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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: *

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 code. No one is evaluating all of the code of libraries they use. You can certainly check some! What does stars tell me? They are an indirect variable caused by the above things (driving real engagement and third interest) or otherwise fraud. Only way to tell is to look at the things I listed anyway. I always treated stars like a bookmark "I'll come back to this project" and never thought of it as a quality metric. Years ago when this problem first surfaced I was surprised (but should not have been in retrospect) they had become a substitute for quality. I hope the FTC comes down hard on this. Edit: * commit history: just browse the history to see what's there. What kind of changes are made and at what cadence.

netdevphoenix 6mo ago
> 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. You might not have but the makers of dependencies that you use might so still problematic.
- whatisthiseven 6mo ago
  True, but that is beyond my control. I am not evaluating every package within a dependency tree unless something happens, out of practicality. I have limited time on this Earth and at my employer. My job is not critical to life. I am comfortable with this level of pragmatism.
  - netdevphoenix 6mo ago
    The same response applies to the dependencies that you choose.
psychoslave 6mo ago
You call these baubles, well, it is with baubles that men are led... Do you think that you would be able to make men fight by reasoning? Never. That is only good for the scholar in his study. The soldier needs glory, distinctions, and rewards. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Napoleon https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Napoleon
Brian_K_White 6mo ago
But to someone else, it is a meaningful metric that you bookmarked something. It doesn't matter that the star isn't you saying you liked something. It's already telling enough merely that you wanted to bookmark it. It's only not meaningful because of how other people can game it and fabricate it, but everything you just said, if it was only people like you, that would be a very meaningful number. It doesn't even matter why you bookmarked it, and it doesn't matter that whatever the reason was, it doesn't prove the project as a whole is overall good or useful. Maybe you bookmarked it because you hate it and you want to keep track of it for reference in your ted talk about examples of all the worst stuff you hate, but really by the numbers adding up everyone's bookmarks, the more likely is that you found something interesting. It doesn't even matter what was interesting or why. The entire project could be worthless and the thing you're bookmarking was nothing more than some markdown trick in the readme. That's fine. That counts. Or it's all terrible, not a single thing of value, and the only reason to bookmark it is because it's the only thing that turned up in a search. Even that counts, because that still shows they tried to work on something no one else even tried to work on. It's like, it doesn't matter how little a given star means, it still does mean something, and the aggregation does actually mean something, except for the fact of fakes.
- whatisthiseven 6mo ago
  > it still does mean something Yes...which is why I said it is an indirect variable, as caused by the other things I pointed out above. Age, quality, code, utility, whether issues are addressed, interest, etc. Or fraud. Pretty cut and dry. FWIW, I almost never star repos. Even ones I use or like. I don't see the utility for myself. Aim for a more concise post and don't couch your statements in doubt next time if you want a productive conversation, because I don't know what you are trying to say.
lukasgelbmann 6mo ago
I use stars to try and protect myself from dependency confusion attacks. For example, let’s say I want to run some piece of software that I’ve heard about, and let’s say I trust that the software isn’t malware because of its reputation. Most of the time, I’d be installing the software from somewhere that’s not GitHub. A lot of package managers will let anyone upload malware with a name that’s very similar to the software I’m looking for, designed to fool people like me. I need to defend against that. If I can find a GitHub repo that has a ton of stars, I can generally assume that it’s the software I’m looking for, and not a fake imitator, and I can therefore trust the installation instructions in its readme. Except this is also not 100% safe, because as mentioned in TFA, stars can be bought.
- MrSandingMan 6mo ago
  What does "TFA" mean here please?
  - bsuvc 6mo ago
    The fucking article.
  - tom_ 6mo ago
    The article. Pick whatever adjective you like beginning with F!
  - alternatetwo 6mo ago
    I think it's "The fucking article".
    - inanutshellus 6mo ago
      Yes and to be clear, one uses "TFA" to imply annoyance that TFA hasn't been read. e.g. "TFA covers this already."
      - lukasgelbmann 6mo ago
        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"?
bsuvc 6mo ago
> 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 obscure dependency for something critical.
- whatisthiseven 6mo ago
  > It's a heuristic that saves me time. A bad one. I listed many other useful heuristics. Do you not find value in them? Do you find stars more valuable than them? Take a moment to consider stars as a useful metric may only be useful for packages created prior to ~2015 when they weren't such a strong vanity metric, and are already very well established. This is preconditioning you to think "stars can still sometimes be useful, because I took a look at Facebook's React GH and it has a quarter million stars". Sure, it's useful for that. But you aren't going to evaluate if the "React" package is safe. You already trivially know it is. You'll be evaluating packages like "left-pad". Or any number of packages involved in the latest round of supply chain attacks. For that matter, VCs are the ones stars are being targeted at, and potential employers (something this article doesn't cover, but some potential hires do hope to leverage on their resume). If you are a VC, or an employer, it is a negative metric. If you are a dev evaluating packages, it is a vacuous metric that either tells you what you already know, or would be better answered looking at literally anything else within that repo. The article also called out how download count can be faked trivially. I admit I have relied upon this in the past by mistake. Release frequency I do use as one metric. When I care about making decisions for a system that will ingest 50k-250k TPS or need to respond in sub-second timings (systems I have worked on multiple times), you can bet "looking at stars" is a useless metric. For personal projects, it is equally useless. I care about how many tutorials are online. And today, I care more about if there was enough textual artifacts for the LLMs to usefully build it into their memory and to search on. I care if their docs are good so I spend less tokens burning through their codebase for APIs. I care if they resolve issues in a timely manner. I care if they have meaningful releases and not just garbage nothings every week. I didn't mean for this to sound like a rant. But seriously, I just can't imagine in any scenario where "I look at stars" as a useful metric. You want to add it to the list? Sure. That is fine. But it should not be a deciding factor. I have chosen libraries with less stars because it had better metrics on things I cared about, and it was the correct choice (I ended up needing to evaluate them both anyhow. But I had my preference from the start). Choosing the wrong package will waste you so much more time. Spend the 5 minutes evaluating for stuff that is important to your project.
kevinsync 6mo ago
I usually use stars as bookmarks to maybe come back to some repo I thought looked interesting a year later. Terrible metric to invest based on!
p2detar 6mo ago
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.
- dredds 6mo ago
  > 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.
- onlyrealcuzzo 6mo ago
  As someone else pointed out... When commits are this cheap, if that's the metric to be gamed, it will be gamed. You just create 5 GitHub accounts, and spread your Claude Code commits to 5 separate accounts to make it look like there's 5 active contributors. If anything, we're better off with a fake star economy that is the main thing most people are trying to game, so the signal to noise can still be that it (at least so far) seems pretty easy to tell how many REAL active contributors there are. Though, I should note, 2 heads are not always better than 1. I'm more interested in a repository that has commits only from two geniuses than a repository that has 100s of morons contributing to it.
q3k 6mo ago
I also never in my career have consciously looked at the GH star counter on a repo, let alone used it to make decisions. Instead I look at (in addition to the above): 1. Who is the author? Is it just some person chasing Internet clout by making tons of 'cool' libraries across different domains? Or are they someone senior working in an industry sector from which project might actually benefit in expertise? 2. Is the author working alone? Are there regular contributors? Is there an established governance structure? Is the project going to survive one person getting bored / burning out / signing an NDA / dying? 3. Is the project style over substance? Did it introduce logos, discord channels, mascots too early? Is it trying too hard to become The New Hot Thing? 4. What are the project's dependencies? Is its dependency set conservative or is it going to cause supply chain problems down the line? 5. What's the project's development cadence? Is it shipping features and breaking APIs too fast? Has it ever done a patch release or backported fixes, or does it always live at the bleeding edge? 6. NEW ARRIVAL 2026! Is the project actually carefully crafted and well designed, or is it just LLM slop? Am I about to discover that even though it's a bunch of code it doesn't actually work? 7. If the project is security critical (handles auth, public facing protocol parsing, etc.): do a deeper dive into the code.
rpdillon 6mo ago
Agree! My longstanding metric uses just two values: * Most recent commit * Total number of commits This might have to die in the era of AI, but it's served me well for a long time. Rather than how many people are paying attention, it tries to measure the effort put in.
- creesch 6mo ago
  > This might have to die in the era of AI, Sadly that is probably true. At the very least I'd add release cadence to it and the quality of releases. Mature, good software will have hotfixes and patch releases every now and then. But not in every release and certainly not 50% of the changes. In the same sense I will often look at the effort put in changelogs. If they took the effort of putting things in category, writing about possible breaking changes, etc it is a possible indicator of some level of quality. At the very least I will have a lot more faith in software with good changelogs compared to something that is just a list of the last N commit messages.
grayhatter 6mo ago
> some of the code. No one is evaluating all of the code of libraries they use. You can certainly check some! I do. I don't review the whole repo, but every single time I update dep versions, I always look at the full diff between the two. It doesn't take that long
nozzlegear 6mo ago
> I always treated stars like a bookmark "I'll come back to this project" and never thought of it as a quality metric. Years ago when this problem first surfaced I was surprised (but should not have been in retrospect) they had become a substitute for quality. Same here. I've starred over 1500 projects on Github over the years, and only because I wanted to save them for later use or as a reference for something I was working on. These days I'll occasionally use the star metric as a signal to avoid certain projects as overhyped (especially if the project has a stars-per-day meter).
creesch 6mo ago
> * last commit date. Newer is better To be honest, these days I have more faith in an application or library with a moderate development pace where maybe the last commit wasn't 2 seconds ago co-authored by claude (in the most blatant examples). The same is true for amount of commits, the type of commits, release cadence and the amount of fixes and hotfixes in releases. I don't feel like being a glorified alpha tester so I look for maturity in a project. Which more often than not means that, yes there needs be activity. But, it is also fine if it was two days ago and there is a clear sign of the same pattern over a longer period. Combined with a stable release cycle, sane versioning and clear changelogs that aren't just a list of the last 10 commit messages. On your point of stars, I think they used to be a valid metric in a similar category. Namely, community behind the software. But it has been a while since that has been true. It certainly hasn't been for a while, ever since I saw these star tracking graphs pop up on repos I knew that there was no sense in paying attention to them anymore.
- baranul 6mo ago
  There is truth in that. A lot of claude co-authored repos look frantic and unstable. It will still depend on the contributors managing things properly to maintain stability and not succumb to AI addiction and insanity. > community behind the software Right. You can't just look at stars. You have to look to see that there is an actual community, along with other contributors.
eek2121 6mo ago
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.
- account42 6mo ago
  Except companies aren't looking for the smartest programmer, they looking for a cog to fit into a spot in the machine. In that sense, evaluation someone on how well they do on the de-facto standard platform makes sense, unfortunately.
toss1 6mo ago
>>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.
coalstartprob 6mo ago
[dead]
notamario 6mo ago
With this approach, which I wholly agree with, many stars means approximately nothing, but few stars signals risk. It’s a bloom filter of sorts for finding the right library.
gauravsc 6mo ago
They're doing it for VCs because VCs consider it proof of traction. They're not doing it to impress you and they don't care whether you check stars or not.

netdevphoenix 6mo ago

> 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. You might not have but the makers of dependencies that you use might so still problematic.

whatisthiseven 6mo ago
True, but that is beyond my control. I am not evaluating every package within a dependency tree unless something happens, out of practicality. I have limited time on this Earth and at my employer. My job is not critical to life. I am comfortable with this level of pragmatism.
- netdevphoenix 6mo ago
  The same response applies to the dependencies that you choose.

psychoslave 6mo ago

You call these baubles, well, it is with baubles that men are led... Do you think that you would be able to make men fight by reasoning? Never. That is only good for the scholar in his study. The soldier needs glory, distinctions, and rewards. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Napoleon https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Napoleon

Brian_K_White 6mo ago

But to someone else, it is a meaningful metric that you bookmarked something. It doesn't matter that the star isn't you saying you liked something. It's already telling enough merely that you wanted to bookmark it. It's only not meaningful because of how other people can game it and fabricate it, but everything you just said, if it was only people like you, that would be a very meaningful number. It doesn't even matter why you bookmarked it, and it doesn't matter that whatever the reason was, it doesn't prove the project as a whole is overall good or useful. Maybe you bookmarked it because you hate it and you want to keep track of it for reference in your ted talk about examples of all the worst stuff you hate, but really by the numbers adding up everyone's bookmarks, the more likely is that you found something interesting. It doesn't even matter what was interesting or why. The entire project could be worthless and the thing you're bookmarking was nothing more than some markdown trick in the readme. That's fine. That counts. Or it's all terrible, not a single thing of value, and the only reason to bookmark it is because it's the only thing that turned up in a search. Even that counts, because that still shows they tried to work on something no one else even tried to work on. It's like, it doesn't matter how little a given star means, it still does mean something, and the aggregation does actually mean something, except for the fact of fakes.

whatisthiseven 6mo ago
> it still does mean something Yes...which is why I said it is an indirect variable, as caused by the other things I pointed out above. Age, quality, code, utility, whether issues are addressed, interest, etc. Or fraud. Pretty cut and dry. FWIW, I almost never star repos. Even ones I use or like. I don't see the utility for myself. Aim for a more concise post and don't couch your statements in doubt next time if you want a productive conversation, because I don't know what you are trying to say.

lukasgelbmann 6mo ago

I use stars to try and protect myself from dependency confusion attacks. For example, let’s say I want to run some piece of software that I’ve heard about, and let’s say I trust that the software isn’t malware because of its reputation. Most of the time, I’d be installing the software from somewhere that’s not GitHub. A lot of package managers will let anyone upload malware with a name that’s very similar to the software I’m looking for, designed to fool people like me. I need to defend against that. If I can find a GitHub repo that has a ton of stars, I can generally assume that it’s the software I’m looking for, and not a fake imitator, and I can therefore trust the installation instructions in its readme. Except this is also not 100% safe, because as mentioned in TFA, stars can be bought.

MrSandingMan 6mo ago
What does "TFA" mean here please?
- bsuvc 6mo ago
  The fucking article.
- tom_ 6mo ago
  The article. Pick whatever adjective you like beginning with F!
- alternatetwo 6mo ago
  I think it's "The fucking article".
  - inanutshellus 6mo ago
    Yes and to be clear, one uses "TFA" to imply annoyance that TFA hasn't been read. e.g. "TFA covers this already."
    - lukasgelbmann 6mo ago
      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"?

bsuvc 6mo ago

> 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 obscure dependency for something critical.

whatisthiseven 6mo ago
> It's a heuristic that saves me time. A bad one. I listed many other useful heuristics. Do you not find value in them? Do you find stars more valuable than them? Take a moment to consider stars as a useful metric may only be useful for packages created prior to ~2015 when they weren't such a strong vanity metric, and are already very well established. This is preconditioning you to think "stars can still sometimes be useful, because I took a look at Facebook's React GH and it has a quarter million stars". Sure, it's useful for that. But you aren't going to evaluate if the "React" package is safe. You already trivially know it is. You'll be evaluating packages like "left-pad". Or any number of packages involved in the latest round of supply chain attacks. For that matter, VCs are the ones stars are being targeted at, and potential employers (something this article doesn't cover, but some potential hires do hope to leverage on their resume). If you are a VC, or an employer, it is a negative metric. If you are a dev evaluating packages, it is a vacuous metric that either tells you what you already know, or would be better answered looking at literally anything else within that repo. The article also called out how download count can be faked trivially. I admit I have relied upon this in the past by mistake. Release frequency I do use as one metric. When I care about making decisions for a system that will ingest 50k-250k TPS or need to respond in sub-second timings (systems I have worked on multiple times), you can bet "looking at stars" is a useless metric. For personal projects, it is equally useless. I care about how many tutorials are online. And today, I care more about if there was enough textual artifacts for the LLMs to usefully build it into their memory and to search on. I care if their docs are good so I spend less tokens burning through their codebase for APIs. I care if they resolve issues in a timely manner. I care if they have meaningful releases and not just garbage nothings every week. I didn't mean for this to sound like a rant. But seriously, I just can't imagine in any scenario where "I look at stars" as a useful metric. You want to add it to the list? Sure. That is fine. But it should not be a deciding factor. I have chosen libraries with less stars because it had better metrics on things I cared about, and it was the correct choice (I ended up needing to evaluate them both anyhow. But I had my preference from the start). Choosing the wrong package will waste you so much more time. Spend the 5 minutes evaluating for stuff that is important to your project.

kevinsync 6mo ago

I usually use stars as bookmarks to maybe come back to some repo I thought looked interesting a year later. Terrible metric to invest based on!

p2detar 6mo ago

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.

dredds 6mo ago
> 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.
onlyrealcuzzo 6mo ago
As someone else pointed out... When commits are this cheap, if that's the metric to be gamed, it will be gamed. You just create 5 GitHub accounts, and spread your Claude Code commits to 5 separate accounts to make it look like there's 5 active contributors. If anything, we're better off with a fake star economy that is the main thing most people are trying to game, so the signal to noise can still be that it (at least so far) seems pretty easy to tell how many REAL active contributors there are. Though, I should note, 2 heads are not always better than 1. I'm more interested in a repository that has commits only from two geniuses than a repository that has 100s of morons contributing to it.

q3k 6mo ago

I also never in my career have consciously looked at the GH star counter on a repo, let alone used it to make decisions. Instead I look at (in addition to the above): 1. Who is the author? Is it just some person chasing Internet clout by making tons of 'cool' libraries across different domains? Or are they someone senior working in an industry sector from which project might actually benefit in expertise? 2. Is the author working alone? Are there regular contributors? Is there an established governance structure? Is the project going to survive one person getting bored / burning out / signing an NDA / dying? 3. Is the project style over substance? Did it introduce logos, discord channels, mascots too early? Is it trying too hard to become The New Hot Thing? 4. What are the project's dependencies? Is its dependency set conservative or is it going to cause supply chain problems down the line? 5. What's the project's development cadence? Is it shipping features and breaking APIs too fast? Has it ever done a patch release or backported fixes, or does it always live at the bleeding edge? 6. NEW ARRIVAL 2026! Is the project actually carefully crafted and well designed, or is it just LLM slop? Am I about to discover that even though it's a bunch of code it doesn't actually work? 7. If the project is security critical (handles auth, public facing protocol parsing, etc.): do a deeper dive into the code.

rpdillon 6mo ago

Agree! My longstanding metric uses just two values: * Most recent commit * Total number of commits This might have to die in the era of AI, but it's served me well for a long time. Rather than how many people are paying attention, it tries to measure the effort put in.

creesch 6mo ago
> This might have to die in the era of AI, Sadly that is probably true. At the very least I'd add release cadence to it and the quality of releases. Mature, good software will have hotfixes and patch releases every now and then. But not in every release and certainly not 50% of the changes. In the same sense I will often look at the effort put in changelogs. If they took the effort of putting things in category, writing about possible breaking changes, etc it is a possible indicator of some level of quality. At the very least I will have a lot more faith in software with good changelogs compared to something that is just a list of the last N commit messages.

grayhatter 6mo ago

> some of the code. No one is evaluating all of the code of libraries they use. You can certainly check some! I do. I don't review the whole repo, but every single time I update dep versions, I always look at the full diff between the two. It doesn't take that long

nozzlegear 6mo ago

> I always treated stars like a bookmark "I'll come back to this project" and never thought of it as a quality metric. Years ago when this problem first surfaced I was surprised (but should not have been in retrospect) they had become a substitute for quality. Same here. I've starred over 1500 projects on Github over the years, and only because I wanted to save them for later use or as a reference for something I was working on. These days I'll occasionally use the star metric as a signal to avoid certain projects as overhyped (especially if the project has a stars-per-day meter).

creesch 6mo ago

> * last commit date. Newer is better To be honest, these days I have more faith in an application or library with a moderate development pace where maybe the last commit wasn't 2 seconds ago co-authored by claude (in the most blatant examples). The same is true for amount of commits, the type of commits, release cadence and the amount of fixes and hotfixes in releases. I don't feel like being a glorified alpha tester so I look for maturity in a project. Which more often than not means that, yes there needs be activity. But, it is also fine if it was two days ago and there is a clear sign of the same pattern over a longer period. Combined with a stable release cycle, sane versioning and clear changelogs that aren't just a list of the last 10 commit messages. On your point of stars, I think they used to be a valid metric in a similar category. Namely, community behind the software. But it has been a while since that has been true. It certainly hasn't been for a while, ever since I saw these star tracking graphs pop up on repos I knew that there was no sense in paying attention to them anymore.

baranul 6mo ago
There is truth in that. A lot of claude co-authored repos look frantic and unstable. It will still depend on the contributors managing things properly to maintain stability and not succumb to AI addiction and insanity. > community behind the software Right. You can't just look at stars. You have to look to see that there is an actual community, along with other contributors.

eek2121 6mo ago

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.

account42 6mo ago
Except companies aren't looking for the smartest programmer, they looking for a cog to fit into a spot in the machine. In that sense, evaluation someone on how well they do on the de-facto standard platform makes sense, unfortunately.

toss1 6mo ago

>>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.

coalstartprob 6mo ago

[dead]

notamario 6mo ago

With this approach, which I wholly agree with, many stars means approximately nothing, but few stars signals risk. It’s a bloom filter of sorts for finding the right library.

gauravsc 6mo ago

They're doing it for VCs because VCs consider it proof of traction. They're not doing it to impress you and they don't care whether you check stars or not.