Does Having an Anime Profile Picture Make You a Better Programmer? | Hacker News Reader

Does Having an Anime Profile Picture Make You a Better Programmer?

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When 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

This is satire right?

Life has gone past satire

We are living in a "Not the Onion" thread.

Satire is dead; you were hearing from eat_veggies.

Satire isn't dead, it's the distinction between real life and satire that's dead

What 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?

I’m curious about the hypothesis that’s driving that question

I 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.)

I have never laughed so hard in a HN comment thread before.

This 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?

As 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.

That'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.

This 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 [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4415372/

> an (loosely) inverse relationship between physical attractiveness and intelligence

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...

Depends on the anime.

Yoku Wakaru Gendai Mahou (never watch this): Terrible programmer

Battle Programmer Shirase: Good programmer

Serial Experiments Lain: Godly programmer

>Serial Experiments Lain: Godly programmer

Alternatively, a godly program.

Anything from Neon Genesis Evangelion: Good, yet horribly depressed programmer

Lain is certified midwit tier. It appeals to the r/iamverysmart types.

And you don't seem to understand

Natural 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

If they prefer dubs, maybe.

The title should be more like Does having anime profile pictures mean you're more active on github?

While 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.

Tldr: 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!

Wouldn't a better coder get it right the first time, with less churn and bug fixes, resulting in less GitHub activity? ;)

FWIW, 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.s... would've been more appropriate, and I'd bet the p-value will be noticeably smaller.

The answer is an unequivocal yes

Came here to post this. Even shorter version: https://external-preview.redd.it/8YFpZC7_jK0aN_fZN6oSq1FqTdr...

Who 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

That'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.

There 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.

The 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.

You'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.

Nah, that’s just the senior engineers self-image.

In reality he created a dumpster-fire because he was stressed (bad management) and went on vacation before the fumes took him. ;)

If you do it over and over, you double your salary because suddenly you’re an IT-consultant.

She builds a masterpiece of JavaScript around Yahoo YQL which she uses until Yahoo stops being relevant and YQL is abandoned. Undeterred she finds an abandoned PHP proxy and beats it with a rubber mallet until it functions as a YQL replacement. Satisfied she continues maintaining a single page web app designed around a single undecorated HTML form so plain looking that everyone who sees it asks "How can you have been working on this project for ten years and it still looks like crap?" She hosts her source code on an abandoned wiki farm instead of GitHub and never changes her profile picture. Same blue wig for a whole decade, yeah!

I don't know what these words mean

> senior 3 principal enterprise

Anime profile pictures in CSGO mean you are a hacker.

Not clicking or viewing this article improved my productivity. Does that count ?

Can this analysis be re-run for profile pictures that have your kid(s) in them?

Does using your furry avatar on github/slack count? :3

Anecdotally, 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.

The 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.

> 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.

Also:

> As for being a “better programmer,” we’ll just equate being better with having more activity on GitHub.

If you want to 10x, I suggest an anime username as well.

It makes me a better programmer.

Just like how wearing Air Jordan's makes you run faster and putting on glasses makes you a better reader

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