HN Explorer

Hacker News too slow? Is it time for HN to switch to a different platform?

10 points by durbin ↗ HN
It seems as if the HN infrastructure hasn't been updated in a long time and is really slow for submitting or commenting on stories. Is is time to switch HN to a different platform?

7 comments

[ 633 ms ] story [ 2462 ms ] thread
pg
Rtm made one that we're now testing.

If you look at the numbers though, there were several times in the past when HN was slower than it is now.

zck
Does this comprise updates to the Arc codebase, a rewrite in Arc, or something else entirely?
CommentTo
Yeah... It is somewhat slow. And for some question, I was trying to comment, but it just wouldn't let me for some reason. It just kept me redirecting to some "/r" page. I logged-out, logged back in, but still had the same problem. But it worked after someone else had made a comment.
nathan_f77
I'm not sure if it is already, but I think it would be pretty great if HN was open source.

The front-end could do with a bit of a facelift, too.

And hey, I've said it before, but we could just switch to Reddit's codebase. Or even operate like http://www.thecutelist.com/, which just points to a modified http://www.reddit.com/r/aww

http://news.ycombinator.com/ could point to http://www.reddit.com/r/hacker_news, for example.

mappu
HN is (roughly) open source: https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc although it doesn't necessarily correspond to the currently running version. You can do the facelift yourself via any number of Stylish userscripts.

Reddit's source code is going to be relatively specialized for their architecture (Cassandra and EC2 and whatever else), and piggybacking on a subreddit is going to encourage bleed, lower control (e.g. pg restricting signups at times), and change the value of karma to represent a cross-culture value instead of what's valued locally.

What advantages are there for merging? You save one password?

bane
It seems to be faster than reddit if that means anything.
electrichead
HN needs a pub sub mechanism so I don't need to rely on RSS any more.