Show HN: Weekend project - Gitscore | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Weekend project - Gitscore

gitscore.com

61 pointsbeastmcbeast35 comments

When you start measuring things, people start gaming them, so for github's sake I hope your project disappears into oblivion.

Klout is the latest major sad example of this phenomenon. People are modifying their Twitter behavior in some fascinating ways to game their Klout score.

However, people love shortcuts, so I'm sure you can refine your service and subscribe clueless HR folks to it.

I don't think that means people should not measure things, if we didn't measure things we would never improve.

Measuring things would be one thing (number of repositories, number of pull requests sent, number of changes committed, number of comments made). I think the concern comes with boiling down a bunch of (possibly unknown) measurements into a single number. Who is to say that the formula is the "right" one or the "best" one? And what happens when people start getting ranked in an absolute sense based on that score?

And if people start changing their behaviour because they're gaming the system (or is it the system that gamed them?), and that results in unintended consequences, do we (as a whole) come out ahead from where we started?

Here's a collection of pagerank values based on the followers graph from two months ago, if anyone's interested

https://raw.github.com/clayw/Github-pageranks/master/github-...

So how are you calculating my (horribly low) score? I am guessing each accepted pull request counts ten, or something but I am interested in the algorithm.

Seems broken on my Chrome Dev Channel - lots of JS errors and a blank score

I had the same problem and it turned out that if you block Facebook and/or Twitter you will break things.

I've the same problem with Safari. I don't see why I need to unblock to see the scores. This is bad design. I'll just pass.

An oversight on my part. Should now be fixed.

It's cute. How does it calculate each statistic?

The score is calculated in three parts. 1) The reputation score is a count of the number of followers you have.

2) The contribution score takes into account the number of repositories you have. It factors in the number of watchers for each repository as well as the number of forks. It then doubles that score if you are the original owner of the repository (rather than the repository being a fork itself).

3) The gist score takes into account the number of gists you have as well as the comments on those gists.

Like democracy, it's Pretty hard to game followers. Thank you.

Cool

looks like some people are having fun with a case sensitivity bug (:

Yeah, should be fixed now.

Github is a great site, but it's not the only place where developers publish code - so be careful.

For instance, there are other places like Bitbucket (which I use myself because of Mercurial and the unlimited amount of private repos), Google Code, and also heavy contributors to big open-source projects that just have their own code hosting.

I have Facebook Disconnect installed in Chrome and get an endless stream of "FB is not defined" JavaScript errors.

I believe that VisionMedia own the place !

He is a pretty prolific programmer and spawner of all things Node.js related.

aka he implements ruby libs in js

Neat project. I built something similar a few weeks ago with Alfred Chan and Michael Grosser that calculates the "gitscore" for startups on AngelList. If you'd like to check it out, the URL is:

http://startup-score.com/

Small UI note - when you focus the text box the hint text should go away. I found myself trying to select and delete the hint text since it wasn't going away by itself.

This is default behavior for the placeholder element in your browser, not an issue with this site's UI.

Well, yes and no. It's the default behaviour, but it seems strange as the text is centred. I think if you left-align the text box input, it would seem more intuitive.

Maybe I'm more used to sites implementing it with Javascript. It does seem to be the default behavior; I'm trying to figure out why intuitively I expected it to be different.

502 bad gateway. On the bright side, if you're overloading nginx with your weekend project it's going pretty well :)

"Unable to lookup user whalesalad"

http://gitscore.com/user/whalesalad :-)

I had an issue where I was caching the rate limit response from github. Fixed now.

Sweet!

Surely Github has more than 1500 users?

It's still indexing as far as I can tell.

gotcha. thanks.

Does not work on Firefox 13.

works for me on ff13

Nice!

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