That doesn't matter for the client through. As long as the data can come in a single small file, for example the <3KB HTML file for the tab I'm writing this on, what the server is doing doesn't matter.

Well, kind of, at least considering the last public version of Arc, that HN uses (found here: http://arclanguage.org/)

It seems to be storing stuff directly on disk, on the same host that the software itself runs on.

So you're right if you consider the filesystem a sort of database, but otherwise no :)

It was announced in 2008! 15% into the 100 year language.

Not sure their tech stack (I'm sure there's a post on it somewhere) but there was a forum software way back that would compile replies and such into static html pages when the submit button was hit, on the assumption that they would be read a lot more times than written to. Worked pretty well from what I recall.

Great idea in theory until you want to change the presentation and now have to recompile 3̵7̵8̵4̵3̵1̵0̵5 (37843314) items :)

True, but it was split into pages so at most 20 items :)

That doesn’t happen over my mobile data connection so I don’t see how that’s relevant to my point

Afaik hacker news pages are stored on the file system.