
Ask HN: What software does YC run on? - listp_nil
Context: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;sama&#x2F;status&#x2F;625022193227984896<p>What platform? DB? Language?
Just curious.
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argonaut
Altman is clearly referring to the internal software used to run YC the
organization, not just HN. In other words, the internal dashboards, CRM-like
software, CRUD apps for organizing events and appointsments, etc. Stuff that
other companies would probably just use Google Apps, Salesforce, Atlassian,
etc. for (YC might even use some of those).

I seriously doubt they are running this stuff on Arc and flat files.

~~~
listp_nil
Exactly. Wanted to know about the backend details of YC not HN.

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krapp
The language is Arc[0], a lisp dialect co-developed by pg. Hacker News itself
appears to be a proprietary fork[1] but the language and original forum
implementation are open source. Hacker News doesn't use a database, rather,
flat-files and code running in RAM. The site began as a proof-of-concept for
Arc but has understandably become something a bit bigger, and as a result
people are sometimes shocked and bemused at how anti-modern it appears.

There are a couple of other HN clones running what I believe is the same
software, like datatau[2] however I don't have any idea about other popular
applications of the language, if there are any.

Kogir, dang and others can fill you in on juicier details, and feel free to
use the email in the contact link below. I feel like this has come up often
enough and is an interesting enough subject that it belongs in the FAQ.

[0] [http://arclanguage.org/](http://arclanguage.org/)

[1] AFAIK, the staff doesn't share the various changes they've made to the
algorithms publicly because there's apparently real money riding on ranking on
the front page for startups and entrepreneurs, and they want to avoid gaming
the system.

[2] [http://www.datatau.com/](http://www.datatau.com/)

~~~
gus_massa
> _The site began as a proof-of-concept for Arc but has understandably become
> something a bit bigger, and as a result people are sometimes shocked and
> bemused at how anti-modern it appears._

Many of these details are explicit design decisions. For example, about flat
files (from
[http://www.paulgraham.com/vwfaq.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/vwfaq.html) )

> _What database did you use?_

> _We didn 't use one. We just stored everything in files. The Unix file
> system is pretty good at not losing your data, especially if you put the
> files on a Netapp. _

~~~
jcr
Though it is most likely still flat files, storage is no longer Unix FS on
NetApp. It seems to currently be FreeBSD ZFS [1] on top of hardware RAID [2]

[1]
[https://twitter.com/HNStatus/status/583694734792597505](https://twitter.com/HNStatus/status/583694734792597505)

[2]
[https://twitter.com/HNStatus/status/583940393433083904](https://twitter.com/HNStatus/status/583940393433083904)

~~~
gus_massa
You are right. The quote was about ViaWeb, the previous startup of pg. He
copied a lot of the details of the ViaWeb implementation in Arc.

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infamouscow
Running on FreeBSD with ZFS. [1]

[1]
[https://twitter.com/HNStatus/status/575914887190159360](https://twitter.com/HNStatus/status/575914887190159360)

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listp_nil
YC not HN.

