Hacker News Reader

yeah, this is super surprising considering their business of annotating individual lines; I'd be storing the lines in a list and caching generated html, not storing the tags in with them. it's kind of weird.

At least for me it was interesting when considering the aspect of finding/modifying stuff in data you cannot control yourself. For instance crawling, indexing or retrieving data in an unspecified format.

Yes, I enjoyed the article as well. My question was why they stored the HTML in the first place.

Well, at a minimum, it saves the processing time required to format the text, which lessens the server cost of each page hit. It's a small optimization, but when the vast majority of the users are just coming to the site to read text, I'd imagine it would save a lot of CPU time.

Not really, the underlying text is just an HTML page that rarely changes and the requests rarely hit the database because caching.

Or you could fragment cache that.