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With so many developers using this package there must be a few here on HN. If anyone here has included this as a dependency I'd love to know the reasoning behin

With so many developers using this package there must be a few here on HN. If anyone here has included this as a dependency I'd love to know the reasoning behind it.

biwills 2y ago
From the description of the repo on GitHub: > I created this in 2014, the year I learned how to program. All of the downloads are from an old version of https://github.com/micromatch/micromatch https://github.com/micromatch/micromatch.
LtWorf 2y ago
To prove a point that download counters are useless I wrote this: https://pypi.org/project/pypular/ https://pypi.org/project/pypular/ Takes me about 7 minutes at home to trigger 1 million fake downloads. I want to use http2 to send less headers and be able to do that in less time.
- compressedgas 2y ago
  > download counters are useless Unless they apply some kind of filtering to discount requests from the same source. If each source address were to only count as a single download once per period and a period was 20 minutes, your million fake downloads if from a single source would be forced to not take 38 years rather than 7 minutes.
  - LtWorf 2y ago
    They would not. In most cases downloads come from a badly setup CI that re-downloads the same thing tens of thousands of times per day. It's incredibly common for them to come from the same source. It would make sense but ALL the project counters would go down by a lot.
- travisjungroth 2y ago
  You can fake counts up but not down. I think it can make a decent measure of popularity where there’s disincentive to be popular (like pypi security). You can set a point where you’ll catch almost all the truly popular packages, plus a small portion of the non-popular. (Although, the ratio of true positive to false positive may be way off, that’s the nature of things with low prevalence).
jayflux 2y ago
A large bulk of those downloads are coming from downstream packages (handlebars-helpers), I don’t think developers are pulling this in directly.

With so many developers using this package there must be a few here on HN. If anyone here has included this as a dependency I'd love to know the reasoning behind it.

biwills 2y ago

From the description of the repo on GitHub: > I created this in 2014, the year I learned how to program. All of the downloads are from an old version of https://github.com/micromatch/micromatch https://github.com/micromatch/micromatch.

LtWorf 2y ago

To prove a point that download counters are useless I wrote this: https://pypi.org/project/pypular/ https://pypi.org/project/pypular/ Takes me about 7 minutes at home to trigger 1 million fake downloads. I want to use http2 to send less headers and be able to do that in less time.

compressedgas 2y ago
> download counters are useless Unless they apply some kind of filtering to discount requests from the same source. If each source address were to only count as a single download once per period and a period was 20 minutes, your million fake downloads if from a single source would be forced to not take 38 years rather than 7 minutes.
- LtWorf 2y ago
  They would not. In most cases downloads come from a badly setup CI that re-downloads the same thing tens of thousands of times per day. It's incredibly common for them to come from the same source. It would make sense but ALL the project counters would go down by a lot.
travisjungroth 2y ago
You can fake counts up but not down. I think it can make a decent measure of popularity where there’s disincentive to be popular (like pypi security). You can set a point where you’ll catch almost all the truly popular packages, plus a small portion of the non-popular. (Although, the ratio of true positive to false positive may be way off, that’s the nature of things with low prevalence).

jayflux 2y ago

A large bulk of those downloads are coming from downstream packages (handlebars-helpers), I don’t think developers are pulling this in directly.