HN itself uses flat files for each of these comments! Somewhat off topic, but one the pieces of code I'm most proud of was effectively a recursive XML scraper

HN itself uses flat files for each of these comments! Somewhat off topic, but one the pieces of code I'm most proud of was effectively a recursive XML scraper that resolved each leaf (each node was a web request) into a line (like a file path) of a massive text file, which was then grepped when a user searched for something. I hacked it together really quickly to solve a problem, which is solved orders of magnitude faster than commercial solutions that tried to be overly clever. I like it because while it was gross and bad and would be embarrassing to read, in reality grep is crazy fast and the OS cached the text file once you'd read it once. It's a nice personal reminder to me that you don't always need to build some Grand Design, especially when you're just building a tool that has no future evolving path.