Ha! Great question, one that I get asked semi-frequently. 1) Because unlike many, I can, 2) Because contrary to popular belief, it is not difficult. :)
Does rather limit the audience though - my main VM is ARM, my main machine is OSX and consequently I can't use this on either. Which is a shame because I'd really like to.
my main desktop is also Mac OS X, I run vmware fusion + linux hosts when necessary, but all of my server infrastructure is linux anyway :-) linux kernel makes assembler so much easier than OS X and of course all of my library is catered for server-side infrastructure.
Yeah, my only easy option is to run this on our live web server. Hmmm, conflicted ...
again FWIW, I am the co-founder of a proper Australian registered business, I appreciate your concern. In an isolated environment, run it with strace -o nasties.txt or something similar. I assure you personally that the only outbound connects this thing does is to your locally defined DNS and firebaseio per the HN API, and is not terribly unpleasant to any host CPU (near as I can tell anyway, and that was before I enabled the 150 item limit on the main page indices).
Typo on Status Bar Counters:
waits 30 secodns
secodns does sound cool :P Maybe a new project in the future?
Admittedly I am no webguy, the webpage for it was very much an afterthought, was just happy to release it... I'll see if I can get the boss to edit the content before my next deploy :)