Anyone else getting traffic numbers that are weird? I will see something like 300 clones yesterday, but i don't think that is real at all.
GitHub's fake star economy
281–290 of 403 posts
Re: GitHub's fake star economy
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
I don't mean hypothetical things... are there any more thresholds that unlock functionality?
Re: GitHub's fake star economy
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
Listening to All In is a real eye opening experience. Especially when they have guests on and they're exactly like the regulars.
I actually think this take is wrong... but the moment Travis Kalanick was a guest and claimed that he was on the verge of discovering new physics with the aid of ChatGPT was an eye opening moment.
"new-to-me" physics
Re: GitHub's fake star economy
#284Can 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…
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We're all morons outside of some very narrow areas of expertise. By most criteria James Mattis would be considered a smart guy: he earned a Master's degree, commanded troops effectively in combat, and served as Secretary of Defense. And yet he fell for the Theranos fraud. You have to know your limitations, and too many people think that because they're good at one thing they must be geniuses who are good at everything. Engineers are especially prone to this delusion.
Re: GitHub's fake star economy
#285Genuine question: Who uses stars on GitHub? Even if I use a library or tool, it’s never once occurred to me to give it a star on GitHub. Is this a real thing people do? And if so, why?
I guess the idea is to show a small token of appreciation. I do that and I am also happy if I receive some on my own repos.
Re: GitHub's fake star economy
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
An open source project really shouldn't be something you need to "get off the ground." If it provides value then people will naturally use it.
How do people know it exists to solve their problem? Even before LLMs it was hard to get through VC funded marketing by (commercial) competitors. My first Open Source project easily got off the ground just by being listed in SourceForge.
How will fake stars help it getting of the ground?
Re: GitHub's fake star economy
#287I don't know what is more, for lack of a better word, pathetic, buying stars/upvotes/platform equivalent or thinking of oneself as a serious investor and using something like that as a metric guiding your decision making process. I'd give a lot of credit to Microsoft and the Github team if they went on a major ban/star removal wave of affected repos, akin to how Valve occasionally does a major sweep across CSGO2 bann…
The problem is that if this is the game now, you need to play it. I'm trying to get a new open source project off the ground and now I wonder if I need to buy fake stars. Or buy the cheapest kind of fake stars for my competitors so they get deleted. For Microsoft this is another kind of sunk cost, so idk how much incentive they have to fix this situation.
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Re: GitHub's fake star economy
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
> I don't really see any evidence that the poor are smarter than the rich.
This is attributable to survivorship bias. Poor people who make bad decisions either die in a gutter or die in a cell. Rich people who make bad decisions get golden parachutes and fail upward ad infinitum.
> 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.
Firstly, to paraphrase Socrates, I fully own that I'm a dumbass, secondly the events of the past decade made it starkly clear that, yes, everyone is dumber than they realize, and now I'm forced to realize it, too.
Re: GitHub's fake star economy
#289Earlier 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…
> Again, VCs don't care if you'll make a profitable business some day. They're just interested in if someone else will come along and pay out giant bags of cash for it later in a liquidity event. If they get even one of those successes, all the stupid GH star watching pays off. And if that's true, they should be slapped, hard. They're no longer performing a socially useful function, and and have degraded towards pure…
You should start your own VC firm, solicit cash from LPs, and invest in companies like Helios. Go ahead, no one will stop you.
Re: GitHub's fake star economy
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
We're all morons outside of some very narrow areas of expertise. By most criteria James Mattis would be considered a smart guy: he earned a Master's degree, commanded troops effectively in combat, and served as Secretary of Defense. And yet he fell for the Theranos fraud. You have to know your limitations, and too many people think that because they're good at one thing they must be geniuses who are good at everythin…
What does a soldier / pollitical appointment know about finance?