7 ms·

GitHub profile achievements

164 points by cqcumbers 3y ago

jacknews 3y ago
just no
laurent123456 3y ago
The "This is fine" achievement is funny but doesn't seem right. The top user ppdemo indeed has a repo where he apparently creates one issue every minute, but there's only a few open issues so he must be deleting them too: https://github.com/pddemo/demo https://github.com/pddemo/demo
- yuchi 3y ago
  You can see that issues’ numbers are through the roof.
- azalemeth 3y ago
  And yet Microsoft's genuinely honest public-facing page is still in the top 13.
- cqcumbers 3y ago
  I did find that suspicious, but that repo has no closed issues either. I wonder if they’re being cleaned up by github in a way that bypasses the issue closed event, because I don’t think there’s a way to do that normally.
- OtherShrezzing 3y ago
  It looks like it reads the number of issues ever created, and subtracts the number of issues tagged as "closed". So "deleted" in that dataset counts as "open".
- sdesol 3y ago
  Here's additional insights regarding the repo https://devboard.gitsense.com/pddemo/demo https://devboard.gitsense.com/pddemo/demo So far, my tool show 54 thousand issues were created by a single person in the last 6 weeks. Full disclosure: This is my tool.
pohl 3y ago
Paging hugoblanc, who has a heroic 14334 +1 comments out there: what drives you?
- moffkalast 3y ago
  Well you know what his answer's gonna be. +1
- CoastalCoder 3y ago
  Because 28668 +0.5 would be excessive. /joke
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  Most of the other users on that that list (#2,#3,#4,#5, and #7) all have forks of the cmssw repository from CERN. They must have some workflow that causes a lot of +1 or :thumb:
clarke78 3y ago
Half of these "achievements" are simply highlighting spam/abuse on the platform which goes relatively unchecked since it still equates to usage & drives up metrics.
- lexicality 3y ago
  Yes, that's the joke
- gweinberg 3y ago
  With the possible exception of patient skeleton, they're all badges of shame.
treprinum 3y ago
Why does every little inconsequential thing have to be gamified to increase engagement? I couldn't care less about how many stars, arctic vault badges etc. do I get in a thing I use to hedge risk of losing my code and collaborate with others.
- naikrovek 3y ago
  you're free to not care. most don't care. but achievements are not the goal, achievements are a fraction of a second of amusement or pride about a career of work. it's not for you, fine. why complain about it? let people enjoy something even though you see no point for crying out loud.
  - treprinum 3y ago
    Somebody is trying to hack my brain to get more engagement from me and steal my "thinking" resources for themselves.
    - swozey 3y ago
      Here you go bud, https://i.imgur.com/2Bg5A4d.png https://i.imgur.com/2Bg5A4d.png Let us have our fun. You can disable it :)
      - treprinum 3y ago
        Should be off by default :-P
  - bawolff 3y ago
    I find comments like these a bit hypocritical. Everything you said could be applied to yourself. Like sure, maybe hating on badges is not for you, fine. why complain about it? It is not a consistent position to complain about people complaining about things on the internet.
- jackson1442 3y ago
  the website is very obviously a joke and is not affiliated with github.
voodooEntity 3y ago
Most of the toplists are just filled with spambots/automations/etc. Also, at least my pov, could this be a quite funny project if better measurements would have been taken. Autoscraping is always a good idea but why not turn it arround and call it a competition. Make people commit their info via a github app to place them in the different rankings and also a global one. Alot of people always want to compete and present theirsel so it should drive itself if spread at the right places. Also you cann add monthyl rankings and stats with persisting medals to earn and keep on the profile page kinda linke a trophy shelf. From here on you can just go the full gamification route with levelling etc. glhf
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
bawolff 3y ago
Why does everyone want to turn github in to gamified social media. The resulting software is the achievement not sone bullshit badge.
- flangola7 3y ago
  Awards are powerfully gratifying and motivational, for some of us especially so. Symbolism is present in every civilization of every era for a reason.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > Awards are powerfully gratifying and motivational I think this is true but only if they're not common and they come from your peers. But I'm no psychologist, so I'm really only asserting what's true for me, not for everyone.
- reaperducer 3y ago
  The resulting software is the achievement not sone bullshit badge. GitHub needs a Participation Badge.
  - woodruffw 3y ago
    This is, in the most basic sense, what the "user contributions" visualization on GitHub is.
- naikrovek 3y ago
  because these achievements are potentially interesting metadata about your work. no one writes software for metadata. people write software, they push it to GitHub, and GitHub gives them achievements which may provide a fraction of a second of amusement. let people enjoy themselves a little, sheesh.
  - reaperducer 3y ago
    no one writes software for metadata They didn't used to because there was no incentive to do anything but a good job. Now there is an incentive to accumulate metadata. And just like thumbs on Facebook or points on StackOverflow, it will be gamed. It will be trolled. All you've done is take the incentive of "earn a good reputation by publishing quality work" and open the platform to people who only care about "Ooh, shiny pieces of flair!"
mattwad 3y ago
Neat! People complaining about 'gamifying github' seem to be greatly over-estimating the author's goal here. Also neat to learn about the free dataset uploaded to https://ghe.clickhouse.tech/ https://ghe.clickhouse.tech/.
- nomilk 3y ago
  I strongly prefer an ungamified GitHub, but can appreciate the OP's work (a nice site and some interesting stats). The two ideas are not mutually exclusive.
  - ugjka 3y ago
    I do like that I have a badge that I have some code in an Arctic vault on photo film
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - swozey 3y ago
    Not only can you turn the badges off in your profile but you are barely even encouraged to participate. I have absolutely no idea what badges I'm missing and I have never once done anything to achieve a badge that didn't come to me by naturally using github. I really don't get why some of you think that github would be drastically different without badges. edit: Here I took a screenshot of where to disable it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36681101#36683016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36681101#36683016
- sdesol 3y ago
  > greatly over-estimating the author's goal here Yeah it is clearly a showcase for ClickHouse which is worth bragging about since it is quite performant. And it has a very strong community as the following shows: https://devboard.gitsense.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse https://devboard.gitsense.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse I am honestly not sure if my solution can handle HackerNews at this point since generating deep insights for ClickHouse (which has a lot of history) is very expensive. For those curious, I'm running DevBoard on a single 128 GB machine with 6TB of SSD in RAID 0 (I'm willing to take the risk) and the Postgres database has over 1000 partitions (including sub-partitions) that are optimized for my queries. I'm pretty sure ClickHouse can be more performant and if the creator of https://ghe.clickhouse.tech https://ghe.clickhouse.tech is reading this, I'm open to seeing if I can't get my solution working on ClickHouse.
that_guy_iain 3y ago
Someone makes a joke post with parody github achievements. Someone else then uses a public dataset to see how many people have these parody achievement. Hacker News: "Gamifying everything is terrible" I think getting angry about everything including parody github achievements is terrible.
- data_block 3y ago
  I think it shows how little the average HN user actually looks at the content that gets posted.
  - bawolff 3y ago
    I think it just shows that people will talk about the interesting issue related to the topic even if its not the direct topic. People are not going to discuss a joke that's not particularly funny. It just isn't very interesting fruit for discussion.
femiagbabiaka 3y ago
Arborist made me chuckle.
fisian 3y ago
While looking at some "top" users on the website, I found this repo that adds trophies to your github profile: https://github.com/ryo-ma/github-profile-trophy https://github.com/ryo-ma/github-profile-trophy Maybe these could also be added in a similar way to show your "worth" to the world even better ;)
mdaniel 3y ago
if you didn't see it, there was recently a discussion on "rejected GitHub achievements" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36607439 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36607439 which I thought had some really good ones
donatj 3y ago
Having to scroll back to the top of the modals to close them is infuriating. Should just be able to click in the gray surrounding them to close them.
- dotty- 3y ago
  CMD+R (or ctrl) to refresh the page is faster than scrolling all the way back up. Ha.
- agumonkey 3y ago
  ho wow, I ran across ui failures of that kind, but usually it's on obscure 90s windows/oracle sub-platforms... this is mind blowing. M-x escape
notatoad 3y ago
on one hand, this is kinda funny. on the other, it seems to be in a little bit poor taste to be highlighting random non-famous people's negative "accomplishments" on a leaderboard like this. i'd hate to wake up one day and find that HN was directing thousands of people to my github profile because i had closed more issues as "wontfix" than any other person on github.
- bsclifton 3y ago
  I'm #6 on that "wontfix" board and it's OK w/ me :) Most of those are from when I migrated our issues from one repo to another. We (Brave Software) do all of our company work on GitHub and have over 10k issues in our main repo. Lots of us falling under `Ideas Person` for opening issues tracking bugs/feature requests/etc. No shame in working in the public
cglong 3y ago
This is great! I wish there was a way to punch in my GitHub username and find out how I'm ranked :)
avg_dev 3y ago
a few weeks ago someone merged a small PR i made in 2016. it was pretty surprising. i had not thought about it in years and had completely forgotten about it.
anon7331 3y ago
[flagged]
thaliaarchi 3y ago
I’m surprised by the low counts for Patient Skeleton. I would have thought stale PRs would be merged more frequently.
- themoonisachees 3y ago
  I mean, by definition they aren't. Also a stale PR is either based on a codebase so old merging makes no sense or the project has been abandonned therefore the maintainer has no need to merge.

164 points by cqcumbers 3y ago

just no

The "This is fine" achievement is funny but doesn't seem right. The top user ppdemo indeed has a repo where he apparently creates one issue every minute, but there's only a few open issues so he must be deleting them too: https://github.com/pddemo/demo https://github.com/pddemo/demo

yuchi 3y ago
You can see that issues’ numbers are through the roof.
azalemeth 3y ago
And yet Microsoft's genuinely honest public-facing page is still in the top 13.
cqcumbers 3y ago
I did find that suspicious, but that repo has no closed issues either. I wonder if they’re being cleaned up by github in a way that bypasses the issue closed event, because I don’t think there’s a way to do that normally.
OtherShrezzing 3y ago
It looks like it reads the number of issues ever created, and subtracts the number of issues tagged as "closed". So "deleted" in that dataset counts as "open".
sdesol 3y ago
Here's additional insights regarding the repo https://devboard.gitsense.com/pddemo/demo https://devboard.gitsense.com/pddemo/demo So far, my tool show 54 thousand issues were created by a single person in the last 6 weeks. Full disclosure: This is my tool.

pohl 3y ago

Paging hugoblanc, who has a heroic 14334 +1 comments out there: what drives you?

moffkalast 3y ago
Well you know what his answer's gonna be. +1
CoastalCoder 3y ago
Because 28668 +0.5 would be excessive. /joke
OkayPhysicist 3y ago
Most of the other users on that that list (#2,#3,#4,#5, and #7) all have forks of the cmssw repository from CERN. They must have some workflow that causes a lot of +1 or :thumb:

clarke78 3y ago

Half of these "achievements" are simply highlighting spam/abuse on the platform which goes relatively unchecked since it still equates to usage & drives up metrics.

lexicality 3y ago
Yes, that's the joke
gweinberg 3y ago
With the possible exception of patient skeleton, they're all badges of shame.

treprinum 3y ago

Why does every little inconsequential thing have to be gamified to increase engagement? I couldn't care less about how many stars, arctic vault badges etc. do I get in a thing I use to hedge risk of losing my code and collaborate with others.

naikrovek 3y ago
you're free to not care. most don't care. but achievements are not the goal, achievements are a fraction of a second of amusement or pride about a career of work. it's not for you, fine. why complain about it? let people enjoy something even though you see no point for crying out loud.
- treprinum 3y ago
  Somebody is trying to hack my brain to get more engagement from me and steal my "thinking" resources for themselves.
  - swozey 3y ago
    Here you go bud, https://i.imgur.com/2Bg5A4d.png https://i.imgur.com/2Bg5A4d.png Let us have our fun. You can disable it :)
    - treprinum 3y ago
      Should be off by default :-P
- bawolff 3y ago
  I find comments like these a bit hypocritical. Everything you said could be applied to yourself. Like sure, maybe hating on badges is not for you, fine. why complain about it? It is not a consistent position to complain about people complaining about things on the internet.
jackson1442 3y ago
the website is very obviously a joke and is not affiliated with github.

voodooEntity 3y ago

Most of the toplists are just filled with spambots/automations/etc. Also, at least my pov, could this be a quite funny project if better measurements would have been taken. Autoscraping is always a good idea but why not turn it arround and call it a competition. Make people commit their info via a github app to place them in the different rankings and also a global one. Alot of people always want to compete and present theirsel so it should drive itself if spread at the right places. Also you cann add monthyl rankings and stats with persisting medals to earn and keep on the profile page kinda linke a trophy shelf. From here on you can just go the full gamification route with levelling etc. glhf

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

bawolff 3y ago

Why does everyone want to turn github in to gamified social media. The resulting software is the achievement not sone bullshit badge.

flangola7 3y ago
Awards are powerfully gratifying and motivational, for some of us especially so. Symbolism is present in every civilization of every era for a reason.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > Awards are powerfully gratifying and motivational I think this is true but only if they're not common and they come from your peers. But I'm no psychologist, so I'm really only asserting what's true for me, not for everyone.
reaperducer 3y ago
The resulting software is the achievement not sone bullshit badge. GitHub needs a Participation Badge.
- woodruffw 3y ago
  This is, in the most basic sense, what the "user contributions" visualization on GitHub is.
naikrovek 3y ago
because these achievements are potentially interesting metadata about your work. no one writes software for metadata. people write software, they push it to GitHub, and GitHub gives them achievements which may provide a fraction of a second of amusement. let people enjoy themselves a little, sheesh.
- reaperducer 3y ago
  no one writes software for metadata They didn't used to because there was no incentive to do anything but a good job. Now there is an incentive to accumulate metadata. And just like thumbs on Facebook or points on StackOverflow, it will be gamed. It will be trolled. All you've done is take the incentive of "earn a good reputation by publishing quality work" and open the platform to people who only care about "Ooh, shiny pieces of flair!"

mattwad 3y ago

Neat! People complaining about 'gamifying github' seem to be greatly over-estimating the author's goal here. Also neat to learn about the free dataset uploaded to https://ghe.clickhouse.tech/ https://ghe.clickhouse.tech/.

nomilk 3y ago
I strongly prefer an ungamified GitHub, but can appreciate the OP's work (a nice site and some interesting stats). The two ideas are not mutually exclusive.
- ugjka 3y ago
  I do like that I have a badge that I have some code in an Arctic vault on photo film
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- swozey 3y ago
  Not only can you turn the badges off in your profile but you are barely even encouraged to participate. I have absolutely no idea what badges I'm missing and I have never once done anything to achieve a badge that didn't come to me by naturally using github. I really don't get why some of you think that github would be drastically different without badges. edit: Here I took a screenshot of where to disable it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36681101#36683016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36681101#36683016
sdesol 3y ago
> greatly over-estimating the author's goal here Yeah it is clearly a showcase for ClickHouse which is worth bragging about since it is quite performant. And it has a very strong community as the following shows: https://devboard.gitsense.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse https://devboard.gitsense.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse I am honestly not sure if my solution can handle HackerNews at this point since generating deep insights for ClickHouse (which has a lot of history) is very expensive. For those curious, I'm running DevBoard on a single 128 GB machine with 6TB of SSD in RAID 0 (I'm willing to take the risk) and the Postgres database has over 1000 partitions (including sub-partitions) that are optimized for my queries. I'm pretty sure ClickHouse can be more performant and if the creator of https://ghe.clickhouse.tech https://ghe.clickhouse.tech is reading this, I'm open to seeing if I can't get my solution working on ClickHouse.

that_guy_iain 3y ago

Someone makes a joke post with parody github achievements. Someone else then uses a public dataset to see how many people have these parody achievement. Hacker News: "Gamifying everything is terrible" I think getting angry about everything including parody github achievements is terrible.

data_block 3y ago
I think it shows how little the average HN user actually looks at the content that gets posted.
- bawolff 3y ago
  I think it just shows that people will talk about the interesting issue related to the topic even if its not the direct topic. People are not going to discuss a joke that's not particularly funny. It just isn't very interesting fruit for discussion.

femiagbabiaka 3y ago

Arborist made me chuckle.

fisian 3y ago

While looking at some "top" users on the website, I found this repo that adds trophies to your github profile: https://github.com/ryo-ma/github-profile-trophy https://github.com/ryo-ma/github-profile-trophy Maybe these could also be added in a similar way to show your "worth" to the world even better ;)

mdaniel 3y ago

if you didn't see it, there was recently a discussion on "rejected GitHub achievements" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36607439 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36607439 which I thought had some really good ones

donatj 3y ago

Having to scroll back to the top of the modals to close them is infuriating. Should just be able to click in the gray surrounding them to close them.

dotty- 3y ago
CMD+R (or ctrl) to refresh the page is faster than scrolling all the way back up. Ha.
agumonkey 3y ago
ho wow, I ran across ui failures of that kind, but usually it's on obscure 90s windows/oracle sub-platforms... this is mind blowing. M-x escape

notatoad 3y ago

on one hand, this is kinda funny. on the other, it seems to be in a little bit poor taste to be highlighting random non-famous people's negative "accomplishments" on a leaderboard like this. i'd hate to wake up one day and find that HN was directing thousands of people to my github profile because i had closed more issues as "wontfix" than any other person on github.

bsclifton 3y ago
I'm #6 on that "wontfix" board and it's OK w/ me :) Most of those are from when I migrated our issues from one repo to another. We (Brave Software) do all of our company work on GitHub and have over 10k issues in our main repo. Lots of us falling under `Ideas Person` for opening issues tracking bugs/feature requests/etc. No shame in working in the public

cglong 3y ago

This is great! I wish there was a way to punch in my GitHub username and find out how I'm ranked :)

avg_dev 3y ago

a few weeks ago someone merged a small PR i made in 2016. it was pretty surprising. i had not thought about it in years and had completely forgotten about it.

anon7331 3y ago

[flagged]

thaliaarchi 3y ago

I’m surprised by the low counts for Patient Skeleton. I would have thought stale PRs would be merged more frequently.

themoonisachees 3y ago
I mean, by definition they aren't. Also a stale PR is either based on a codebase so old merging makes no sense or the project has been abandonned therefore the maintainer has no need to merge.