how hard is it to maintain your own clone of HN ?
jacquesm: I've toyed around with it for a couple of days about two minor releases ago, it was quite stable but under load that might be a different situation.My lisp knowledge is around -270 degrees so I had a real hard time understanding the code but bit by bit it started to clear up and once you get past that it looked very compact.The only person that ran a real production clone of HN with substantial traffic that I'm aware of was nickb, together with prakash and miles under 'newmogul.com', since then this has been taken over by markenomics.com, but there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of activity there.As for stability under load, from what I can tell by observing HN the server goes down several times an hour and has a script wrapped around it to keep it up or something like that. Every time it goes down it re-reads the state from a bunch of files and then seems to work quite well until the next crash. The crashes - as far as I can see - rarely lead to data loss though there have been some rare instances of comments getting mixed up in the wrong threads.I hope this helps.