You were right, however, that the post was never about code quality or code comments. It was only about "history's great, yo; here's what you can do with it".
Notice the code comment. I took it out for the example in the blog post to illustrate how we would deal if there was never a code comment in the first place.
Where did the 5 extra "miles" come from? He picks a quote where “20 miles/day” is a good pace to have set for yourself, but then adds this about his team: “We’ve been constantly marching at a good pace (~25 miles per day)“.
The app is running on a single (free) Heroku dyno, PostgreSQL as db & full text index, and fronted with Rack::Cache using 5MB memcache for storage (also free).
It survived being first on HN for hours, no probs.
I have considered it myself, but quickly dismissed it because, yes, the output would grow considerably.
I love Coffee and would use it for everything, but this is one of those cases where we simply need to squeeze every single byte and scream each time that we have to let one go.
You were right, however, that the post was never about code quality or code comments. It was only about "history's great, yo; here's what you can do with it".