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Comment by tw1010 | Hacker News Reader

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tw1010

I think that's fake code in the images ;)

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I was trying to work out what language it is - also switching on strings like that doesn't seem like a great idea.

The project is hosted on Github [0], I'm not sure if the entire source code is available though.

[0] https://github.com/codeforamerica/autoclearance

I would hope the entire source is available. We should always be wary of secret algorithmic decisions in court cases. The algorithm should be openly available for the public to see in the same way that the law is to be openly available.

Hi, engineer on the project here! That's an old version of the code that turned out to be too slow for the volume of records we need to process. The current version, which you see in the images from the article, is written in Golang.

You’re doing incredible work. Keep it up!

(Also use consts so you don’t make typos - or so your typos are at least consistent :)

Can you go into that a little more - the switch to Golang and the old version being too slow?

The code in the screenshot is valid Go (switching on strings, no parentheses around the if condition, incrementing a map value using ++) and could even be the output of go fmt (with the { on the same line as the if).

The app itself appears to be written in Ruby (the github link is posted elsewhere in the comments), and looking at the image included in the article further down I assume the code is from a Go app that takes the Ruby app's logs and generates some statistics.

Yes, that was painful to see. The strings are even capitalized in a particular way so it doesn't look like it had already been processed to normalize the formatting.

Well it’s relevant to the story, so if it’s fake they put a surprising amount of effort into it...

If you go to 1:51 in the video, you can see the same code on what appears to be an engineer's screen. It seems like it would be a lot of effort (and questionable journalism) to fake that.

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