Even pg admits that Hacker News is a technology failure. HN is good because of the community, not the software. The software in fact seems to be a hacked together half-assed job.
No, that's not true. The software works quite well, especially considering how few lines of code it is. (To be able to say that was one of the goals for both app and language.)
What I said was that it's not user features that keep people here. But there is more to the software than user features. A good example is the code that protects against various kinds of abuse, like spam, trolls, and voting rings. By LOC that is a large percentage of the total, and HN as a community would be long since dead without it.
