Basic HTML isn’t static HTML. The comments and posts for Hacker News still needs to be stored and loaded from a database.

Well, kind of, at least considering the last public version of Arc, that HN uses (found here: http://arclanguage.org/)

It seems to be storing stuff directly on disk, on the same host that the software itself runs on.

So you're right if you consider the filesystem a sort of database, but otherwise no :)

It was announced in 2008! 15% into the 100 year language.

Not sure their tech stack (I'm sure there's a post on it somewhere) but there was a forum software way back that would compile replies and such into static html pages when the submit button was hit, on the assumption that they would be read a lot more times than written to. Worked pretty well from what I recall.

Great idea in theory until you want to change the presentation and now have to recompile 3̵7̵8̵4̵3̵1̵0̵5 (37843314) items :)

True, but it was split into pages so at most 20 items :)

That doesn't matter for the client through. As long as the data can come in a single small file, for example the <3KB HTML file for the tab I'm writing this on, what the server is doing doesn't matter.

That doesn’t happen over my mobile data connection so I don’t see how that’s relevant to my point

Afaik hacker news pages are stored on the file system.

Because not every letter is a 500 line, 30 dependency component, in other words