[HN Gopher] GitHub profile achievements
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GitHub profile achievements
Author : cqcumbers
Score : 138 points
Date : 2023-07-11 14:01 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cqcumbers.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (cqcumbers.com)
| avg_dev wrote:
| 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.
| voodooEntity wrote:
| 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]
| anon7331 wrote:
| [flagged]
| clarke78 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Yes, that's the joke
| gweinberg wrote:
| With the possible exception of patient skeleton, they're all
| badges of shame.
| bawolff wrote:
| Why does everyone want to turn github in to gamified social
| media.
|
| The resulting software is the achievement not sone bullshit
| badge.
| flangola7 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| _The resulting software is the achievement not sone bullshit
| badge._
|
| GitHub needs a Participation Badge.
| woodruffw wrote:
| This is, in the most basic sense, what the "user
| contributions" visualization on GitHub is.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I'm 100% with you in that this "gamify everything" thing sets
| my teeth on edge. But this can easily be ignored. Let the kids
| have their fun.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| This is a joke website. The person who made it was making a
| joke.
| pc86 wrote:
| No you don't understand we're _engineers_ this is Serious
| Business and can only be conducted Seriously!
| naikrovek wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| _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!"
| naikrovek wrote:
| I think you are dramatically overestimating the number of
| people who will do this.
|
| I also think that you are dramatically _under_ estimating
| the transparency of activity optimized for metrics. Those
| that do this will reveal this behavior by virtue of the
| nature of the behavior itself.
|
| Dammit, it's OK for people to like stuff, even if you don't
| like that stuff. You don't like it! FINE! Others _do_ , so
| let them live their own life, please.
| swozey wrote:
| Who cares if 1% of people "game" it? Do you think people
| are actually looking up lists of achievements outside of
| gag websites like this and getting jealous that someone
| else has XYZ achievement to the point that they'll game the
| system themselves to get that achievement? And if they do,
| so what?
|
| So maybe 1% of people do that. We should nuke it for the
| other 99% who literally just push code into a repo, go to
| their profile randomly and see that they've earned a new
| badge?
|
| I have maybe 4-5 badges and I have literally no idea what
| the next one I'm closest to getting is. I don't even know
| what badges I'm missing. But it's still cool to me to see a
| new one show up.
| lucumo wrote:
| > > no one writes software for metadata
|
| > They didn't used to because there was no incentive to do
| anything but a good job.
|
| Whenever I'm leaving a job, I keep a look-out for
| opportunities to change lines that rarely change. Things
| like doctype declarations, blank lines, closing braces,
| stuff like that. If I can change them, my name is
| memorialized longer in the `git blame` of projects.
|
| People will find ways to gamify everything. It's quite
| often a release valve for stress or boredom.
| bawolff wrote:
| I mean, no offense but that's the perfect example of why
| this sort of thing is annoying.
|
| It encourages people to do things that they wouldn't
| normally do that has negative (albeit minor). Extra
| unnessary commits complicate the git log. Intentionally
| getting your name on git blame makes finding the true
| commit slightly more annoying.
|
| Sure these are incredibly minor things, but its still
| encouraging behaviour that is not positive.
|
| Metric chasing is destructive.
| swozey wrote:
| Why do tens of millions of video gamers work to get to 100%
| completion and various goofy achievements in their games? Why
| does Spotify Rewind get posted every year?
|
| Some of us find it fun and neat to see certain
| things/statistics we've achieved/ruined over time.
| slily wrote:
| It's easy for it to devolve into an unhealthy distraction
| from real life. I know a few people who are out of school and
| unemployed and spend their days grinding in MMOs or
| collecting achievements. At least with GitHub you're
| presumably doing something productive to earn them.
| swozey wrote:
| Yeah I honestly find people going for 100% achievements to
| be absolutely strange to me. Same with New Game+ people. A
| lot of the time you have to play the game over and over
| again or do something horribly repetitive to get to 100%
| and people just do it. There are very few non-strategy
| games I ever want to play again as much as I enjoyed the
| first play through.
|
| I feel like the people who don't like "gamifying" github
| think that that's the similar style of github badges.
| Someone even mentioned that "you can't 100% life" or some
| form of that. That is the furthest thing from the point of
| it in my opinion and experience.
|
| But there are definitely a small portion people who go for
| that, I'm sure.
| bawolff wrote:
| But life is not a game. You cannot get 100% completion of
| creating open source software. These statistics (as well as
| the real githu badges) are bad and not correlated with what
| the whole point of it all is.
| swozey wrote:
| There is no way that you can objectively state that "These
| statistics are bad."
|
| These badges literally do not affect my life at all. Nor do
| they affect probably 99% of github users other than being
| an interesting thing to look at when they accidentally
| click the profile button.
|
| I posted a screenshot on how to disable them if you'd like
| to.
|
| What is the "whole point of it all?" Who are you to
| determine that, anyway? Maybe the point of it for some
| people is to code and have fun :)
| lagniappe wrote:
| I find myself wondering what the point of it all is. If
| anybody knows, holler.
| nologic01 wrote:
| I know the point of it all, but make a point of not
| revealing it. Which points to its recursive nature, if
| you catch my drift.
| jackson1442 wrote:
| you can turn them off on your profile within settings if you
| dislike them that much.
| thaliaarchi wrote:
| I'm surprised by the low counts for Patient Skeleton. I would
| have thought stale PRs would be merged more frequently.
| donatj wrote:
| 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- wrote:
| CMD+R (or ctrl) to refresh the page is faster than scrolling
| all the way back up. Ha.
| agumonkey wrote:
| 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
| fisian wrote:
| 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
|
| Maybe these could also be added in a similar way to show your
| "worth" to the world even better ;)
| jacknews wrote:
| just no
| mattwad wrote:
| 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/.
| sdesol wrote:
| > 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
|
| 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 is reading this, I'm
| open to seeing if I can't get my solution working on
| ClickHouse.
| tylerhannan wrote:
| That would be https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=zX41ZdbW
|
| https://github.com/ClickHouse/github-explorer
| sdesol wrote:
| Thanks. For a CTO, he is extremely active in the community.
| Only the ClickHouse robot is on par with his engagement.
| I'll reach out to him to see if ClickHouse is a viable
| option as my plan is to replace GitHub's insights tab with
| a useful dashboard (this is why DevBoard has such an
| minimal look), so I'll need a very performant DB that can
| work with my queries.
| nomilk wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I do like that I have a badge that I have some code in an
| Arctic vault on photo film
| [deleted]
| swozey wrote:
| 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
| laurent123456 wrote:
| 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
| azalemeth wrote:
| And yet Microsoft's genuinely honest public-facing page is
| still in the top 13.
| sdesol wrote:
| Here's additional insights regarding the repo
| 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.
| cqcumbers wrote:
| 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.
| yuchi wrote:
| You can see that issues' numbers are through the roof.
| OtherShrezzing wrote:
| 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".
| mdaniel wrote:
| if you didn't see it, there was recently a discussion on
| "rejected GitHub achievements"
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36607439 which I thought had
| some really good ones
| notatoad wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| femiagbabiaka wrote:
| Arborist made me chuckle.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I think it shows how little the average HN user actually looks
| at the content that gets posted.
| bawolff wrote:
| 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.
| treprinum wrote:
| 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.
| jackson1442 wrote:
| the website is very obviously a joke and is not affiliated with
| github.
| naikrovek wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Somebody is trying to hack my brain to get more engagement
| from me and steal my "thinking" resources for themselves.
| swozey wrote:
| Here you go bud, https://i.imgur.com/2Bg5A4d.png
|
| Let us have our fun. You can disable it :)
| treprinum wrote:
| Should be off by default :-P
| bawolff wrote:
| 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.
| cglong wrote:
| This is great! I wish there was a way to punch in my GitHub
| username and find out how I'm ranked :)
| pohl wrote:
| Paging hugoblanc, who has a heroic 14334 +1 comments out there:
| what drives you?
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| 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:
| moffkalast wrote:
| Well you know what his answer's gonna be.
|
| +1
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Because 28668 +0.5 would be excessive.
|
| /joke
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(page generated 2023-07-11 23:01 UTC)