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Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hope you don't mind, I thought this was a really valuable dashboard.
Not at all! The ShowHN didn't really get a lot of feedback but this thread has already given me a lot to think about adding/improving.
Do people really put weight in stars? It seems completely unrelated to anything but, well, popularity. Even when I modify other peoples' code I fork to a private repo and maintain my changes separately, and I'm fairly certain I have never starred a repo.
Stars have been useless as signals for project quality for a while. They’re mostly bought, at this point. I regularly see obviously vibe-coded nonsense projects on GitHub’s Trending page with 10,000 stars. I don’t believe 10,000 people have even cloned the repo, much less gotten any personal value from it. It’s meaningless.
Programming has long succumbed to influencer dynamics and is subject to the same critiques as any other kind of pop creation. Popular restaurants, fashion, movies - these aren't carefully crafted boundary pushing masterpieces.
Pop books are hastily written and usually derivative. Pop music is the same as is pop art. Popular podcasts and YouTube channels are usually just people hopping unprepared on a hot mic and pushing record.
Nobody is reading a PhD thesis or a scholarly journal on the bus.
The markers for the popularity of pop works are fairly independent from the quality of their content. It's the same dynamics as the popular kid at school.
So pop programming follows this exact trend. I don't know why we expect humans to behave foundationally differently here.
Do people really put weight in stars? It seems completely unrelated to anything but, well, popularity. Even when I modify other peoples' code I fork to a private repo and maintain my changes separately, and I'm fairly certain I have never starred a repo.
I'm one of those zero star repos. I've been using Claude Code for some weeks now and built a personal knowledge graph with a reasoning engine, belief revision, link prediction. None of it is designed for stars, its designed for me. The repo exists because git is the right tool for versioning a system.. that evolves every day. The framing assumes github repos are supposed to be products.
Hold on. I'm in the middle of building this[0]! What the heck? Your email isn't in your profile -- reach out. [0]: https://github.com/ctoth/propstore
Perfect example of a base rate fallacy - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy What percentage of GitHub activity goes to GitHub repos with less than 2 stars? I would guess it's close to the same number.
Off topic, but it reminds me of another principle: every geographic heatmap is just a population map. https://xkcd.com/1138/
I have never cared about LinkedIn or GitHub stars or any of those bullshit metrics (obviously because I don't score very highly in them), and am enjoying exploring a million things at the speed of thought; get left outside, if it suits you. Smart and flexible people have no trouble using it, and it's amazing.
Rather measure how much I've learnt and created recently compared to before, and get ready for some sobering shit because us experienced old dudes can judge good code from bad pretty well.
I used Claude code to build a custom notes application for my specific requirements.
It’s not perfect, but I barely invested 10 hours in it and it does almost everything I could have asked for, plus some really cool stuff that mostly just works after one iteration. I’ll probably open source the code at some point, and I fully expect the project to have less than two stars.
Still, I have my application.
For anyone that’s interested in taking a look, my terrible landing page is at rayvroberts.com
Auto updates don’t work quite right just yet. You have to manually close the app after the update downloads, because it is still sandboxed from when I planned to distribute via the Mac App Store. Rejected in review because users bring their own Claude key.