oh boy I wrote one of these many years ago for HN.
Within like an hour or two pg emailed me asking me to stop. I didn't know it at the time, but HN was being run on a rusty potato and scraping the homepage every 5 or 10 seconds was causing significant load.
Afaict, HN is still running on a rusty potato. The software's written well, so it doesn't need to run on more than that. (What's going to happen to it? Someone links to it from HN?)
> one of the more important and trafficked properties on the Internet.
I like HN, but it's really only important within a very niche subset of the Internet, and it also doesn't have much traffic. There's like a single post submitted every two minutes. That's not much.
I think [being unable to handle peak load] does not imply efficiency. Unless perhaps this is a joke that I’m misunderstanding?
Nonetheless, i suspect that HN probably is quite efficient, just based on what I know about dang. Even so, the parent claim was that it was popular and important, not that it was efficient
Within like an hour or two pg emailed me asking me to stop. I didn't know it at the time, but HN was being run on a rusty potato and scraping the homepage every 5 or 10 seconds was causing significant load.