He was some 20..10 years ago a proponent of succint code and even authored the Arc language which is used to run HN.

Is HN any more sophisticated than a PHPbb forum? The value is in the community and moderation, not the back end.

Given that is has soldiered on almost two decades as a single-server system, I'd give a bit more credit to the back end.

Maybe it's an inside baseball joke taken out of context that I don't understand.