[HN Gopher] Introducing the new star-history.com - the missing G...
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       Introducing the new star-history.com - the missing GitHub star
       history graph
        
       Author : tianzhou
       Score  : 65 points
       Date   : 2022-01-23 15:18 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (star-history.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (star-history.com)
        
       | jstrieb wrote:
       | This is very cool! I like that multiple repos can be added to the
       | graph at once. Previously, I have used https://starchart.cc/,
       | which is similar, but lacks this feature.
        
       | RobotCaleb wrote:
       | Tangential: I know there are people who collect stars on their
       | projects and use them as badges of pride and perhaps put them on
       | their resumes. I've never quite understood this. I never look at
       | how many stars a project has and I have never starred a project
       | as far as I am aware.
       | 
       | What am I missing?
        
         | lancesells wrote:
         | I use them as a bookmark in Github.
        
           | seanw444 wrote:
           | Same here. Sometimes I'll go through bouts of starring tons
           | of cool repositories that I find useful or interesting, to
           | save them for later when I have time to fully check them out,
           | or when I know they'll come in handy.
        
         | bewuethr wrote:
         | I use stars and the new lists feature built on top of it mostly
         | like a GitHub specific bookmarks tool.
        
           | efrecon wrote:
           | I feel the new list feature is missing the ability to have
           | many lists. 10 (or whatever the max is, can't remember) is
           | too little. I'd like to have many more categories available.
           | What do you all think?
        
         | BugsJustFindMe wrote:
         | Stars are a soft indicator of community reach. Between any two
         | similar projects, one with more stars has plausibly more people
         | aware of its existence and more people who wanted to say "I
         | like this".
         | 
         | "I never do X, therefore..." is a closed mindset that people
         | should try to get away from. Ok, so you don't star projects.
         | But clearly other people in general do star projects, so stars
         | shouldn't be a huge mystery.
        
           | goodpoint wrote:
           | Stars are very much unrelated to quality and impact of a
           | project.
           | 
           | Case in point: the top 20 starred projects include joke
           | projects, "awesome" lists and some javascript stuff.
           | 
           | It's probably also easy to buy stars.
        
             | manquer wrote:
             | It is relative to other tools in the same space and beyond
             | a point it is meaningless.
             | 
             | I.e. I would be happy to find a library with 100 stars in
             | say elixir and similar threshold would be say few thousands
             | in JavaScript.
             | 
             | Beyond 10-20k it is just popularity. It is meaningless
             | whether vue or react is more popular.
             | 
             | Also it is only one indicator between choosing libraries,
             | how many active contributors, how many closed and open
             | issues , when was the last release also matters as well.
             | 
             | Bottom line is you try to avoid something very few people
             | use or only one guy is developing
        
             | ma2rten wrote:
             | I'm not sure what your point is. Stars are decent indictor
             | when comparing two projects in the same category.
        
             | throwthere wrote:
             | Yeah they're a rough universal indicator. Unless you can
             | mention a better one that's just as simple I don't think
             | the counterpoint you're making is very strong.
        
           | RobotCaleb wrote:
           | Well, right. Which is why I asked the question. Appreciate
           | the answer!
        
           | isomel wrote:
           | >"I never do X, therefore..."
           | 
           | That's not what he said, he said rather "I never do X, what
           | am I missing?"
        
         | nurgasemetey wrote:
         | I use github stars with
         | https://github.com/abhijithvijayan/stargazed for bookmarking.
         | It really makes easier finding something by keyword.
        
           | RobotCaleb wrote:
           | That seems like a pretty worthwhile project, actually. Thanks
           | for sharing that
        
         | jacquesm wrote:
         | Projects faking their traction by incentivizing people to star
         | their project even though they have never used the repo.
        
         | simonw wrote:
         | A challenge with open source is that people can use your stuff
         | without ever telling you about it. It can sometimes feel like
         | releasing software into the void - any glimmer of interest is
         | motivating, and stars represent a glimmer of interest.
        
         | nyellin wrote:
         | 1. It's a proxy for measuring how interested the community is
         | in your project.
         | 
         | 2. A lot of people use star counts to determine whether or not
         | your project is reputable.
         | 
         | 3. As founder of a company with a major open source project,
         | it's one of the only reliable data sources we have for
         | benchmarking our own community growth. I can't see historical
         | (or present) traffic numbers for other open source projects in
         | the kubernetes space, but I can see the history of their star
         | counts. That's really useful when you need to set goals for
         | community growth
         | 
         | 4. Some VCs care about it
         | 
         | As with most metrics, the metric in and of itself isn't
         | important. What it measures (community growth) is. So be
         | careful to optimize the latter and not the former
        
         | 323 wrote:
         | 1000 stars on GitHub are about as powerful as 1 million
         | followers on Instagram. If you don't understand why 1 million
         | followers on Instagram are life changing, well...
         | 
         | Being a gitfluencer is extremely valuable.
        
           | jacquesm wrote:
           | If they are organic, yes.
        
       | boomskats wrote:
       | So this is the same timqian codebase? Just rebranded?
        
       | agluszak wrote:
       | Opinion: I really dislike the font in the graph, it's hard to
       | read
        
       | tianzhou wrote:
       | star-history.com is already the de-facto GitHub star history
       | graph. Recently, we just finished a major update.
       | 
       | 1. Generate high resolution chart image. 2. Timeline mode to
       | align trajectory among repos debuted from different times. 3.
       | Embed chart into other websites. 4. Temporarily toggle a
       | particular repo.
       | 
       | We try to keep its original sketching feel while rewrite the
       | entire site using modern stack (Vue + TailwindCSS + Vite).
       | 
       | Hope these improvements will make it more useful to open source
       | project maintainers.
        
         | nyellin wrote:
         | I just want to say thank you!
         | 
         | The timeline mode is fantastic
        
       | amrrs wrote:
       | Star History is the gold standard of this..if any Python
       | enthusiast is interested in implementing this in Python, this
       | tutorial uses it to teach steeamlit https://youtu.be/TzF-OUA1Tlo
        
       | liorgrossman wrote:
       | Congrats on your re-launch - nice work!
       | 
       | At Openbase.com we're building the star count charts by using the
       | GitHub GraphQL API (as we use it for other things like collecting
       | stats about commits, issues and PRs).
       | 
       | Looking at how star-history works, seems like you opted for using
       | the GitHub REST API - what are the upsides / downsides of using
       | the REST API?
        
       | francoismassot wrote:
       | Fan of start-history.com here, thanks for your work.
       | 
       | One feature is missing: search repository with a nice
       | autocomplete would be very useful.
        
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       (page generated 2022-01-23 23:01 UTC)