Its interesting to note that the the boweb-production servers of "www" don't have read-replicas (asynchronous replication) for read scalability. Anyone know why? Typically, one would use read-replicas to alleviate read workloads on the master.

Most likely the www servers are serving almost entirely static, cached content. Hell, they might not actually see any actual public traffic - they might just serve as CDN origins.

This is 100% correct. We also generated static snapshots of the origin and mirrored to S3. In the instance of something going awry with our primary origin servers, we could fail back to S3 as an origin.

EDIT: I'll add that our origin offload for WWW hovered around 98%.

Try systems companies (e.g. storage, networking) - you get to build products that leverage core CS concepts - algorithms, distributed systems etc. You also get a chance to use your investigative skills to debug problems like race conditions, memory leaks etc.

pg,

Just wondering as to why HN isn't hosted in the cloud? (e.g. on AWS, Rackspace etc.). How do you backup all the data?

Because that would cost more?

I don't really know what the benefit of cloud hosting would be in this case.

Most systems companies (e.g., networking, storage) do development in C/C++/Java. Have you checked 'em out?

Networking, storage companies is a good option and if you get into core stack, work is very challenging. You should be able to find lists like these online: http://www.storagenewsletter.com/news/startups/most-promisin... You can also try contacting recruiters on LinkedIn to see if they are willing to sponsor visa.

On a related note, here's a search tool (though not perfect) I wrote some time ago that helps filter out stories by points, age & #comments:

http://searchyt.twittrank.info/

Check out:

http://www.alexa.com/topsites

Hi there,

My email info is in my profile.

Thanks! Sure, thats on the TODO list :)

Thanks for the feedback!