Ask HN: Why is HN down so frequently?

It's some guy's weekend project that took off, and it's too clever to use plebian nonsense like a database.

It doesn't? I had no idea, I guess I just assumed it did.

Someone will probably some along and explain it in detail, but as I roughly maybe understand it, Hacker News stores everything as Lisp closures in RAM, which fills up frequently. So every now and then, it sort of has to be turned over and emptied out, like a toaster.

..and as flat files to disk. But not a database.

I noticed it was down a bit earlier as well, but I wouldn't say HN is down frequently. In fact, I can only think of today's incident and maybe one other where HN was down without any kind of advanced notice.

Yes, 'frequent' can be a relative term, but I see it down once every few days.

It doesn't make any money :)