Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GitHub's fake star economy

awesomeagents.ai

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 403 posts

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#271

Post by cmrdporcupine »

groundzeros2015 wrote: post #267
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer isn't that they're morons. It's that they aren't people who "invest" in "good businesses" to make money, but instead on the whole a class of individuals classed with gambling on high risk ventures that will have absolutely massive returns and they don't care if 90% of them fail and 9% flounder because the 1% that succeed bring in absolutely apeshit amounts of $$ when they are acquired by someone else. Usin…

I know this isn’t quite your point. But for the portfolio approach to be plausible you have to play as if all of them will succeed, and only later sort out the failures. If you mentally say “well 90% fail so I’ll just throw in this dog shit to see what happens” then you increase the failure rate.

Yeah I can see that.

Another thing I was thinking as I was re-reading this thread is that for some VCs the fact that you can game your GH star count might in fact read as a positive signal. It shows you're willing able to play a kind of vicious PR game to get popularity.

Again, VCs not interested in pure technical excellence or geek "cred". They likely want you if you're the kind of person who can stand in front of a room and puff yourself up and make yourself look more important than you are, and frankly "acquiring" GH stars might just be part of that.

I think it's awful, and I could never do that and my values wouldn't let me buy stars or lie about my projects.

Hence I've been working in this industry for 30 years this year, and I'm still a wage labourer.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#272

Post by DoctorOW »

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…

> If a metric or signal matters, there is already an ecosystem built to fake it, and faking it starts to be operational and just another part of doing business.

https://www.xkcd.com/2899/

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#273

Post by necubi »

rib3ye wrote: post #225
kibwen wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

this is compounded by young, newly rich tech workers (no kids, no mortgage, maybe not even a car) experimenting with being a VC because they've recently reached accredited investor status. and it's not just ZIRP. every recent IPO or liquidity event creates literally 500 more of these guys.

Those would be angels, not VCs. VCs manage outside money.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#274

Post by abelanger »

> Our analysis revealed the fork-to-star ratio as the strongest simple heuristic for identifying potential manipulation. The logic is straightforward: a star costs nothing and conveys no commitment. A fork means someone downloaded the code to use or modify it.

This is just clearly...incorrect? You can both modify code without forking it and most software is distributed via a registry or binary download, which also wouldn't be represented in forks. For most projects, the number of forks is a lossy signal for how busy the contributor ecosystem is, nothing else.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#275

Post by georgeecollins »

kibwen wrote: post #254
georgeecollins wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

true, but the way I would frame it is we are all morons in someone else's eyes. No one is as smart as they think they are. The mistake Americans make is thinking that rich people are so smart that everything they do is smart.

Yes, but while we're all born stupid, rich people are subject to forces that actually make them dumber than the average person. Normally people learn from failure because they experience tangible negative consequences as a result of failure. But money is a better insulator than a vacuum, and once you're sufficiently wealthy, failure no longer has any tangible negative effect on your quality of life. Lose ten billion…

I don't really see any evidence that the poor are smarter than the rich. You can say that a wealthy person is more insulated from their mistakes, but I think poor and rich react very similarly to major financial setbacks. Yeah, a wealthy person can do something dumb all the time and not feel it, but then a poor person may be doing as proportionately badly with things like credit card fees or sports gambling. If you think you are smarter because you are a "normal person" then I think you need to consider that everyone is dumber then they realize.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#276

Post by utopiah »

kindkang2024 wrote: post #120
utopiah wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When a metric becomes a target it ceases to be a good metric as they say. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law

Nice to know the name for this — Goodhart's Law. And I think the core reason is that the cost to fake these metrics is far less than what they claim to represent. Stars, reviews, ratings, trading volumes — all cheap to manufacture, and only getting cheaper with AI. I've been thinking about this a lot. These metrics are all just marketing signals to draw people's attention, trying to make some kind of deals. So the fi…

> make the cost of the signal match what it claims to represent.

Well that's the WHOLE problem of trust. There is so much work on blockchain in proof of work, proof of stake, etc in order to protect ourselves from attacks, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack

If you do find a way it would apply to a lot more than "just" GitHub star for VCs.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#277

Post by dredds »

p2detar wrote: post #205
whatisthiseven wrote: post #106

I don't think I have ever used stars in making a decision to use a library and I don't understand why anyone would. Here are the things I look at in order: * last commit date. Newer is better * age. old is best if still updating. New is not great but tolerable if commits aren't rapid * issues. Not the count, mind you, just looking at them. How are they handled, what kind of issues are lingering open. * some of the co…

Totally agree with you. I think Github "stars" are a relic of the past. They should be renamed to "Bookmarks" and exist as a tool for users to just mark interesting repositories. By no means should a repository keep a count of how many people bookmarked it. It makes no practical sense. Active maintainers and commit dates are much better metric.

> Active maintainers and commit dates are much better metric.

But in an age of bots/agents, that's just kicking the can down the road by making it easier to fudge regular activity of practically zero importance. Even worse for the ecosystem than paid like counts.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#279

Post by bena »

xnorswap wrote: post #133
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…

I don't follow American Football so I don't know how coaching contracts work for you guys, but how does someone go 1W 15L one season, survive as head coach to go 0W 16L the next season, and still start the next season after that as head coach? Over here the fans would be singing "You're getting sacked in the morning" halfway through that first season. I guess not having relegation makes things slightly less ruthless…

If Jackson signed a three-year contract, then the Browns would be paying him for three years regardless. Even if they fired him. Then he could go work for another team and get paid by both teams.

Regardless, a coach is given some leeway their first season. They were coming off a 3-13 season, so 1-15 isn't that much of a drop. Jackson could make the case that he needed another season to build his ideal roster.

Then after going 0-16, they were on track to get Mayfield. He could have made the case that if he can't win with Mayfield, then maybe he just can't win.

Then he didn't win with Mayfield.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#280

Post by daemonologist »

sunrunner wrote: post #19
3form wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stars have fallen to the classic problem of becoming a goal and stopping being a good metric. This can apply to your measure just as well: issues can also be gamed to be opened, closed and responded to quickly, especially now with LLMs.

Was it ever a good metric? A star from another account costs nothing and conveys nothing about the sincerity, knowledge, importance or cultural weight of the star giver. As a signal it's as weak as 'hitting that like button'. If the number of stars are in the thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, that might correlate with a serious project. But that should be visible by real, costly activity such as…

I remember talking to some of the folks running UIUC's hackathon (probably ten years ago) and they'd built a sort of page-rank for Github - hand-identifying the most prominent and reputable projects/individuals and then using follows and stars to transfer that reputation. I don't know how well it worked in practice or if it was every published, but it might be more effective than pure star count.

(This was for admissions iirc - they had limited slots and a portion of them were allocated to people with a strong github rank.)

Post reply on HN