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Does Having an Anime Profile Picture Make You a Better Programmer?
- rocket_the_dog 6y agoIt makes me a better programmer.
- eat_veggies 6y agoWhen I switched to an anime profile picture I became ostracized at my job, and that boosted my productivity 3x due to fewer distractions. I have never felt more lonely in my life but my manager is happy with my performance so it's worth it imo
- wrkronmiller 6y agoThis is satire right?
- jacobush 6y agoLife has gone past satire
- slowmovintarget 6y agoWe are living in a "Not the Onion" thread.
- gorkish 6y agoSatire is dead; you were hearing from eat_veggies.
- dagav 6y agoSatire isn't dead, it's the distinction between real life and satire that's dead
- meowface 6y agoWhat kind of anime profile picture, if you don't mind saying? Is it a character who resembles you and shares your attributes, or one that's dramatically different?
- joshspankit 6y agoI’m curious about the hypothesis that’s driving that question
- meowface 6y agoI could elaborate on all the reasons why I think this, but basically I imagine that an adult male using a female child as an avatar would be more likely to incur ostracization than if they were using an adult male that mostly resembled themselves as an avatar. (I'm just assuming the poster is an adult male. Apologies if I'm wrong.)
- jakobpb 6y agoI have never laughed so hard in a HN comment thread before.
- torusenthusiast 6y agoThe answer is an unequivocal yes
- exolymph 6y agoCame here to post this. Even shorter version: https://external-preview.redd.it/8YFpZC7_jK0aN_fZN6oSq1FqTdrP_6rK6kF3fDJWIeE.jpg?auto=webp&s=a054666460fb5442da47c1eb65f58f6de741ee46 https://external-preview.redd.it/8YFpZC7_jK0aN_fZN6oSq1FqTdr...
- nathanaldensr 6y ago> Therefore, we must once again acquiesce to Betteridge’s law, and adopt our null hypothesis, that having an anime profile picture does not necessarily correlate with your abilities as a programmer.
- jt2190 6y agoAlso: > As for being a “better programmer,” we’ll just equate being better with having more activity on GitHub.
- renewiltord 6y agoAnime profile pictures in CSGO mean you are a hacker.
- manishsharan 6y agoNot clicking or viewing this article improved my productivity. Does that count ?
- ipnon 6y agoNatural language aptitude seems to predict programming ability better than mathematical aptitude.[1] Should we be surprised that fans of foreign language TV seem to have some talent for programming? [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-60661-8#Sec15 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-60661-8#Sec15
- throwanem 6y agoIf they prefer dubs, maybe.
- lousken 6y agoThe title should be more like Does having anime profile pictures mean you're more active on github?
- benjaminbachman 6y agoTldr: there is no significant correlation between having an anime profile and amount of GitHub activity. A few days ago HN had a thread extolling the virtues of publishing negative results... And here we are!
- nomel 6y agoWouldn't a better coder get it right the first time, with less churn and bug fixes, resulting in less GitHub activity? ;)
- gwern 6y agoFWIW, I think it may be statistically-significant eyeballing the graph. Activities, being counts bounded at 0, can't be normal, and these are very non-normal data, so the t-test is wrong; if he wanted a p-value, https://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/generated/scipy.stats.wilcoxon.html#scipy.stats.wilcoxon https://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/generated/scipy.s... would've been more appropriate, and I'd bet the p-value will be noticeably smaller.
- dilandau 6y agoIf you want to 10x, I suggest an anime username as well.
- Darmody 6y agoThis reminds me of this joke. A guy enters and IRC channel and says: - Hello, is this an anime channel? - Yes - How do I patch KDE2 under FreeBSD?
- kache_ 6y agoWho would you trust more to be able to build out a piece of software to specification? A greasy nerd with an anime T shirt? Or a senior 3 principal enterprise software engineer
- ubercow13 6y agoThat's a tough call. I have never been in a position of managing a project like that with IRL, real developers. But based on my experience choosing software on Github for personal use, I'd say the anime avatar is a positive indicator of quality overall, edging out the smiling corporate headshot by a reasonable margin.
- tra3 6y agoThere was no context to gp’s question. In a corporate environment you’d for sure trust a shiny headshot. You don’t want to be responsible for a greasy nerd but nobody’s been fired for hiring IBM.
- danielscrubs 6y agoThe greasy nerd will be done after a month with something barely working and he will say it’s a masterpiece. It will lack the login functionality but he will say someone else can handle those banalities. The senior 3 principal software engineer will create a 20-something deep layer cake in Java after 3 years. It will be done perfectly to specification and will be as bland as sand. No other programmers will want to touch either, and that good folks, is the state of programming.
- ehnto 6y agoYou're forgetting the outdoorsy profile picture, who will build roughly to spec in half the time using last years tooling. The client will be happy, the code will be maintainable, but whenever something goes wrong they'll be hiking.
- danielscrubs 6y ago
- throwanem 6y agoWhile the chosen line of inquiry is intrinsically intriguing and offers promise of potentially very many valuable results, this initial effort uses activity as a proxy for skill, a metric which seems potentially confounding without the ability to demonstrate strong correlation between quantity and quality of contribution. I'd like to see edits detailing such a correlation, or else the use of a more reliable metric. Unfortunately, as the matter stands, the weak metric used renders the strong conclusion in the manuscript unsupportable, and I cannot approve the manuscript for publication in this form.
- briga 6y agoJust like how wearing Air Jordan's makes you run faster and putting on glasses makes you a better reader
- missblit 6y agoDepends on the anime. Yoku Wakaru Gendai Mahou (never watch this): Terrible programmer Battle Programmer Shirase: Good programmer Serial Experiments Lain: Godly programmer
- ba2plus 6y ago>Serial Experiments Lain: Godly programmer Alternatively, a godly program.
- hguant 6y agoAnything from Neon Genesis Evangelion: Good, yet horribly depressed programmer
- dilandau 6y agoLain is certified midwit tier. It appeals to the r/iamverysmart types.
- boomer_joe 6y agoAnd you don't seem to understand
- SSchick 6y agoDoes using your furry avatar on github/slack count? :3
- throwanem 6y agoAnecdotally, I feel like the furry/infosec correlation may be somewhat stronger than the furry/dev correlation. That said, I doubt the difference would be all that large.
- dlivingston 6y agoAs someone who has been involved in academia in some fashion for over ten years, here are my observations (note: this is heavy on subjectivity): 1. Those involved academically or professionally with some form of STEM, seem to be, on average, less physically attractive than the average population. If this is true, we can say that there is an (loosely) inverse relationship between physical attractiveness and intelligence. 2. People who have hyper-lower confidence in their attractiveness tend to have profile pictures of things other than themselves (anime, The Joker, wolves, flowers, etc.). If this is true, then there is a positive correlation between physical attractiveness and propensity to use a non-facial PFP. 3. Therefore, if 1 and 2 are true, then it follows that intelligence is roughly positively correlated with having an anime PFP.
- truckerbill 6y agoThat's not entirely watertight - it's not necessarily intelligence that's correlated with looks; maybe its just influencing what people pick as their major. Maybe attractive people do less STEM because they naturally are more socialised growing up, and spend less time shut away. That results in less STEM knowledge, but not necessarily less intelligence.
- ipnon 6y agoThis is an interesting hypothesis. Attractiveness appears to be weakly related or unrelated to intelligence.[1][2] [1] https://personal.lse.ac.uk/Kanazawa/pdfs/I2011.pdf https://personal.lse.ac.uk/Kanazawa/pdfs/I2011.pdf [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4415372/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4415372/
- szemet 6y ago> an (loosely) inverse relationship between physical attractiveness and intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox 1. certain (genetic) diseases lowers both intelligence and attractiveness 2. I vaugly remember some theory from the early time of population statistics (Galton maybe?), that if successful men (which may correlate with intelligence) tend to marry beautiful women - then on the long run we can expect attractivenes and intelligence to correlate more - but have not heard if it was ever empirically verified or not...
- kjeetgill 6y agoThe conversation here around the headline is pretty disappointing for HN. It's a silly premise but the attempt at answering this question by scraping and correlating github activity and profiles is pretty great fun and hackery. The conclusion, for those skimming the comments: > That provides a p-value of 0.2371. We now have to conclude that the higher average we got isn’t statistically significant, since our p-value of 23.7% doesn’t meet the traditional 5% cutoff. Therefore, we must once again acquiesce to Betteridge’s law, and adopt our null hypothesis, that having an anime profile picture does not necessarily correlate with your abilities as a programmer.
- barnaclejive 6y agoCan this analysis be re-run for profile pictures that have your kid(s) in them?