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GitHub's fake star economy

awesomeagents.ai

361–370 of 403 posts

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and to be clear, one uses "TFA" to imply annoyance that TFA hasn't been read. e.g. "TFA covers this already."

That’s not something I wanted to imply. It can also stand for "the fine article". Is there a better shorthand for "the article linked at top of the page" / "the original article"?

TFA works fine either way. It's OK that it is subject to interpretation.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#362
post #84
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I especially love issues automatically "closed due to inactivity" just to keep the number of issues down :V

Sometimes people open issues without proper information. It cant be replicated and nobody else is jumping in that it affects them. You may suspect its something else, maybe with their environment, but if they don't engage what else can you do? Tell them you are closing it and specify what kind of info you need if they ever get around to providing it and it can be reopened.

"Unable to reproduce" is a fair enough explicit close reason. This is more about those "stale" bots that exist that just kinda close the issues because there hasn't been any response for X days. The annoyance with the practice usually stems from the fact that many of the victims of this comes from a lack of maintainer response.

This sort of bot punishes users for making even valid reports that aren't fixed immediately or missed by the maintainers for whatever reason including transitory ones, etc.

Constantly bumping threads/issues/whatever is generally considered rude, so this is why issue reporters generally don't do it, plus generally the reporter isn't solely focused on that particular issue

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#363

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…

Honestly, anyone using Github as a basis for hiring to begin with is approaching hiring with flawed thinking. Github isn't the only source for git, and git isn't the only standard for version control. Further, Github has been pushing companies AWAY from the platform thanks to high costs and other nonsense. I've seen more than one company either run a local git server or something like a local git lab instance. Using github as a metric just ensures that you eliminate anyone not using github. That includes many amazing open source devs, for example.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#364

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…

>>The FTC's 2024 rule banning fake social influence metrics carries penalties of $53,088 per violation - and the SEC has already charged startup founders for inflating traction metrics during fundraising

Six million fake stars is just what this small crew found, likely in a matter of hours.

A fine of $53,088 times six million is 318.528 billion.

Just going hard after a small portion of that should both put an end to it and a slight dent in the deficit.

This kind of fraud is rampant because everyone concludes the way to win is not to make a real advance, but to simply game the system. Seems they are not wrong because the lack of enforcement makes the rules meaningless.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#365
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 I do it all the time, whenever there are competing libraries to choose among. It's a heuristic that saves me time. If one library has 1,000 stars and the other has 15, I'm going to default to the 1,000 stars. I also look at download count and release frequency. Basically I don't want to use some obscur…

> If one library has 1,000 stars and the other has 15, I'm going to default to the 1,000 stars. There are clearly inflection points where stars become useful, with "nobody has ever used this package" and "Meta/Alphabet pays to develop/maintain this package" on the two extremes. I'm less sure what the signal says in-between those extremes. We have 2 packages, one has 5,000 stars, the other has 10,000 stars - what does…

If the goals relate to maintenance and viability, we’re looking for a minimum threshold of implementation. Amazon and Microsoft have a lot of stars, both have ‘more than enough’ to care.

If the goals are marketing or targeting or mass-market appeal or hiring pools then those stars say something else.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#366

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…

[dead]

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#367

My project https://github.com/socketCluster/socketcluster has been accumulating stars slowly but steadily over about 13 years. Now it has over 6k stars but it doesn't seem to mean much nowadays as a metric. It sucks having put in the effort and seeing it get lost in a sea of scams and seeing people doubting my project's own authenticity. It does feel like everything is a scam nowadays though. All the numbers seem fak…

That’s okay. I’m there with you too with about the same cumulative.

I measure my own projects by the enjoyment I got out of them. No sense in chasing validation from others when ones only metric will forever be what’s in their own control.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#368
post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> We're all morons outside of some very narrow areas of expertise speak for yourself, I guess? Some people know things in many areas. But even if they are not experts outside of their areas of expertise, they may recognize their limitations in other areas and thus avoid making costly mistakes. This may even be the rule for adults, rather than the exception.

Some people believe they know things in many areas. This is typically the Dunning-Kruger effect in action.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#369
post #143

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…

> 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 I do it all the time, whenever there are competing libraries to choose among. It's a heuristic that saves me time. If one library has 1,000 stars and the other has 15, I'm going to default to the 1,000 stars. I also look at download count and release frequency. Basically I don't want to use some obscur…

And that's fine if you're just writing a toy program for personal use. But it's deeply problematic if you have to rely on that library for anything important. This type of lazy approach to the software bill-of-materials has gotten a lot of organizations into trouble with exploitable security flaws.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#370
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 I do it all the time, whenever there are competing libraries to choose among. It's a heuristic that saves me time. If one library has 1,000 stars and the other has 15, I'm going to default to the 1,000 stars. I also look at download count and release frequency. Basically I don't want to use some obscur…

> If one library has 1,000 stars and the other has 15, I'm going to default to the 1,000 stars. There are clearly inflection points where stars become useful, with "nobody has ever used this package" and "Meta/Alphabet pays to develop/maintain this package" on the two extremes. I'm less sure what the signal says in-between those extremes. We have 2 packages, one has 5,000 stars, the other has 10,000 stars - what does…

At the 10,000 star level, my worry is going to be how tempting a target it is for a supply chain attack. (Most likely via one of it's dependencies.)
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