Two years ago I emailed HN to ask why favoriting posts is rate limited. Got the reply, "HN's main software runs on a single core."

They also said they are working on an overhaul of Arc and HN, which will massively improve performance.

They gave you false info

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34171328

Nothing in that thread or linked threads provides anything that contradicts that statement that I could find.

Please be more descriptive so that people actually get your point.

NGINX does the heavy lifting, and can utilize many cores.

HN started as a project to experiment [1] with the Arc Language [2], so it doesn't surprise me that it used static files as a storage.

I wondering what is the stack these days though.

[1] http://paulgraham.com/hackernews.html [2] http://arclanguage.org

That is what I'd expect it to still be tbh, if the responsiveness is anything to go by.

Is that supposed to be a good thing?

If it provides the correct features and runs correctly, simpler is better. To me, simpler to run, understand, backup, deploy, recover goes in the right direction.

In my opinion, yes. It's simple to run, simple to back up, simple to migrate to a new server, upgrade path is straightforward (find the fastest single core CPU).

Would it make your experience as a user better if the data was stored in a schema-less distributed database instead of saved to file? Would you browse it more often? If you had to pay for it, would you pay more money?

Because at the end of the day, none of those decisions matter, and sometimes the crappy, inelegant solution is cheaper and more understandable to the ones running it for almost two decades.

Oh, I'm not debating the impact such a decision has on users, but rather on development experience and ops.

> schema-less distributed database instead of saved to file

I was actually going to suggest SQLite.