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GitHub's fake star economy

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181–190 of 403 posts

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#181

Post by art_mach »

Yeah, I was pondering a few months away when I checked Pathway, an ETL solution. I've never heard about it but I saw some news that they have created a better model than transformer. So stats:

- link: https://github.com/pathwaycom/pathway

- watch: 115, fork: 1.6k, star: 63.5k

- issues: 32, PR-s: 3

And compare to other ETL tool, like Apache Airflow - used by me and many machine learning folks:

- link https://github.com/apache/airflow

- watch: 777, forks 16.9k!!!!!, Stars: (only!) 45.1k

- issues: 1200 (!!!), PR-s (501!!!).

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#182

Post by consp »

bombcar wrote: post #135
mauvehaus wrote: post #124

Can anyone explain why on earth VC's are making actual investment decisions based on imaginary internet points ? This would be like an NFL team drafting a quarterback based on how many instagram followers they have rather than a relevant metric like pass completion, or god forbid, doing some work and actually scouting candidates. Maybe the Cleveland Browns would do that[0], but it's not a way to mount a serious Super…

This has happened in multiple industries a number of times - publishers discover that people with large twitter followings sell a decent number of books, so they start selecting new authors who only have large twitter followings, and discover is was correlation and not causation. And once it gets out that it’s a selection criteria it gets gamed to hell and back.

You just stated Goodharts law in effect.*

[*] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#183

Post by gobdovan »

whattheheckheck wrote: post #134
gobdovan wrote: post #88

These kinds of articles make you feel like there are specific, actionable problems that just need an adjustment and then they disappear. However, the system is much worse than you'd expect. Studies like this are extremely valuable, but they don't address the systematic problems affecting all signaling channels: most signals themselves have been manufactured into a product. Build a SaaS and you'll have "journalists" a…

Yeah imagine how nature feels with all of the fake eyes and other fake predator signals like bright colors. Evolution finds a way

A way for what? Evolution does not have a will, does not work for anybody in particular, and it's statistically likely that it will work against you, as almost all species that ever were went extinct and almost no individual from just 15 generations ago has left DNA to present people. [0] [1]

[0] http://www.stat.yale.edu/~jtc5/papers/Ancestors.pdf [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11542058/

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#184

Post by ngruhn »

bombcar wrote: post #135
mauvehaus wrote: post #124

Can anyone explain why on earth VC's are making actual investment decisions based on imaginary internet points ? This would be like an NFL team drafting a quarterback based on how many instagram followers they have rather than a relevant metric like pass completion, or god forbid, doing some work and actually scouting candidates. Maybe the Cleveland Browns would do that[0], but it's not a way to mount a serious Super…

This has happened in multiple industries a number of times - publishers discover that people with large twitter followings sell a decent number of books, so they start selecting new authors who only have large twitter followings, and discover is was correlation and not causation. And once it gets out that it’s a selection criteria it gets gamed to hell and back.

Also known as Goodharts law.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#185

Post by dr_kretyn »

Can now someone make analysis of Google Ads fake economy? I'm convinced that the data they share - specifically clicks - is false, and potentially they're paying some fraction to people to click it.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#186

Post by sidewndr46 »

mauvehaus wrote: post #124

Can anyone explain why on earth VC's are making actual investment decisions based on imaginary internet points ? This would be like an NFL team drafting a quarterback based on how many instagram followers they have rather than a relevant metric like pass completion, or god forbid, doing some work and actually scouting candidates. Maybe the Cleveland Browns would do that[0], but it's not a way to mount a serious Super…

Hiring a QB based off instagram followers isn't even that unrealistic. If you can put together a team to win the Superbowl, sure do it! If not, just get together a team that people enjoy following and watching. Much of that would be putting athletes on the field that people engage with.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#187

Post by sidewndr46 »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #145
mauvehaus wrote: post #124

Can anyone explain why on earth VC's are making actual investment decisions based on imaginary internet points ? This would be like an NFL team drafting a quarterback based on how many instagram followers they have rather than a relevant metric like pass completion, or god forbid, doing some work and actually scouting candidates. Maybe the Cleveland Browns would do that[0], but it's not a way to mount a serious Super…

When I took over MLAgents at the end of 2021, before Unity fully shit themselves after the insane Weta acquisition, the main metric they were using to promote the project internally were github stars Yes actually Needless to say they didn’t like when I said this was a worthless metric and we needed to be using something like “working policies” or “time saved training”

For those of us that don't understand what was so insane about the Weta acquisition?

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#188

Post by consp »

mentalgear wrote: post #94

> VC funding pipeline that treats GitHub popularity as proof of traction Why am I not surprised big Capital corrupts everything. Also, Goodhart's law applies again: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". HN Folks: What reliant, diverse signals do you use to quickly eval a repo's quality? For me it is: Maintenance status, age, elegance of API and maybe commit history. PS: From the article:…

Overly verbose and "glitter" readme.md files is a good indicator of bad projects or at least projects which need more attention to be used. It's too often pre-rugpull or look-at-me repos where better solutions are one click away.

Finding any curse words in hidden comments in the commit history is for me a good indication of a human working on a passion project, though ymmv.

And there are always exceptions to the exception of the exceptions.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#189

Post by [deleted] »

mauvehaus wrote: post #124

Can anyone explain why on earth VC's are making actual investment decisions based on imaginary internet points ? This would be like an NFL team drafting a quarterback based on how many instagram followers they have rather than a relevant metric like pass completion, or god forbid, doing some work and actually scouting candidates. Maybe the Cleveland Browns would do that[0], but it's not a way to mount a serious Super…

[deleted]

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#190

Post by tonmoy »

whilenot-dev wrote: post #168
tonmoy wrote: post #164

Steam wishlist, itch.io number of views, YouTube views and now GitHub stars… I’m tired of all the gamification of creativity. Now if you’d upvote my comment I can get same karma please and thank you

Besides the ability to downvote comments after passing a threshold of 500, what else is HN karma good for?

Who knows? The way things are going VCs could start asking claude to review someone’s online presence and Claude might decide karma is the best metric for that
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