Over the years it seems there have been a fair few 'Hacker News for X' (see https://hn.algolia.com/#!/story/forever/prefix/0/hacker%20ne...). Presumably each time people implement the whole site from scratch (users, commenting, ranking, etc). Have there ever been any open-source attempts at creating a generic Hacker News style site that people could self host for specific topics? The only thing that I can think of is self-hosting your own copy of reddit.
From the discussion yesterday on "HN for data scientists"[0], there was mention of a service which enables one to deploy "HN for X"[1], as well as some discussion that (some version of) the code for HN is available[2].
Stamplay is a BaaS similar to Firebase (think of it like IFTTT for backend dev). They open-sourced a HN-clone with their service that gets you up and running super quickly: https://github.com/Stamplay/stamplay-hackernews