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Comment by ernst_klim | Hacker News Reader

I think people expect the star system to be a cheap proxy for "this is a reliable piece of sorfware which has a good quality and a lot of eyes".

I think as a proxy it fails completely: astroturfing aside stars don't guarantee popularity (and I bet the correlation is very weak, a lot of very fundamental system libraries have small number of stars). Stars also don't guarantee the quality.

And given that you can read the code, stars seem to be a completely pointless proxy. I'm teaching myself to skip the stars and skim through the code and evaluate the quality of both architecture and implementation. And I found that quite a few times I prefer a less-"starry" alternative after looking directly at the repo content.

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given that you can read the code, stars seem to be a completely pointless proxy

Imagine you're choosing between 3 different alternatives, and each is 100,000 LOC. Is 'reading the code' really an option? You need a proxy.

Stars isn't a good one because it's an untrusted source. Something like a referral would be much better, but in a space where your network doesn't have much knowledge a proxy like stars is the only option.

> Is 'reading the code' really an option? You need a proxy.

100k is small, but you're right, it can be millions. I usually skim through the code tho, and it's not that hard. I don't need to fully read and understand the code.

What I look at is: high-level architecture (is there any, is it modular or one big lump of code, how modular it is, what kind of modules and components it has and how they interact), code quality (structuring, naming, aesthetics), bus factor (how many people contribute and understand the code base).

Ask Claude to help. Read the dang code. You'll be more confident in your decision and better positioned to handle any issues you encounter.

It's too much work, so you decide to trust the opinion of someone else who probably also hasn't done the work.

I don't think I have ever even considered using star count as a factor for picking from alternatives.

Looking at the commit history, closed vs open issues and pull requests provides a much more useful signal if you can't decide from the code.

The issues page used to be good for this as well. What kind of problems people are having.

(Sometimes still is, but the agents garbage does not help)

Could it be that stars were a good proxy, but as people realized such, they started being gamed, resulting in them becoming a bad proxy? Goodhart's Law would seem to always be in play for any proxy, because once it is recognized as a good proxy, bad actors will begin gaming it. A proxy that can't be gamed would be ideal, but I feel that is akin to wishing for the Philosopher's Stone.

The VCs looking to invest would naturally care more about popularity than quality, because popularity would be how you make sales.

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