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3/10. Ouch.
I look around and see all these 8/10+'s around here and I have to wonder if a lot of it comes down to having seen pictures of these people before. My own score is DNF, because I'd managed to get one right most of the way through and stopped. That I would have had a better score choosing by coin flip is interesting.
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5/10. It's surprisingly hard...I even hesitated over Guido!
Presumably if it was easy to tell killers by their looks, they'd find it considerably harder to get away with the 'serial' part.
I got 9/10

But I think I know why... I started going partly by the style of the photograph, and partly by facial expression, but not their actual face.

[Edit] shame it's not random or a pool larger than 10, I can't do multiple trials to figure out if I just got lucky.

Even just applying filters or some more recent, casual killer photos would be helpful. For some, the "photo scanned from newspaper" look was identifiable.
Same here. It didn't help that his T-shirt was similar in colour to the stereotypical orange prison jump-suit :)
8 out of 10. Not bad, it seems you can sense logical brains versus clogged drains

They all looked like killers.

Why do people still think they can judge a person's character by a single photograph?

This is an age-old dogma rooted in genetic superiority crap that really needs to die. Even a simple Google search shows a staggering number of these pop-psychology articles being actively peddled to the masses. Oh, if a person's nose is a bit crooked in the wrong direction, watch out!

I would assume that’s precisely the point of this silly game — to demonstrate directly that you can’t accurately judge someone by their appearance. But maybe I misinterpret?
You're quite right. It's absolutely mocking that idea --however lightly in an entertaining way --which is better than the 'we know better lecture' alternative.
Sure, I can see that. It just triggered me a little bit that I was being encouraged to judge people so readily. Plus, the comments here didn't seem to make that connection. They mostly saw it as a particularly "hard" challenge, rather than an exposition of our own biases.
I'd assume many people here interpreted it as a test of general knowledge rather than a test of ability to divine someone's homicidal tendencies from their mugshot.
Perhaps the game was intended to demonstrate you can't judge a person so easily?
> Why do people still think they can judge a person's character by a single photograph?

They don't. That's the point. This was a test of recognizing people, not photo-personalities. You don't need to take things so pedantically.

Hi, I made the quiz and tried to design it to make judging by appearance work as poorly as possible, so the initial daft premise then becomes something a little bit more interesting as you get some wrong. But I think it's reasonable to be wary of the issue, particularly with endless problems emerging nowadays with facial recognition tech.
Thanks for the response. I do appreciate the intent. As you can see, though, some of us don't are more prone to missing the intent. It's even demonstrated by one of the responses to my comment here.

Maybe make that end goal a bit more explicit towards the end? Or maybe it's okay as is, since it did generate a conversation and thus served its purpose.

Out of curiousity, how much work (e.g. in days or weeks) does it take for you to make something like this?

Uhh, it's not perfect, but you can definitely judge a lot about a person by looking at them, from their body language. Video would be better, and of course in person would be better again, but it's not like there's no information there. It's not skull measuring to interpret body language, and some of that body language can come off in a still photo. In particular, I think I can get a pretty good read on how empathic a person is pretty quickly based on body language.
8 out of 10. To be fair, both avocations are attractive to unbalanced personalities.
> both avocations are attractive to unbalanced personalities

<cough><cough>

I thought to make a comment about an excess of meticulousness, but then I remembered Larry Wall and thought about Perl, so I suppose that doesn't really fly.
He's the analogue of the guy who just blew away whole families point-blank.
This reminds me of Cringley's theory that there are two main types of programmer, hippies and nerds. Hippies do big picture stuff and are good at UI/UX etc. but their low level code is sometimes untidy, nerds are great at fine detail and micro-optimization but can lose sight of the overall goal.
You can still set the record for being both though. To balance it out...
I was a bit disappointed by the missed opportunity for a joke: Steve Jobs for the demise of serial ports.
Ironically, Steve Jobs supported USB, the Universal Serial Bus ;-). Maybe we could agree that Jobs wanted to kill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-subminiature ? :-)
I thought Apple was pushing FireWire at the time?
Different purposes. Roughly FireWire replaced SCSI, and USB replaced ADB/serial.
FireWire was replacing SCSI.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac_G3

> The iMac was a huge success for Apple, revitalizing the company and influencing competitors' product designs. It played a role in abandoning legacy technologies like the floppy disk, serial ports, and Apple Desktop Bus in favor of Universal Serial Bus. The product line was updated throughout 1998 until 2001 with new technology and colors, eventually being replaced by the iMac G4 and eMac.

> ...

> A later hardware update created a sleeker design. This second-generation iMac featured a slot-loading optical drive, FireWire, "fanless" operation (through free convection cooling), a slightly updated shape, and the option of AirPort wireless networking. Apple continued to sell this line of iMacs until March 2003, mainly to customers who wanted the ability to run the older Mac OS 9 operating system. USB and FireWire support, and support for dial-up, Ethernet, and wireless networking (via 802.11b and Bluetooth) soon became standard across Apple's entire product line. The addition of high-speed FireWire corrected the deficiencies of the earlier iMacs.

USB promptly kicked out the ADB peripherals.

FireWire is serial, too. It seems that, over larger distances, parallel only is faster up to a certain clock frequency (or if you want to go to extreme lengths to ensure each wire in a parallel channel has the same transmission delay, as Cray did (https://www.reddit.com/r/cableporn/comments/11vku2/each_of_t...)
Right. There was a period in maybe the 2000s? when a number of the formerly parallel interconnect technologies were being replaced by serial ones because the frequencies had gotten high enough that clock skew was becoming a big problem.
I was thinking there would be at least one that's both programming language creator and serial killer.
Would you settle for a filesystem creator?

EDIT: BTW they did include Randy Kraft [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Kraft

Woh, there have been two file system creators that are murderers?
Kraft and Reiser, right?
What filesystem did Kraft create? Wikipedia is silent on the matter.
Sorry, I was unclear. Kraft was [merely] a programmer+serial killer.
maybe creating a file system makes people... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
A similar game is Quant Fund or Metal Band:

http://www.quantfundormetalband.com/

My score there was only slightly better than on Programming Language Inventor or Serial Killer.

haha yeah embarrassed thought I was gonna get 95%+
Someday I want to make a version called Startup or Indie Band.
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Dang, quant funds are pretty metal!
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Magic card or Metal band is also a fun game.
I got cheated by this! Wolverine is both the name of a band (prog metal from Sweden) and a Quant fund.
10/10, I am mildy disturbed with myself that I know by sight with seemingly equal weight both language creators and serial killers.
They say it takes one to know one. The question is if that refers to language inventors or murderers. I got 8/10 right, so I guess I had better come up with a programming language pretty soon. ;-)
Just one question: do you have a basement?
Well this got too dark after four tries before I backed out (I got three right). Gonna go take a shower and do some skin and hair grooming now.
It rubs the lotion on its skin
I’m glad this comment got undead so I could upvote
When you click on a comment's timestamp, you can "vouch" for it, thereby raising it from the dead.
I had no idea! This site has too many weird hidden features
Or else it gets the code again

(Is probably how my compiler feels when I try to be clever)

8/10 I had the advantage of recognizing Sussman, Sammet and Guido. I don't think they look like killers. But I also didn't think that about Dorothea Puente and John Christie who I mistook for planguage designers :-)
8/10. I tried to focus on eyes as a heuristic, for whatever that's worth. I also recognized Guido.
Funny, same heuristic, same score and also knew Guido.
It's a bit tactless to post this while Brad Cox's obituary is the top post on HN.
Are you implying that Dr Cox was a serial killer?
No. I'm not trying to make a disgusting joke. A site that has you judge whether a person is a serial killer or a programming language creator is in poor taste when one of the top programming language creators' obituaries (with his photo) is on the front page. Too soon.
9/10 better than I thought.
In extremely bad taste.
Pretty funny though
Scored 10/10. Marking mugshot-looking pics for serial killers and professional-looking portraits for programming language creators.
Kara Swisher was reminiscing about a similar game on the early web called Lesbian or German Woman which always seemed to trip her up.
The internet needs more stuff like this. I got 7/10 but I couldn't resist calling Guido a killer after the way he murdered Perl slowly for like a decade.
I don't care, I still love quirky perl.
I hope Perl 7 helps Perl make a comeback. Given Larry Wall's Christian background, it would be appropriate for his language to be crucified and then be resurrected later.
It would be great if we could have some stats on the responses. Preferably cross referenced by referrer URL.

I'd like to know what percent of the HN crowd thinks Guido looks like a serial killer.