After running it, I have a few more questions, I hope you aren't frustrated with me yet :)

1. What is the difference between "racket -m -f" (this one doesn't work, but used to work with mzscheme) and just "racket -f"? The manpage asks to visit the webpage and i went to this page to look for help, but I dont seem to be able to locate it: http://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/racket.html

2. In the arc prompt, after loading "news.arc", I would like to run the news server on a different thread, eg: "(= app (thread (nsv)))" (read on the web), but it doesnt return me the arc prompt.

3. Just to test what happens under increased load, I went to localhost:8080 and repeatedly hit the refresh button on my browser. After many repeated refreshes, the news page was no longer served. Here's what was happening in the arc screen: http://pastebin.com/TcBa2SuM and here's the tail of logs/srv-* file: http://pastebin.com/Xiym77sR (i wonder who the strange user 0PgEaESj is :))

2. Hmm, it works for me. Are you sure there's no prompt? Here's how it looks for me:

  $ racket -f as.scm  
  Use (quit) or ^D to quit, (tl) to return here after an interrupt. 
  arc> (load "news.arc") 
  nil 
  arc> (thread (nsv)) 
  #<thread> 
  arc> rm: cannot remove `arc/news/story/*.tmp': No such file or directory 
  load items:  
  ranking stories. 
  ready to serve port 8080 

Only if it's meaningless to invoke a procedure called 'main automatically. :-p

These are the command-line args: http://docs.racket-lang.org/reference/running-sa.html

It came as a surprise that HN serves directly off port 80- wonder how to they manage ssl from arc. I plan to serve via apache rewrite rules (reverse proxy)- and yes, sadly all ips in the arc logs show the local address. Thanks for this link. Also, who is that strange user on my logs (there are different names on different hosts)? :)

If you're seeing those changes in the diff akkartik linked to, take a closer look. It's just whitespace. ^_^;

Pauan pointed out the "(require racket/unsafe/ops)" line in ac.scm. According to https://github.com/nex3/arc/blame/master/ac.scm, the line was added in this February 2011 commit (well before October!): https://github.com/nex3/arc/commit/cea8a4c5e9d1eb42f54b6c333...

The main point is that you want something that works, right? :) If updating Racket isn't working for you, maybe for now you can revert to an older version of Anarki. The commit before the racket/unsafe/ops one is https://github.com/nex3/arc/commit/b36f223bfba2e12e518fff955..., which you can get to like this:

  $ git checkout b36f223b

  $ git checkout master

Yes, I would like to use something that works, and something that is as latest as possible :) I seem to be using Racket (in the form of plt-scheme) and it seems to work for an older version of arc. The point of my question was if I needed to do something to keep up with the changes made in Arc.

---

"The point of my question was if I needed to do something to keep up with the changes made in Arc."

I am also working on creating a discussion forum based on arc news. I have programming and web development experience but none with arc or list-like languages. I saw hubski's site and liked it a lot. I have some specific questions:

- like the OP asked, how difficult would it be to add open-id, facebook, twitter, g+ integration?

- how does hubski distinguish text submissions vs videos and so on? How do I group/categorize all of them?

- how do I add tags to submissions or allow admins to add tags?

- how do i decrease the karma required to downvote?

- how do i mimic HN's job page, ie: no name of the poster and no comment field- just link and text. How to group all such posts?

how difficult would it be to add open-id, facebook, twitter, g+ integration?

That depends on how integrated you want to get. It's fairly trivial to be able to add a 'like' or '+1' button, but if you want deeper integration, you'd have to be specific about what you want to do. I haven't tried open-id. I'm sure it's doable.

how does hubski distinguish text submissions vs videos and so on? How do I group/categorize all of them?

For videos, it is a matter of identifying the url as a video url, etc. For example with findsubseq, you can pick out if contains "youtube" "youtu.be", etc. Text submissions are those that lack a url, and don't have an empty text field, etc. No quick fix here. news.arc wasn't made to sort them that way, I had to do that.

how do I add tags to submissions or allow admins to add tags?

There are a number of ways you might go about that. I added the tag as an additional story key/value pair. Depending on your tagging structure, you might want to make each tag it's own template, containing the ids of stories carrying that tag.

how do i decrease the karma required to downvote?

I think there is downvote-threshold* in news.arc, -just change the value. I don't use karma or downvotes with Hubski. So I don't have that code anymore. :)

how do i mimic HN's job page, ie: no name of the poster and no comment field- just link and text. How to group all such posts?

Shouldn't be too difficult. Each story could have a 'job' key with a value of nil or t. If it is t, then opt not to show the comment tree, name, etc.

- If I want to start hacking into the news code, is news.arc the only file I start with? I would also like to change the css, make email field compulsory, send email confirmation and so on. If you could show me some direction, it would be very helpful.

- by integration with other services, I mean allowing likes, +1, commenting, log-in etc. I think I will have to look into the code to start understanding this more, so it is related to the above point.

- about identifying video URLs- how would you recommend expanding something like, say a bit.ly link?

- Yes, I haven't done anything with the code yet because it looks a little unfamiliar at this point. But I'd love to.