What does HackerNews think of hackernews?

I think it's a ratio of votes to time. I think as little as 4 votes can get something on the homepage if they come in fairly quickly.

The source code for hn is available if you want to go and look up the specifics. I'm not sure if this is the most up-to-date mirror, but the site doesn't change that often: https://github.com/wting/hackernews

Might not count as modern, but the original Reddit and HackerNews codebases:

- https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit1.0

- https://github.com/wting/hackernews

There's also this https://github.com/wting/hackernews -- which is a version of the source code to the site from sometime in the past.

"ad-hoc filesystem based solution" is the closest of your definitions, I think. Last time I saw/heard, HN was built in Arc, a Lisp dialect, and use(s/d) a variant of this (mirrored) code: https://github.com/wting/hackernews

Check out around this area of the code to see how simple it is. All just files and directories: https://github.com/wting/hackernews/blob/master/news.arc#L16... .. the beauty of this simple approach is a lack of moving parts, and it's easy to slap Redis on top if you need caching or something.

There is a modern maintained variant at https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/tree/master/apps/news as well if you want to spin up your own HN-a-like and have the patience.

File syncing between machines is pretty much an easily solved problem. I don't know how they do it, but it could be something like https://syncthing.net/ or even some scripting with `rsync`. Heck, a cronned `tar | gzip | scp` might even be enough for an app whose data isn't exactly mission critical.