That, or restrict the maximum number of comments at a given level to a large, but fixed number that you can express as a fixed size number, say two digits in base 62 (digits are 0-9a-zA-Z). Or, if you use postgres, make the index column a list of integers.
Personally I just sort everything in memory like reddit, since I need to traverse all branches to calculate weighed scores, which is a balance of vote counts and age. I think reddit/HN do something similar? I wonder how Disqus handles this.
"One could argue that was more craftsmanship than innovation, but there's a strong connection between making things well and making better things, and China isn't famous for quality goods either."
That's because they weren't taught in our textbooks.
I'm trying to wrap my head around how the whole thing works. On one hand, mundane stuffs are monitored, on the other hand, you have stuffs like these freely discussed:
According to wikipedia, this is on the 12th most popular site in China.
I think the censors operate on very crude keyword filters. As long as you avoid the few obvious keywords, it's not that easy to get caught. The domestic web sites get around the censor by agreeing to open backdoors for the filters, yet at the same time turn a blind eye to the real disruptive stuffs that got around it.
Another thing is that scrolling is kinda sluggish in Chrome on my 2007 Mac Mini. Google docs PDF reader seems to scroll much more smoothly. It's still a big improvement over the flash version.
Just curious, which family in the film are you referring to? I only have a vague recall of them.