only the defaults gives SO MUCH ux like font size, spacing between lines, text width.

Another great accesibility feat is the APIs for this web. I use upvoterate listing from quality news as front page.

To sum it up, opening the tab previews under Zen Browser made my experience feel like the coolest SPA, haha.

For context, "worse is better" refers to Gabriel's observation that products with simple implementations and complicated interfaces tend to achieve adoption faster than products with complex implementations and elegant interfaces.

One of the original motivating examples were Unix-like systems (simple implementation, few correctness guarantees in interfaces) vs. Lisp-based systems (often well specified interfaces, but with complicated implementations as the cost.)

oh man... this comment is just so, so incredibly apt.

"Incidentally, very few people grasp the amount of effort Daniel Gackle expends running HN now, and what an amazing job he does." -Paul Graham, https://x.com/paulg/status/1282055086433284103

Well, Facebook is PHP so...

Yay

I liked the "friends" and "foes" system that Slashdot had, though I would say generally the "foes" here just get banned which is convenient.

I also thought Slashdot's moderation system was kind of fun. I am not sure it was useful but I enjoyed the annotations (+5 Funny when serious, +5 Insightful when inciteful, etc.) Meta-moderation was also neat?

I think that the classical phrasing is "less is more".

At least, that's how my bash pager has it in the manpage.

I'd like some markdown support:

  * Triple ticks for code ```

  * Bullet lists

Two spaces to mono space is somewhat offensive

The "tech progressive" mindset cannot comprehend the idea that something cannot be improved or shouldn't be "enhanced". It is too close to the abyss.

Dark mode. Sure, Dark Reader exists but many mobile browsers don't support it.

Annoyingly enough it's been talked about for years but it never gets implemented, despite only three colors really needing a swap: background to dark sepia or just dark gray, and text to white and off-white.

I want a pickup truck that is designed like HN. The slate may be the answer

Dark Mode. And Follow User would be two feature I have been using for years with other tools.

I'd say that's the main thing. People hate ads, HN uses unobtrusive text ads. The moderation isn't that a competitive advantage, IMO. Slashdot's was better, mostly because it had measures to stop moderation abuse whereas HN seemingly doesn't. It's just a plain old up/down system with the added filip of a "super down" button, for those who are really committed to banning their opponents. I read with showdead turned on because perfectly reasonable comments are so often greyed out or dead. That used to happen much less on Slashdot because there were far fewer people with moderation rights and the bad ones got filtered out via metamod.

Maybe now it's been ported to Common Lisp it'll be easier to add features.

[flagged]

I'm not sure what you mean? The literal quote from the Wikipedia article on "worse is better" is:

> It refers to the argument that software quality does not necessarily increase with functionality: that there is a point where less functionality ("worse") is a preferable option ("better") in terms of practicality and usability.

For that reason, I think I am applying the term precisely as it was defined.

The irony of my comment, which dang picked up, is that the original idea was a criticism against Lisp, suggesting that the bloat of features was a part of the reason its adoption had lagged behind languages like C.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

I've written Python for 14 years and have never seen code like that. It certainly isn't a perfect language, but this doesn't look like a common concern.

People write a lot of Python, because the language is easy to get into for a lot of non computer-science folks (e.g., engineers and scientists) and the ecosystem is massive with libraries for so many important things. It isn't as conceptually pure as lisp, but most probably don't care.

Python made a choice to have default values instead of default expressions and it comes with positive and negative trade-offs. In languages like Ruby with default expressions you get the footgun the other way where calling a function with a default parameter can trigger side effects. This kind of function is fine in Python because it's unidiomatic to mutate your parameters, you do obj.mutate() not mutate(obj).

So while it's a footgun you will be writing some weird code to actually trigger it.

Ah yes, the ol' default empty list Python gotcha, it bit me I think about 10 years ago, and ever since, sadly I've written code like this so many times it's not funny:

    def fun(a = None):
        _a = a if a is not None else []

Some of us genuinely like the way it looks.

HN is like 4chan, but house-broken.

A lot of people claim that but I've never seen evidence of the existence of a vast number of people who would be using Hacker News if only it had more bells and whistles. Craigslist is "ugly" too, and plenty of people use it.

I think it's more likely that most people (even most tech-adjacent people) simply don't know this place exists, or don't care, since no one is sharing links to Hacker News on mainstream social media and nothing goes viral here outside of already established HN-adjacent circles.

I like Hackernews. I like the simplicity. I don't bother with better AI. I prefer it that way and I acknowledge that the look and feel of Hackernews does not suite everyone.

But I don't value the look and feel of Hackernews, because it drives people away -- as if these people are of lesser value. That is just elitist and gatekeeper mentality.

I find aesthetically pleasing, tbh.

HN's aesthetic has grown on me honestly!

There's a less cynical interpretation of that which is not so far from the case.

There's a few levels going on here:

- technologists and startup wannabes feeling like HN is "underground" because of the stripped down aesthetic and weird tech stack

- out of touch VCs who are successful because of money and connections but want to cosplay as technical

- the end users of the startups, who are fed the enshittified products funded by the VCs and created by the technologists

It's not ironic whatsoever.

I miss slashdot when it was at its peak decades back

unsure why precisely it descended so much

not crazy about HN's approach but the quality of the discourse here is so high through whatever mechanism, I don't much care

I remember slashdot being full of "M$ is teh evill111!!" and other childish nonsense. At the end of the day what matters is the results, and i much prefer the discusions on hn than /.

How are you determining the causative relationship?

Not me! For a number of years, I was like "what's with that domain, never heard of ycombinator, oh well, can't be bothered reading up on it right now, anyway, great content here, and nice minimal interface, I'll keep coming back".

A lot of people on HN do infact hate YC and pretty much everything VC

Dutch tech news website Tweakers.net basically has this. Comments are moderated on a scale from -1 to +3, and then you can choose to expand only +2 and up.

https://m.xkcd.com/810/

https://m.xkcd.com/1019/

https://m.xkcd.com/2159/

> I don’t think there is heavy moderation in the traditional sense.

It seems to be a combination of manual and automated moderation (mostly by dang but he has more help now), using the kind of over/under-engineered custom tools you'd expect from technophiles. I've wondered a lot about the kind of programming logic he and the others coded up that make HN as curious as it is, and I have half a mind to make a little forum (yet another HN clone, but not really) purely for the sake of trying to implement how I think their moderation probably works. If I went through with this, I'd have it solely be for Show HN style project sharing/discussion.

HN is heavily moderated by humans. They've discussed it before. They're machine-assisted, but heavily involved day-to-day.

I'm curious why λακωνίζειν needs to be nominalized and φιλοσοφείν doesn't.

The exception to that rule was Google. Which coincidentally might have been one of the best VC investments of all time.

There are probably Markdown libraries for Arc by now?

Though, Reddit eventually realized that javascript: URLs - in Markdown - were an XSS risk.

That might've been more a reflection on PLT than on Scheme48 (which also had some really smart people on it).

As some point, when I was writing a lot of basic ecosystem code that I tested on many Scheme implementations, PLT Scheme (including MzScheme, DrScheme, and a few other big pieces), by Matthias Felleisen and grad students at Rice, appeared to be getting more resources and making more progress than most.

So I moved to be PLT-first rather than portable-Scheme-first, and a bunch of other people did, too.

After Matthias moved to Northeastern, and students graduated on to their own well-deserved professorships and other roles, some of them continued to contribute to what was soon called Racket (rather than PLT Scheme). With Matthew Flatt still doing highly-skilled and highly-productive systems programming on the core.

Eventually, no matter how good their intentions and how solid their platform for production work, the research-programs-first mindset of Racket started to be a barrier to commercial uptake. They should've brought in at least one of the prolific non-professor Racketeers into the hooded circle of elders a lot sooner, and listened to that person.

One of the weaknesses of Racket for some purposes was lack of easy multi-core. The Racket "Places" concept (implementation?) didn't really solve it. You can work around it creatively, as I did for important production (e.g., the familiar Web interview load-balancing across application servers, and also offloading some tasks to distinct host processes on the same server), but using host multi-core more easily is much nicer.

As a language, I've used both Racket and CL professionally, and I prefer a certain style of Racket. But CL also has more than its share of top programmers, and CL also has some very powerful and solid tools, including strengths over Racket.

Lisp of Theseus does have a certain ring to it.

Next up, the end goal: Emacs Lisp.

Yes, but for me each name denotes the thing as it was when it was called that.

(This conversation has turned unexpectedly ontological!)

They were all based on MzScheme, yes. But nowadays Racket runs on the fastest scheme, chez.

HN runs now on SBCL, which is much faster and also multi-threaded.

> Initially called Startup News or occasionally News.YC., it became known by its current name on August 14, 2007.[4]

Oh I have been on HN since 2008 and didn't know that.

I still can't wrap my head around how the conventional wisdom in the industry to work around that problem is to add even more slow network I/O dependencies.

4chan is a special case, because all of its content pages are static HTML files being served by nginx that are rewritten on the server every time someone makes a post. There's nothing dynamic, everyone is served the exact same page, which makes it much easier to scale.

Based on context, you are insinuating that a discussion board like HN _can_ be hard on the CPU alone? If so, how? My guess would be _also_ be that the CPU would have little to do by itself, but that I/O would take the brunt?

Most apps aren’t suffering from computation. They suffer from I/O

HN is not really that much of a workload. Links with text only comments, each link gets a few hundred comments at most, and commenting on stories ends after they are old enough.

Probably everything that's current fits easily in RAM and the older stories are candidates for serving from a static cache.

I wouldn't say this is an astounding technical achievement so much as demonstrating that simplicity can fall out of good taste and resisting groupthink around "best practices".

I think NodeJS apps typically rely on JavaScript event-loop instead of starting new processes all the time.

Spawning new processes for every user is possible but would probabaly be less scalable than even thread-switching.

In fairness, HN wouldn't show more than what, twenty-ish thread roots at a time, requiring you to click "more" to bring in more... which could contain the same set of thread roots you'd been looking at, depending on upvote activity.

(I assume that this update has removed that HN restriction, but haven't bothered to go look to verify this assumption.)

Check out ocicl! https://github.com/ocicl/ocicl

Apologies that may have come across as more accusative than I intended. I was just surprised that whatever missing(?) feature or behavior that would cause one to move off of Racket wouldn't be of interest to other Racket users

https://twostopbits.com

I use the HN Arc code, but the site is about retro computing and gaming.

Does not work in embedded browsers in RSS readers. We need a proper site CSS, not client-side patches.

That thread is 5 years old, and nothing really came out of it.

The genius solution in there is probably this one:

     @media (prefers-color-scheme:dark){body{filter:invert(1) hue-rotate(180deg)}}

...which you can try by doing this in the browser console:

    const styleElement = document.createElement('style');
    styleElement.type = 'text/css';
    styleElement.textContent = "@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) { html { filter: invert(1) hue-rotate(180deg); } }";
    document.head.appendChild(styleElement);

But I get that there are a lot of opinions. Just try one, put up a vote over a week, do it over 4-6 weeks, settle on the one that has the best feedback...

Does not work in in-app browsers.

This is what cmd +/- is for

I like it, in fact my standard terminal font size is even smaller. I hate all the modern websites wasting tons of whitespace, so that you need to hit C-- ~3 times to make it usable.

whats wrong with that?

The OP isn't really asking for a "dark mode" like a literal reading of his comment might suggest. He's asking for an officially supported dark mode that evolves with the site and doesn't break random functionality one day. It's easy to use Stylist or TamperMonkey to make a dark mode that works at one instant of time. It's much harder to maintain one indefinitely in the face of constant changes made by developers not concerned with breaking your work, which they probably don't even know about.

I don't read HN in normal browsers. If you read the RSS feed and click through, for instance, it's instant white flash from the embedded browser in the RSS reader, which cannot be customized but honors dark mode.

That’s not really the point, my RSS reader’s in-app browser couldn’t deal with that.

That does not prevent a big white flash in the middle of the night, and does not work inside all in-app browsers.

Thanks for clarifying

Sure, if they paid for diffs. I don't think they do. Dev time is not free :)

I think the (anonymous? I can't find a name) author of the OP slipped slightly at the end of that otherwise-impeccable sequence of quotes. That last comment (http://arclanguage.org/) to Clarc. It includes a sample application which is an early version of HN, scrubbed of anything HN- or YC-specific.

I am asking about the core language implementation. No need to publish the whole source code of HN, just the part of source code of clarc.. You do not have "anti-abuse measures" in the language implementation and runtime, do you? Is it that hard to seperate a language implementation and code written in the language?

Depends on what you consider "monetization." Are there ads? Not explicitly, but YC startups do advertise themselves in threads here, and aspiring entrepreneurs do use visibility on HN (both to users and YC) as part of their strategy. If you think this is just a forum of nerds engaging in organic conversation and intellectual diversion, you'd be mistaken. Your attention is currency here as much as anywhere.

Not sure about 300 comments but a post with 5300 comments takes about 10 seconds to load:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43208973

In March this year, HN changed pagination behavior. Previously, one needed to paginate through pages to read more than X comments. Around March, they now serve all comments at once.

A post having over a thousand comments is extremely rare so not a big deal.

HN has been known to fail in the past with heavy or high velocity threads to the point that dang has asked people to log off en masse to reduce server load. That shouldn't happen for a simple text forum.

Is HN really that small, considering "HN hug of death"? If it really is small, then hey, we may have already talked! :)

Read earlier in the thread that they run the open sourced version https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44099315

This is simply not true. At the highest levels, security is about distributing costs between attackers and defenders, with defenders having the goal of raising costs past a threshold where attacks are no longer reasonable expenses for any plausible attacker. Obfuscation, done well, can certainly play a role in that. The Blu-ray BD+ scheme is a great case study on this.

You can only say that if you have no idea about cryptography. It is definitely true in the real world, but it needs the right context to be relevant.

It is related to Kerckhoffs principle: "The design of a system should not require secrecy, and compromise of the system should not inconvenience the correspondents"

This means that all of the security must reside on the key and little or nothing in the method, as methods can be discovered and rendered ineffective if that's not the case. Keep in mind that this is for communication systems where it is certain that the messages will be intercepted by an hostile agent, and we want to prevent this agent to read the messages.

When implementing modern cryptographic systems, it is very easy to misuse the libraries, or to try to reimplement cryptographic ideas without a deep understanding of the implications, and this leads to systems that are more vulnerable than intended.

Security by obscurity is the practice of some developers to reinvent cryptography by applying their cleverness to new, unknown cryptosystems. However, to do this correctly, it requires deep mathematical knowledge about finite fields, probability, linguistics, and so on. Most people have not spent the required decades learning this. The end result is that those "clever" systems with novel algorithms are much less secure than the tried and true cryptosystems like AES and SSL. That's why we say "security by obscurity" is bad.

Now, going back to the main topic: Hacker News is not a cryptographic system where codified messages are going to be intercepted by an hostile actor. Therefore Kerckhoffs principle doesn't apply.

it does not apply to the "real" world, but the digital one

Is there data or otherwise that HN is growing stale? Or more of a general vibe

I mean this in the spirit of genuine curiosity: what staleness risk is there given the massive breadth of experience the existing userbase already has?

Muscle memory belongs on a balance sheet.

Business incentives

HN is odd in that it’s subsidized by a hyper capitalist who still has at least a romantic concept of the “early” internet

My assumption is that HN will die when the current leadership turns over because while HN does help marketing/intel for YC it’s a cost center

All cost centers eventually get closed

I have routinely noticed this sort of construction since a few years [1]. Does it correspond to standard usage in other languages? If so, which ones?

---

[1] See what I did there? Eh? Eh?

I should've been more clear that my claim was only about the ability to post messages, have them stored in a database, and then have a tree-view that displays and edits the posts. That's 99% of what users do right? That entire functionality could be done by an AI Agent nowadays in about 10 minutes.

I've been coding for 35 years. I love HackerNews. Because it works. And it's all we need. But holding it up as some example of engineering would be silly. It's just a tree editor. I implemented a better tree editor myself today from scratch.

If you want to know what stuff I'm impressed by it's things like Mastodon, Nostr apps, and stuff that does more than edit a simple content tree of nothing but plain text. We can't even upload images. Can't do markdown. lol. It's definitely a "Less is More" app, from two decades ago. Just agree to agree with me on that. It's not an insult to them. It's just an observation.