> This is a bloody social news site, as trivial an application as it gets.

I'm gonna have to disagree with you there. It's a fairly complex transactional system.

> One man can write a half-decent one in a week.

No, one man can write something that resembles a social news site in a week, but building a good one that scales takes a bit longer. :)

> And for ramping it up, even the scaling roadblocks and tricks are old news by now to the web building community in general.

That one I'll agree with. Their initial scaling problems should be fairly well understood.

> No, one man can write something that resembles a social news site in a week, but building a good one that scales takes a bit longer. :)

That totally depends on your available toolset and experience.

> That totally depends on your available toolset and experience.

That's either ignorant or boastful (or both). Any decent programmer will admit that they can't build a good and scalable anything in a week from scratch.

If you count your "toolset" as an entire framework that does what you want already, then sure, maybe it's possible. Otherwise you're just being foolish.