GitHub user 4148 just starred 129k repositories and still counting | Hacker News Reader

GitHub user 4148 just starred 129k repositories and still counting

github.com

56 pointsreimertz31 comments

A case of github not limiting a particular api endpoint? I don't see any real harm in this guy sorta running amok. It does make the feature of staring repos less... something.

There was a good talk I would recommend watching by Jeremy Edberg (Architect from Netflix/Eeddit that said to put limits on everything)

http://www.heavybit.com/library/video/2013-08-13-jeremy-edbe...

"As I mentioned before, you need to watch your limits. You should also put limits on everything. Put a hard number of limit on number of API requests that could be made from any one IP. Make it a thousand a second, something absurdly high. Because you know what? One day, that's going to happen and you're going to be really glad that that limit was there because now you've blocked somebody from completely taking down your service, maybe because they just wrote a bad robot or something, you know? They were trying to scrape your site, they screwed up, they're hitting you 10,000 times a second. At least, it won't take you down. Or, maybe perhaps, you've been linked from the Yahoo front page, which is what took down Reddit the first time when somebody put a Reddit button on a page that was linked from the Yahoo! home page. We basically DDoS-ed ourselves with the Reddit buttons. We quickly figured out how to put that on a CDN, so we didn't have to deal with that problem anymore."

There is a 5,000/hour rate limit. (https://developer.github.com/v3/activity/starring/) So 120,000 repo Stars a day at maximum utility.

You can get a list of all GitHub repos and derive their IDs with some BigQuery shenanigans on the GitHub Archive, then just feed the IDs into a while-loop. Simple to implement, albeit not necessarily ethical.

EDIT: 5,000 limit is not endpoint specific. But if you use it all for one endpoint...

That seems like a super high limit.

It's high because the 5,000 limit is globally shared for all non-search queries: https://developer.github.com/v3/rate_limit/

Seems like a good way to gain attention to ones repositories. Greenhat[1] is interesting. I wonder how deceptive this is to recruiters, and if GitHub can do anything to try and validate commit histories / distinguish or weight vs open source contributions and individual projects.

[1] https://github.com/4148/greenhat

As an alternative, check my project rockstar [0] also.

[0] - https://github.com/avinassh/rockstar

Why would you ever want that? After seeing that script, I checked his own and sure enough... he runs it on his own. It only took a few clicks to see that it just changes some number on one file a few times a day. If you are "decorating your calendar" like that to impress people, you're just going to look foolish. Or is there some grand plan I'm missing?

It's a funny thing that exposes sort of a vulnerability in something that is supposed (?) to show ... something good? productivity?

The user is also the author of this, which will artificially inflate the number of commits a user has made of a calendar year. https://github.com/4148/greenhat

Perhaps 4148 is testing something out related to that or a new project and the script went bad?

I was all, "Hey, someone starred my repo!" It was this.

I feel you bro, same happened to me.

Exactly man. A great start to the day .. now this .. :(

It happened to me too. Weird

Rate limit EVERYTHING. I learned this lesson the hard way early on at Stack Overflow. ;)

Do you (or anybody else) have any advice on how to figure out how to come up with limits for things? Somebody else mentioned that Github limits stars to 5000/hr, but that definitely seems high. How would you decide on how to limit something like this?

that's more of a query limit, not just starring.

Any stories / blog articles you can share?

I'm kind of feeling left out, none of mine.

Same here :(

I kept getting notifications that "4148 starred your repo" and I was very confused because it was a seemingly unrelated set of repos!

I've seen a few users with 100k-plus starred repositories so nothing exceptional there. What would be interesting to know is when this "starring frenzy" actually started. Considering the user joined Github in November 2013 that equals to about 5.5k stars/month.

They're now at 134k, so I'd guess it started recently.

About Stars

Starring a repository allows you to keep track of projects that you find interesting, even if you aren't associated with the project.

When you star a repository, you're actually performing two distinct actions:

-Creating a bookmark for easier access

-Showing appreciation to the repository maintainer for their work

Many of GitHub's repository rankings depend on the number of stars a repository has. For example, repositories can be sorted and searched based on their star count. In addition, the Explore page shows you popular repositories based on the number of stars they have.

https://help.github.com/articles/about-stars/

I don't followed him before, but when I clicked the title and saw I have followed him. Now my GitHub timeline is full of him ...

Seems like they should remove the ability to star via the GitHub API. A star should indicate physical/human interaction.

Any feature you remove from the API will be replaced with a python mechanize script that does the same thing but less efficiently.

hey he starred my projects! thanks 4148!

Starred one of my projects too, but within 134k stars it makes me feel kind of insignificant ;)

Not as insignificant as not being starred.

True that ;)

meh

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