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This comment is exactly the sort of thing that site guideline asks you not to post here.
How do you compare the physical intelligence of an Olympic athlete with years of specialized science-driven training, to the physical intelligence of a man who trained to fight in war since childhood and who has battle experience? Just because one person can jump into a pool better, does not make them superior. Just because one person has more capability to defend their family does not make them superior.
When people try to make these judgements, they don't like being honest about how hard it is to compare the cognitive faculty of two different human beings. Often these discussions just end up with a lot of cultural relativism, a lot of people declaring what they're familiar with is more valuable. Ideally people would learn more about 'unknown unknowns'-- the things they didn't know that they don't know. In practice people get uncomfortable being told there are things they don't get that other cultures understand well.
I noticed reading the FAQ that HN users can change their names now:
> Can I change my username?
> Yes. Email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll help.
How on earth did you pull this off? Can you please allocate some time someday to talk about this on a technical level? It’s probably one of the more impressive refactorings I’ve ever seen.
HN was originally designed so that usernames were the primary key in HN’s database schema. They appear in dozens of places, and each of those places would need to be mutated by a username change. But that would be hard for obvious reasons — examining up to 37 million items and updating them atomically isn’t so easy, especially when there are external systems involved like Algolia and Firebase.
The only other way I can think of would be to create a second “shadow” user. E.g. if user foo wants to change their name to bar, then create bar and set it as the shadow of foo. But now everywhere in the code that looks up usernames needs to perform this indirection. Is that how it works? It would also have other benefits, e.g. if someone visits /user?id=foo then you can redirect them to bar. But there must be dozens of places where this indirection needs to happen, so I’m leaning towards the “update all 37 million items atomically” design rather than shadow users.
I suppose the third option is to punt: create bar, set bar’s karma to foo’s, change foo’s profile to “I switched to bar,” and lock foo. That’s entirely valid, and seems like the most likely approach for a name change. (It would certainly sidestep a mountain of complexity…)
As someone who’s studied the HN codebase for well over a decade, I have to know. It’ll torment me if it remains a mystery. Sorry for the off topic question.
* claiming mathematics is "white", and removing calculus from high school curricula
* eliminating standardized testing as the primary criteria for university admission so that the admissions staff can exercise their biases without being exposed.