Hacker News has so little capability, almost any experienced developer using a modern AI Coding Agent could replicate the entire thing in a weekend, and perhaps in a single day.
I'm not saying it's bad, or criticizing anyone. I mean it does what it does, and it works, and people like it. But no one should care what technology they're using because there's just nothing impressive going on from a technical perspective.
Good software tends to resemble an iceberg - what you see is just a small bit of what's actually in there. I wouldn't be so hasty in assumptions here.
I should've been more clear that my claim was only about the ability to post messages, have them stored in a database, and then have a tree-view that displays and edits the posts. That's 99% of what users do right? That entire functionality could be done by an AI Agent nowadays in about 10 minutes.
The question would be how many security exploits and other edge cases would be included in that.
Doesn't matter. You could replicate the basic functionality of Hacker News in a single Coding Agent Prompt. Sorry, I'm not wrong.
I've been writing web apps since 1998. Just today I implemented a similar tree view, with ability to create, edit, rename, move files and folders in a TypeScript react web app, and my app that I wrote today is a vastly more sophisticated GUI than Hacker News. lol.
It _does_ matter as those edge cases would be the difference between a working product and something that's trivial to topple over with `"; find . -exec shred -f {} \;` if your agent is used for the backend. There's also a lot of boring problems to solve backend wise (migration, failure mitigation, suitable performance, etc) that need to be considered for a site with significant traffic even for "basic functionality" (a service that's down cannot serve it's users).
The frontend of HN doesn't need to be complex and I'd even argue that it's better for being simple as it's then easier to parse, takes less effort from the client to render, certainly less battery on mobile, and so on. Web applications don't _need_ to be more complex than the problem at hand where the frontend itself is just enough of to display content in a comfortable enough format for human consumption.
Unrelated to the topic but related to the thread: if you edit a message then please keep the original message around to keep context for others that read this thread if that edit would change how the message was interpreted at the time of the reply. Non-functional edits (e.g spelling corrections) are fine without notice.
What I meant by "doesn't matter" is that your original quip didn't prove me wrong. You just want to talk about all these other things to insinuate somehow I'm unaware of them, despite having 3 decades of web dev exp. lol. I already made it perfectly clear what I said is about 2 days of work, and I'm not wrong.
I don't get this attitude at all. I would think most programmers/readers are interested in the gears and cogs behind something they use on a regular basis. Especially if the work in web, backend, etc.
I've been coding for 35 years. I love HackerNews. Because it works. And it's all we need. But holding it up as some example of engineering would be silly. It's just a tree editor. I implemented a better tree editor myself today from scratch.
If you want to know what stuff I'm impressed by it's things like Mastodon, Nostr apps, and stuff that does more than edit a simple content tree of nothing but plain text. We can't even upload images. Can't do markdown. lol. It's definitely a "Less is More" app, from two decades ago. Just agree to agree with me on that. It's not an insult to them. It's just an observation.