YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Analysis and any artifacts are all handcrafted by me. I mean that is the work. I have never seen papers or code as an outcome. What I want is to learn and enable other to learn. That I can only get from doing the work myself.

if (thingThatIsTrue):

  // a bunch of logic here...

  // different logic here...

if (thingThatIsTrue):

  return doThisWhenTrue()

Just a simple example. I'm not sure if this is what you consider "obfuscating" the branches. Logically the same, but a bit more linear to understand?

Edit: I am bad at formatting comments here.

It's not applicable to every situation, but one way to do this is some very basic fuzzy logic. You do a little math and then either choose a single branch at the end, or sometimes avoid a branch altogether. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/artificial-intelligence/fuzzy-...

Another way to avoid some branches is to have specialized routines, maybe with multiple dispatch, rather than more general methods with a bunch of checks within them for slightly different situations.

A classic performance hack for critical sections is loop unrolling.

if Val === "A" then Do funcA() else if Val === "B" then

and so forth for lots of values, or using a switch statement or similar branching instead of

Object functions = { "A": funcA() {does what funcA does}, "B": funcB() {does what funcB does} etc. etc.

}

runnableFunction = functions[val]; runnableFunction();

Actually writing it I remember now someone who did this, a junior who had to update a validation function for XML invoices based on their root namespaces, which there could be a large number of these, and so she wrote out

switch namespace == "somenamespace" { validatingscheme = "someschema"; doPreliminaryFunctionToDetermineifshouldvalidate(); }

I can't remember all the details as this was almost 20 years ago, however while it was true that one branched on the schema, it made much more sense to look up what one was supposed to do based on the rule for branching and then just execute that one action rather than writing a bunch of branching logic.

So to make it more concrete: Once branching rules becomes sufficiently complex prefer query for what you should do rather than branching

on edit: note again, not real code, but should be understandable and translatable into real code to understand what is being said easily enough.

  total = calculateOrderTotal(user.order);
  if (user.isPremiumMember) {
    total = total * 0.9;        // 10% discount

  total = calculateOrderTotal(user.order);
  let discount = calculateDiscount(user);  // Returns 0.9 or 1.0
  total = total * discount;

One is actually helping and the other is making yourself more visible to mgmt for promotions.

What I'm saying is I am not a jerk and actually do care about my coworkers, however I also don't want a bunch of noise in a chat app I have to use to do my job.