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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

> Maintainers: You’re a primary maintainer or core team member of a public repo with 5,000+ GitHub stars or 1M+ monthly NPM downloads. You've made commits, releases, or PR reviews within the last 3 months.

How many total developers does that cover? 100? How many of them aren't already corporate employees?

And also

> 6 months of free Claude Max 20x

So basically a free trial.

When Github Copilot first launched they gave Pro subscriptions to everyone that regularly committed to a public repo, regardless of the number of stars or downloads, and kept renewing it indefinitely. I don't know if that program is still around but it was amazing to get to try out some early LLM coding tools for open source development.

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Github search gives me 11 300 results for 5000+ stars[0]. Dunno if they all qualify as open source, but that's also repos, not contributors. Presumably there's an average of > 1 per repo.

NPM probably adds a lot. I can't find any recent sources, but NPM packages get downloaded a lot (e.g., every Github Action run.) And to get such a download, an NPM package just has to be somewhere in the dependency tree, which are famously enormous. (Though many might not be updated in the past 3 months, though.)

[0] https://github.com/search?q=stars%3A%3E5000+sort%3Astars&typ...

A lot more than a 100, for once I'm one of those https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash

Github is Microsoft. MS has a war chest big enough not to care if they throw away money for customer acquisition

Yeah, their thing is more making products worse over time and wasting billions. You will see this in action shortly with XBox. I think they will do both this time.

> How many total developers does that cover? 100?

I love these questions bc they both can be answered with some slight heuristics, and they are quite surprising!

As of January 2026, there were > 13k npm packages w/ more than 1 Million monthly downloads [1]

Answering "how many total developers does that cover" is a lot harder (more expensive, rather, as I am not going to pay for the query on Google BigQuery to answer it, not after I spent $3k by accident last time doing similar exploration in the past)

I wont try to make a SWAG about how many devs have write access across those repos, but in the npm ecosystem alone I'm comfortable saying it is an order of magnitude more than 100.

[1] - https://gist.github.com/jonchurch/1dd845f4d26823fce5590af1aa...

GitHub is cagey about the criteria, but yes this is ongoing. It doesn't appear to be tied to active contributions though. I'm a maintainer on paper of a moderately large open source project that I haven't been involved with in years, and they still renew my free copilot monthly.

It's bizarre how they mention NPM for package downloads, and forget that other ecosystems exist too that aren't exactly small... PyPI, NuGet, Cargo, Maven, RubyGems, etc.

I think there's plenty of them. I know at least 3 guys eligible for such requirements (but this guys aren't some public persons giving tech-talks and so on, just some niche libs for others to use). If Claude would ask for 100k stars repos, then yeah. I guess there would be even less than 100

Shucks, I'm only 1000 stars singlehandedly. Curse my woeful irrelevance :D

I guess I will just have to NOT sign on to this nonsense and allow it to atrophy my ability to think of things independently, thus ending up completely dependent on an outside tool of ever-increasing price.

Gosh darn it, of all the luck.

> a public repo with 5,000+ GitHub stars

This is going to get abused so fast, it will make your head spin.

EDIT: I just look up the highest-ranking "buy GitHub stars" page (which I will obviously not link here), and it looks like you would have to pay a little over $1000 to get the required amount of stars. So I suppose it might not get abused as easily as I thought.

On the other hand, someone with the gumption and elbow grease to abuse this process themselves could still easily do so, I'd wager.

All that being said, I still think that GitHub stars are effectively worthless, and attempting to assign value to them like this is, at best, a fool's errand.

I can imagine this will invoke Goodhart's law, increasing the amount of people shilling their AI-generated shovelware onto a Web already greatly suffering from the consequences of the plummeting cost of intelligent-sounding text generation.

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