It's training to compete with VallyWag. Snarky comments auto-generated to tear apart the day's news. It should be too hard to write better than them. Eliza?
Neat, I think you found a bug that allows us to write literal asterisks!
* test* *
EDIT: OK, if you put three asterisks in a row with a whitespace or newline to the right of the asterisks, you get a literal asterisk, but six asterisks in a row does not get you two adjacent asterisks.
Speaking of back-end stuff, what is the backend of Hacker News? What are you using for persistence? Do you have any sort of model layer? Any recommendations/anecdotes?
How do you make the whole thing transactional? I don't mean file persistence (you can do that every once in a while) but the whole application. Manual thread synchronization?
You don't need thread synchronization if you don't have threads. ;-)
Threads should be avoided whenever possible and only used when you have no better alternative or if there is a really good performance benefit. Multithreaded programming is easy to screw up and hard to get right, and is usually not needed.
