"No ORM (such as Hibernate); they use straight JDBC ... Spring as glue"

Spring has stuff in it to make working with JDBC much more sane (much less exception handling code to write, you can make it DRY, etc.). I'd be very surprised if they weren't using that.

I guess this post could be used as a convincing argument to implement searching into ycnews:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=209716 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=210537

Or use http://searchyc.com or http://ycombinator.search.xirium.com ...

It's really not that hard to just type "site:news.ycombinator.com <search terms>" into google. Just sayin...

Actually, that is quite a mouthful to type

if you use your fingers to type, it is much less mouth-intensive.