[HN Gopher] GitHub Star History Graph
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GitHub Star History Graph
Author : bokenator
Score : 92 points
Date : 2022-05-28 17:44 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (star-history.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (star-history.com)
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| I wrote a tiny tool to calculate a "brightness" score for a repo,
| which looks at the total number of stars _that the people who
| starred your repo_ have.
|
| The idea being that people who starred your repo who themselves
| have tons of stars are likely "better" in that they are likely to
| be experienced, intelligent users, and not bots.
|
| https://github.com/Hellisotherpeople/Bright
| samwillis wrote:
| If you want see the effect of HN on a new repository:
| https://star-history.com/#samwillis/tetra&Date
|
| It was on the HN homepage for about 5 hours yesterday, never
| higher than about 25. The initial jump on the 25th was some
| attention on Twitter. Also the HN link was to the website, not
| the GitHub. I imagine if it had been a link to the repository the
| stars would be higher.
| jackconsidine wrote:
| I use this a lot. I find it interesting to compare trajectories
| of similar projects. it's often hard to predict the popularity
| (or at least star count) of a library. Case in point, back when
| Bootstrap was in vogue I always found the Vue.js version of far
| superior to the react-strap (and react-bootstrap) in terms of
| API, documentation, and support. Yet bootstrap-vue never came
| that close to catching it's React counterparts in stars.
|
| To play devil's advocate to those who thumb their noses at GH
| stars, I've found this metric to be a helpful proxy in my career
| when choosing libraries.
| viraptor wrote:
| Slightly related, but... what is it with stars? I've never
| starred a repo and don't understand why I would want to. Yet it
| seems to be a popularity contest people care about for some
| reason, even though it correlates strongly with forks/issues/prs
| so you get the same idea about usage from those. Does it go at
| all beyond a "like", or am I just too old to get it?
| irrational wrote:
| I use it as a bookmark. Under my own account I can find the
| repos I have starred.
| hk__2 wrote:
| GitHub recently added a feature where you can organize your
| stars in lists, so you decide what they mean. My lists include
| for example "useful CLI tools", "languages", and "projects to
| contribute to". Outside of this feature, I mostly use the stars
| as a 'like' button.
| frou_dh wrote:
| It's a 2-in-1 like & bookmark.
| asaddhamani wrote:
| I think of it as a "like" or a bookmark, if I come across a
| repo and I find it interesting or useful, I star it.
| onionisafruit wrote:
| It makes me feel good when I see one of my projects getting
| stars. When I star a project it is with the hope that another
| maintainer will have a similar good feeling.
| loudthing wrote:
| Github has always had a bad history graph. I've always wondered
| why we can't just have a live Github history graph like in
| Sourcetree.
| nateb2022 wrote:
| Is that a pentagram?
| herpderperator wrote:
| Anyone know how they're creating such a cool chart like that?
| mgdlbp wrote:
| The chart is generated by this,[0] which looks like a custom
| implementation using the same technique as this xkcd-style
| chart library[1] made by the same person who started this site
| (according to the footer).
|
| [0] https://github.com/bytebase/star-
| history/tree/main/packages/...
|
| [1] https://github.com/timqian/chart.xkcd
| Raed667 wrote:
| For me, stars have an inverse correlation with actual usage. I'll
| star projects I want to look at some day, because they seem cool,
| like Svelte or Vite.
|
| But projects I work with daily, I don't need to star them to
| remember they exits, like React or Webpack.
| somecommit wrote:
| ouch... I starr-ed Vite like, 1 hour ago... but somehow I feel
| you are right...
| woodruffw wrote:
| I'm in the same boat. But it seems like there's a broad range
| of different use patterns for them.
| [deleted]
| The_Colonel wrote:
| For every professional React developer, there's probably ten
| people who consider React cool and something to learn in the
| future, while they haven't even heard about Svelte or Vite.
| kortilla wrote:
| Doubtful anyone thinks react is cool at this point. It's more
| of a thing you just need to use for your job. It's like Java
| at this point.
| yreg wrote:
| Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2021:
|
| - 69% of respondents love React, 31% dread React
|
| - 25% of developers who are not using React would like to
| use it (1st place among web frameworks)
|
| https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021
| naikrovek wrote:
| that survey seems like more of a survey of the hive-mind
| and less of a survey of real opinions.
|
| I recall one year there were SO MANY people saying that
| they loved Rust (enough to make it the most loved
| language in the survey) but the number of people who
| answered that they were actually using Rust was far, far
| smaller. something like 10% of the number of people who
| claim to love it have ever used it for any purpose.
|
| I think someone could easily cherry pick results from
| this survey to back any opinion they have, completely
| independent of any actual "truth."
| dtolnay wrote:
| I made a CLI version of a star history grapher for my own use,
| because I wasn't happy with the granularity of the graphs
| available in the various online incarnations of this.
|
| https://github.com/dtolnay/star-history
|
| Here is a side-by-side comparison of graphs generated by star-
| history.com vs my tool: https://github.com/dtolnay/star-
| history/issues/8
|
| You can distinguish a lot finer structure in my graph: coinciding
| with individual blog posts with not as much reach as something on
| Hacker News front page. That structure is almost entirely
| concealed in star-history.com by the cartoony graphs.
| vjeux wrote:
| https://www.npmtrends.com/ if you want the same for npm data.
| alcover wrote:
| I get many stars on my last project but no issues or PR. It feels
| quite lonely and, more importantly, I can't know if my work is
| going in a good direction.
|
| I think people mainly use stars as bookmark.
| cube2222 wrote:
| I recommend adding telemetry to your project for this (and I
| know a lot of people feel strongly about this, so I'll add:
| with a very easy way of disabling it).
|
| In OctoSQL[0] I'm literally just sending JSON files with coarse
| information about 1. invocations of the CLI, 2. features used
| in these invocations, to a VM on DigitalOcean (with a 10-line
| server receiving them and writing to a JSON file - which I can
| then process using OctoSQL itself).
|
| Thanks to this I knew that until recently most of what I had
| were stars, not actual usage, and could also see how the big
| rewrite I released in January (and the following updates) made
| a lot of people start actually using it since. Very nice
| feeling :)
|
| All telemetry logic in OctoSQL is actually contained in a
| single short file[1].
|
| PS: Keep in mind that https requests take a long time, as they
| need to do a few roundtrips for the TLS handshake. Don't do
| that on every invocation if you have latency-sensitive
| invocations. I.e. in OctoSQL I'm only sending aggregated
| telemetry data every 10 invocations (as well as on the very
| first one).
|
| [0]:https://github.com/cube2222/octosql
|
| [1]:https://github.com/cube2222/octosql/blob/main/telemetry/tel
| e...
| nyellin wrote:
| Octosql looks very cool! Thanks for posting.
|
| Also agree with you about telemetry. We send some minimal
| telemetry in Robusta (also easily disabled) and it's been a
| big help for us as a project.
|
| https://github.com/robusta-dev/robusta
| dataangel wrote:
| do you warn users about the telemetry? OSS users and
| developers in particular are pretty hostile to it, especially
| when it's default
| cube2222 wrote:
| Please judge for yourself in this asciinema I've just
| uploaded whether it's enough of a warning:
| https://asciinema.org/a/eWQsyXQKi1fmithyTekAD5fWS
| fuzzythinker wrote:
| I think of stars as encouragement, so I give them when it has
| fewer than a few-k stars and is well maintained, or if not, to
| encourage it.
| necessary wrote:
| Is there an established way that people advertise their open
| source projects to developers for help? I know that GitHub has
| exploration features but when I last used them it felt like
| looking for a needle in a haystack.
| alcover wrote:
| Not that I know of. Especially for C. I resorted to re-post
| to reddit when I reach a subjective milestone but the returns
| are slim. Also I hear people may dislike such an auto-
| promoting endeavour...
|
| First time I posted an early naive version of my string lib,
| the thread became a deluge of 500+ reactions and constructive
| advice. Subsequent submissions with a much better work got me
| depressed.
| swyx wrote:
| i use this thing all the time, but wish i had the option to turn
| off the XKCD style charts to some thing more "professional"
| woodruffw wrote:
| Very cool. I had no idea GitHub's API kept history statistics for
| stars!
| dabeeeenster wrote:
| I don't think it does...
| woodruffw wrote:
| It looks like they're using the `starred_at` timestamp, which
| is indeed provided by GitHub's stars API[1].
|
| Edit: the code in question[2].
|
| [1]:
| https://docs.github.com/en/rest/activity/starring#custom-
| med...
|
| [2]: https://github.com/bytebase/star-
| history/blob/c8c66678db8015...
| est31 wrote:
| Yeah and therefore, it's not the actual history because it
| only tracks the dates of when the people who have currently
| starred it have started starring it. It's a detail, but if
| someone unstars, it will be treated as if that person had
| never starred the project in the first place. Or in other
| terms, whatever graph is shown, you will never see it go
| down.
| dabeeeenster wrote:
| Ah my mistake! Thanks!
| jerryjerryjerry wrote:
| Star can only show part of the truth, and a more comprehensive
| analysis may be needed to show popularity in multiple dimensions,
| like this website does: https://ossinsight.io/
| dabeeeenster wrote:
| I wish Github were more permissive with traffic-related data to
| your Github pages. I'm not expecting GA tags, but being able to
| see > 14 days of page view history would be a good start.
|
| Anyone know of any other solutions around this sort of thing?
| matsemann wrote:
| Yeah, I don't want to include trackers because of privacy. But
| it would be nice to see which pages are accessed, and from
| where the visitors are coming. I don't need more than that, and
| that can be gathered from the access logs.
| slimsag wrote:
| In my opinion, analytics should be minimal, 100% anonymous,
| aggregated, and _open to the public_ - otherwise it's spying.
|
| I use a self-hosted Plausible analytics server to implement
| this[0] across all my websites, so it's all public and you
| get to see exactly what I see[1][2].
|
| [0] https://hexops.com/privacy/
|
| [1] https://opendata.hexops.com/devlog.hexops.com
|
| [2] https://opendata.hexops.com/machengine.org
| jcheng wrote:
| I'm with you on minimal, 100% anonymous, and aggregated,
| but why does the data need to be open to the public to not
| be spying? Genuinely curious, you've clearly thought about
| this a lot.
| slimsag wrote:
| There are only two reasons it would need to be private:
|
| (1) you're collecting data where if it was public, people
| would be outraged. That's spying.
|
| (2) you believe the data is anonymous and valuable, but
| only you / your group should benefit from the insights it
| provides. You're afraid someone else is going to 'take
| your ideas' and execute them better than you can.
|
| Point 1 is ethically wrong, in my view. Point 2 is not
| ethically wrong, but IMO means what you are just trying
| to run a monopoly on an idea. That's fine, people do it
| all the time, especially companies - but I think this is
| wrong for the progress of humanity overall and I dislike
| it.
| willcipriano wrote:
| Someone saving all the letters you have written them
| isn't spying on you, you have just been careless to write
| down so many private things.
|
| The easier way is to assume all signals emitted by your
| computer are being consumed somewhere (Hey CIA friends!)
| and not emit anything you don't want detected.
| slimsag wrote:
| Say I hire a company that sends someone to help with
| cleaning around the house. Every week, they send someone
| out and we're both happy with the arrangement.
|
| Later, I find out from someone who works there that in
| fact when they send someone to your house they are
| instructed to record all the audio in your home, write
| down everything you buy, who else is in your home, and
| where everyone works. They are to return this information
| to the company.
|
| Your argument is that it's my fault for using a service
| that does this, and my fault for not noticing I am being
| spied on. I can agree it's safer to assume everyone is
| spying on me at all times - but that doesn't mean we
| shouldn't name and shame everyone who is, in fact,
| instructing all of their agents to spy on you.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| If the data is public, you're instantly able to be held
| accountable for the data you're collecting. Others can
| determine if you are doing something privacy invasive,
| intentionally or inadvertently.
|
| Public analytics therefore help ensure and demonstrate
| your analytics are ethical.
| edflsafoiewq wrote:
| Why?
| liorgrossman wrote:
| Love the xkcd style chart!
|
| <shameless-plug> We also show the GitHub star history, alongside
| npm download history, issue and PR stats on Openbase:
| https://openbase.com/js/react/insights </shameless-plug>
| BonoboIO wrote:
| https://openbase.com/categories/rust/most-popular-rust-libra...
|
| Does not work. Only JavaScript top list work for me.
| liorgrossman wrote:
| Thanks for the heads up! We'll take a look.
| amrrs wrote:
| Tutorial on building it with Python https://youtu.be/TzF-OUA1Tlo
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