I did plenty of stuffs today with SN, I added showing the comment chain (post context) and top frequent participants in a thread. I also added some cache clearing every 30 minutes, that way, I will only be forced to revisit a thread after half an hour, instead of compulsively checking and rechecking a thread every other minute.
The messiest code is the UI lua/html code, which isn't really unexpected. On the positive side, it's quite easy to modify or add new changes. And it still performs relatively well, less or around 100ms per 100 comments. Sure, text/template might be way, way faster, but it's not as flexible, or even quite painful to use.
The external http request are still by far the slowest though, the filesystem caching is required.
To fill my gaps in my intuition and understanding, I started reading another book called "Full frontal calculus" by Seth Braver. It's surprisingly amusing to read, particularly the writing style of the author, where he uses religiuous analogies to describe the divide between limit-based calculus and infinitesimal calculus. It's certainly a refreshing way of explaining as opposed to the a bit overly dry prose from the other calculus book I was reading. I don't suppose to say that this is better pedagogically speaking, but it's certainly more entertaining.
