February 22, 2026
Search drama in aisle HN
Algolia Hacker News Search GitHub Project Archived
Beloved Hacker News search gets ‘archived’ and users instantly ask: “Wait… is it dying or getting an upgrade?”
TLDR: Algolia quietly archived the public code for Hacker News search, but an insider revealed the real system was secretly rewritten and lives in a private codebase. Users swung between panic, hope for a new search, bug complaints, and demands for a full history archive of every post ever.
Hacker News fans just got a scare: the public code for the much‑loved Algolia-powered search was quietly marked “archived” on GitHub, which for many sounds a lot like “we’re pulling the plug.” Cue the collective gasp. But then an Algolia developer relations rep swept in like a plot twist, casually dropping that the real search was secretly rewritten a year ago and now lives in a private code stash. Instantly the mood shifted from funeral to conspiracy thriller: is this a shutdown, a glow‑up, or both?
One commenter immediately went into hopeful‑speculation mode, asking if this means a shiny new Hacker News search is coming. Another, who’d been seeing “Algolia API failed” errors in their favorite third‑party app, treated the thread like a tech support hotline, basically saying, “So THAT’S why things are breaking.” There was also genuine surprise that the old backend ran on Ruby on Rails at all, like someone finding out their favorite sports car had a minivan engine the entire time. Meanwhile, a different commenter ignored the drama entirely and went straight for the big prize: can we just get a giant downloadable archive of every Hacker News post ever? In classic HN fashion, the thread turned into equal parts wake, bug report, nerd trivia, and data‑hoarder fantasy, with everyone trying to read the tea leaves of one little “archived” tag.
Key Points
- •The HN Search application is a Rails 5 project that powers Hacker News search, using React on the frontend and algoliasearch-rails for search integration.
- •Setup instructions cover cloning the repository, installing dependencies, configuring database and application YAML files, and running SQLite3 migrations.
- •Deployment relies on Capistrano and requires SSH access, with documented issues involving Bluepill and Thin that can disrupt or rollback deployments.
- •An `algoliasearch` configuration on the `Item` model defines which attributes are indexed, how they are ranked, highlighted, tagged, and sorted by Algolia.
- •The project credits Hacker News as the content source, Firebase for the real-time crawling API, and wkhtmltoimage for thumbnail crawling and rendering.