11 ms·
Programming Language Inventor or Serial Killer? (2003)
- derefr 3y agoDeeper question: why is Sussman wearing a fez in that photo?
- ufo 3y ago"We're getting really close to the spirit of the computer at this point, so I have to show a certain amount of reverence and respect" https://youtu.be/aAlR3cezPJg?list=PLE18841CABEA24090&t=234 https://youtu.be/aAlR3cezPJg?list=PLE18841CABEA24090&t=234
- nomaxx117 3y agoThis is great fun. Even if it's mostly a 50/50 guessing game it's still quite humorous.
- anigbrowl 3y agoI scored 9/10 and 'true crime' is not an especial interest of mine, I didn't recognize anyone's photos. * HMU if you want to screen new hires/potential business partners, no refunds
- Wowfunhappy 3y ago> no refunds If you get it wrong and they hire a serial killer... well, I don't think this policy will be necessary.
- naniwaduni 3y agoWhat? No, you'd be worried about getting a programming language inventor for your serial killing startup, right?
- smsm42 3y ago"I know you hired me to murder the competing gang, but I thought designing a new multi-paradigm type-safe VM-driven LISP-like automatically verifyable programming language would be much better use of the money".
- quickthrower2 3y agoSelf selected p-hack
- anigbrowl 3y agoI've got a make a living somehow, and keeping programmers out of the murder industry seems like the least I can do. If you let one in pretty soon the whole thing becomes automated and you'll just have AI-powered steamrollers turning the whole thing into an impersonal, generic experience.
- swader999 3y agoDon't ever pick me for jury duty.
- TA23091417 3y ago[flagged]
- pharrington 3y ago"Established much of the design of COBOL in two weeks" that still doesn't answer the question??
- visarga 3y agoThat answers the question why is COBOL so weird. Just like JS, invented in a week, fixed for the next 3 decades.
- keyle 3y agoI'd take COBOL over JS back in 1997!
- zelphirkalt 3y agoThe real question is how many lives were lost, because of COBOL and as such can be indirectly attributed.
- casion 3y agoHeh, I knew all the names by the photo... maybe I should leave the house one day.
- jansan 3y agoAll names of both categories? Maybe you should stay inside a little longer.
- RajT88 3y agoIs there one with file system inventors or murderers?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gabereiser 3y agoDouble Bonus Points for ReiserFS right?
- yowzadave 3y agoI like this because I like to flatter myself that I have a good intuition about people after seeing them, and this shows that I’m completely wrong about that—barely better than random.
- Macha 3y agoIt turns out with the trappings of how serial killers are presented in media (bad black and white photos from odd angles), everyone looks like a serial killer.
- jeffparsons 3y agoThere's a security camera monitor displayed prominently in one store near where I live that makes everyone look dodgy — something about the frame rate and fuzzy image just looks like shoplifting footage you'd see on the news. I see myself on the screen as I enter and think "yeah, that guy's going to hold up the shop or something".
- RugnirViking 3y agosurely in this case the very fact that it looks like a security camera feed is why? wouldn't most security cameras do that right? :) its an interesting thought, that the only place most people see stuff like that is recordings of incidents
- jeffparsons 3y agoI think it's because it looks like an _ancient_ security camera feed, which reminds me of watching security footage on television news as a child. Most modern systems I see don't have that kind of noisy distorted "bad analogue" look so I think they just don't trigger the same reaction in me.
- NikkiA 3y agoPlus the whole website primes you to think that you're about to be presented serial killers. You could do a 'serial killer or ...' about anyone whose prime was between 1950 and 1970-some and has a lot of mostly B&W photos.
- kunley 3y agoGvR !! ;)))
- atleastoptimal 3y agoMaking a programming language prone to bugs/frustrating to work with makes one possibly a stochastic serial killer
- Waterluvian 3y agoI mean instead of killing entire people, what if you kill a small fraction of thousands of people?
- arthurcolle 3y agoThat's how SaaS pricing was invented!
- fud101 3y agodo you really mean it bro?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- 1letterunixname 3y agoLiveness data flow analysis is just a phase a compiler and JITs go through. They'll eventually cease murdering heap and stack values once they've decided to halt. Unfortunately, they use a disposable Erlang distribution Schrödinger cat box to make each decision. Not sure what they do with all the no-longer-cats or what sort of sensor detects ex-cats. Schrödinger couldn't just invent a cyanide sensor. He was definitely a psychopathic serial killer in addition to being a serial pedophile (this bit is true).
- ericls 3y agoAt least I got guido right…
- pteraspidomorph 3y ago9/10. Sorry, Guido, I knew those were the dead eyes of a programming language inventor but I still decided to go with serial killer.
- lukeinator42 3y agoI got the same score for the same reason, haha
- cutemonster 3y agoI got 8, ... The old lady, was 50-50? How could one know if she was one of the spaceship programmers but at old age? But now I realize, the photo looked old too, so then logically she couldn't have been one of them after all :-)
- mabbo 3y agoI got 9/10 (sorry Sussman!). In a previous version of this game on another site, Phil Wadler was one of the computer scientists and I was able to say "I've met that one! I hope he's not a serial killer..."
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- debtless4080 3y ago10/10
- Nevermark 3y agoIsn’t a shotgun murderer a … parallel killer?
- gabereiser 3y agoNot if you await the first shot…
- secf4ult 3y agoYou cannot await in top level, unless...
- jp57 3y agoWhy not both?
- armchairhacker 3y agoCorrection: programming language inventor or convicted serial killer
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoOr doesn’t exclude and.
- avodonosov 3y agoknown programmer language inventor (some of the maniacs could have secretly designed prograrming languages too)
- h2odragon 3y agoJust because they maniacs and did bad things, should we name their private shames too?
- jdjdjdjdjduuuu 3y ago7/10
- nneonneo 3y agoAka, hacker or ‘hacker’. I feel like with enough photos of just about anyone, you’ll eventually get one that makes them look sinister…
- Jigsy 3y ago2/10. Surprised that Hans Reiser wasn't on the list. (Or I didn't see him.)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bagels 3y agoThat one is a trick question if sorts.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- djmips 3y agowow you are almost exactly backwards. do you hate language inventors?
- Jigsy 3y agoNot really. I just assumed nearly everyone was a programmer. "Wow, what a sweet old lady. I'm guessing she invented Fortra-- oh, she, murdered people for their social security checks."
- naniwaduni 3y agoAs far as we're aware, he doesn't belong to either category (yet).
- 3y ago
- neilv 3y agoI know it's a silly game, but I'm slightly uneasy with it. If you remember a time when programming computers was considered nerdy, in a socially discouraged and mocked kind of way (until it became big money)... a game of guessing whether a photo is of a serial killer or a computer programming nerd... might seem a little abusive.
- an_aparallel 3y agokind of agree - its the same "humour" which devolved TV like big bang theory into canned laughter shit-shows - poking fun of "virgin nerds" (which make bank).
- neilv 3y agoAnd worse. When, say, GvR was a kid, it was normal in many schools for nerds to be bullied. Imagine someone doing this game back then, in that context, passing it around school (before cyberbullying), and it'd be pretty nasty. We can say "but computer programming is OK, now that it's a status career that rich kids have blessed as cool, and kids don't get bullied like that in school so much, so now it's funny in a non-bullying way", I guess. Still feels like punching-down, to me, but not everyone knows the earlier context.
- lo_zamoyski 3y agoIt sounds like you're the one doing the punching down by tacitly assuming that who write software are or were wimpy, creepy nerds. If that's not a stereotype, than I don't know what is. And trust me, there are plenty of bullies in tech. Don't worry. There's no one needing to be rescued here.
- wiseowise 3y agoStopping calling people “wimpy, creepy nerds” would be a good start.
- joelegner 3y ago
- ganglandfee 3y agoWell, all I learned is that I’m a judgmental piece of shit.
- prtsh9 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- eru 3y agoI got 2/10. And one of them only because I recognised Guido van Rossum. I'm honestly impressed that I did so much worse than chance. That must require some special kind of (inverse) skill.
- wpietri 3y agoI only got 3 of 10 right, substantially worse than random chance. Sorry, coders! Although I don't feel bad about thinking that the COBOL inventor was a serial killer.
- el_toast 3y agoThis reminds me of a game me and a buddy started playing called 'homeless or math professor?'. Fun times.
- dhosek 3y agoI thought this was going to be about how uncaught null errors kill people.
- icpmacdo 3y agoFunny seeing this I've have the identical idea before
- spott 3y agoRelated: https://www.proforhobo.com https://www.proforhobo.com
- karaokeyoga 3y ago"why not both?"
- temeya 3y ago7/10, so a pass. But as others have pointed out, everything in the photographs (from lighting to the angle of the subject) tells nothing about the subject. Unless you've seen pictures before, you wouldn't know, and even then you wouldn't know. People don't matter. Your perception of them DOES matter and that can change from things such as a single photograph.
- glandium 3y agoSome of the pictures are clearly mugshots, though, and those are all from serial killers.
- avodonosov 3y ago8/10 I thought one photo was of Larry Wall, but that was a similary looking murderer (and a programmer, but not known to invent any language)
- Ericson2314 3y agoRieser FS Reiser, did he make any PLs?
- kasperset 3y agoI scored 8 out of 10! Was fun
- daxvena 3y agoI feel like I gamed this somehow. Instead of looking for serial killers, I looked for anyone who didn't look like a programming language inventor and got 10/10.
- gorgoiler 3y agoRob Pike, Canadian inventor of Golang, an imperative language with a focus on channel based concurrency …aka a “serial” killer. Sorry.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- isaacfung 3y agoWhen ProgrammerHumor mixed with DadJokes
- aatd86 3y agoA true dad joke would be about cereal killers. That's a bit too dark.
- marginalia_nu 3y agoHi hungry, I'm dad.
- jstarfish 3y agoFollow your nose, it always knows, the flavor of death, where ever it goes! -- Toucan "Son of" Sam
- LaurenSerino 3y agoWhy not both?
- arianvanp 3y agoThis is gross
- dang 3y agoRelated: Programming Language Creator or Serial Killer? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25878602 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25878602 - Jan 2021 (139 comments) Can you tell a programmer/language inventor from a killer? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1455383 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1455383 - June 2010 (12 comments) Programming Language Inventor or Serial Killer? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=135299 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=135299 - March 2008 (1 comment) (I put 2003 on it because of https://web.archive.org/web/20031008105832/http://www.malevole.com/mv/misc/killerquiz/ https://web.archive.org/web/20031008105832/http://www.malevo... but I didn't have the patience to wait for it to load. How different can it be though, with that url...)
- ithkuil 3y ago9 out of 10 You'd spot Hannibal Lecter in seconds at a hack day. Your liver's safe
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- skrebbel 3y agoI got 6/10 and it told me better not to work in IT recruitment but joke’s on them cause all our interviews are text based
- muzani 3y agothis is why we tell people not to put their photos on resumes
- BerislavLopac 3y agoI just chose "serial killer" for everyone. In my experience, when programming language inventors encounter all the comments and requests and criticisms from the users of their languages, there is a very thin line separating them from becoming serial killers...
- deelly 3y agoWe need additional button, thats appears after wrong choice. "I wish...". And resulting statistics, of course. Or is it too dark?
- pmontra 3y agoI got 6 out of 10, a poor result according to the site. I picked inventor on the first entry, killer on the second one and kept alternating. Great site, BTW. Plenty of other games and with an unusual twist they are selling them (the sub sites for the games)
- al_be_back 3y agoso that's where Zuckerberg got his idea for hot-or-not
- meekaaku 3y agoJust found out i know more serial killers than programming language inventors
- benj111 3y agoI got 3 out of 10, and one I recogised. Does that mean: A. I'm a sociopath because I'm unable to detect the cues B. An inherently good / naive person that has never needed to differentiate between a programmer and a serial killer? Til: keep away from people I think look like programming language designers.
- FireInsight 3y agoEasy, serial killers always looks more handsome.
- einpoklum 3y agoI guessed "programming language inventor" for all of the images I saw, and I would do so again if I had to replay this "game", because I don't think it's reasonable to assume someone is a serial killer, while guessing they've invented a programming language is harmless speculation.
- michael_leachim 3y ago10/10 but the difference is obvious, you just have to look into their eyes. PL designers are a bit weird and not of this world. Serial killers have this spark in their eyes that is really difficult to hide.
- thombat 3y agoBoth know where they hid the bodies, but for the designers it's a metaphor for the parts of the language they wish had come out better whereas for the killers it's a source of glee that they outsmarted the police.
- littlestymaar 3y agoFor men, it appears that wearing glasses is a pretty good proxy for not being a serial killer, you'll get 6 out of 8 with that. Unfortunately, the correlation is reversed on the women, which makes it a mediocre 6 out 10.
- mcv 3y agoIt took shockingly long before I got even a single one right. Fortunately I recognised Guido. And then there's the trick question where I was right that he looked like a programmer...
- borbulon 3y agoI did NOT do well on this quiz. Remind me to run any time someone says they invent programming languages.
- spacechild1 3y agoI can't believe they didn't include Bjarne Stroustrup. https://www.linuxjournal.com/files/linuxjournal.com/linuxjournal/articles/070/7099/7099f1.jpg https://www.linuxjournal.com/files/linuxjournal.com/linuxjou...
- jansan 3y agoRight, learning C++ was a near death experience for me.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Aardwolf 3y agoYou know you guessed wrong when you select "Programming language inventor" and the description starts with "The Butcher of ..."
- Sindisil 3y ago10/10 Not sure what that say's about me ...