Well, there’s a vanilla version of HN that comes with the Arc distribution. It doesn’t look like any of the files in the Arc distribution have been modified since Aug 4, 2009. I just got it running on my machine (only took a minute) and submitted a link. Unsure what features are missing. Relevant HN discussion.
If someone knows Paul Graham, we might be able to get a more recent version of the code, minus spam prevention features & such? BTW, I believe Y Combinator is hiring hackers. (Consider applying!)
Arc isn’t really used for anything besides Hacker News. But it’s designed to enable “exploratory programming”. That seems ideal if you wanted to do a lot of hands-on experimentation with features to facilitate quality online discussion. (My other comment explains why there might be low-hanging fruit here.)
Hacker News was rewritten in something other than Arc ~2-3 years ago IIRC, and it was only after that that they managed to add a lot of the interesting moderation features.
There are probably better technologies to build an HN clone in today–Clojure seems strictly better than Arc, for instance–the parts of HN that are interesting to copy are the various discussion and moderation features, and my sense of what they are mostly comes from having observed the site and seeing comments here and there over the years.
Well, there’s a vanilla version of HN that comes with the Arc distribution. It doesn’t look like any of the files in the Arc distribution have been modified since Aug 4, 2009. I just got it running on my machine (only took a minute) and submitted a link. Unsure what features are missing. Relevant HN discussion.
If someone knows Paul Graham, we might be able to get a more recent version of the code, minus spam prevention features & such? BTW, I believe Y Combinator is hiring hackers. (Consider applying!)
Arc isn’t really used for anything besides Hacker News. But it’s designed to enable “exploratory programming”. That seems ideal if you wanted to do a lot of hands-on experimentation with features to facilitate quality online discussion. (My other comment explains why there might be low-hanging fruit here.)
Hacker News was rewritten in something other than Arc ~2-3 years ago IIRC, and it was only after that that they managed to add a lot of the interesting moderation features.
There are probably better technologies to build an HN clone in today–Clojure seems strictly better than Arc, for instance–the parts of HN that are interesting to copy are the various discussion and moderation features, and my sense of what they are mostly comes from having observed the site and seeing comments here and there over the years.
Here is some alternative code for building an HN clone: https://github.com/jcs/lobsters (see https://lobste.rs/about for differences to HN).