HN Explorer

Ask HN: Is there a description of the file layout HN uses to store data?

24 points by TekMol ↗ HN
As far as I know, HN uses no DB and just writes all data to plain text files.

Does this still hold true?

Is there a description of the layout somewhere? I wonder if it is just one file per comment and the name is the id. And what the internal structure of those files is.

I think it would be a very interesting example of a successful Web2 style project that writes to files instead of using a DB.

4 comments

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yababa_y
Current HN is a mystery but you can look at Anarki, which descends from its implementation, or older version of Arc. Yes, files are named by id, the contents are a sexp encoding nested tables (so, lists of lists of … key value pairs)

https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/blob/master/apps/news/...

TekMol
Is there an example of such a sexp encoded post somewhere?
yababa_y
just run the code, it’s SO easy to find this out.