There is a specific record being claimed.
They're not just saying the absolute downloads are going up, as the OP suggests.
They're not just saying the absolute downloads are going up, as the OP suggests.
The absolute number of lifetime downloads can of course only go up (but that's even more vacuous).
“Unix timestamp counter breaks record after writing this comment”
makes that vacuous connection, hence my original comment.
The numbers graph is spiky and I can imagine you could argue either way that they are generally trending up or not. But that's irrelevant!
So I fail to see this discussion as anything but sophistry until anyone demonstrates that the download numbers are totally ordinary. It's typical HN contrarianism without any value, because it's enough to argue for the possibility of something, even when the data for checking it is easily accessible.
That's then what tempfile was questioning how it contradicted smokel's claim (because it doesn't, just an imagined claim). Your points, that if the number of weekly downloads isn't actually consistently increasing then this could still be meaningful, are valid - but irrelevant to tempfile who was wasn't arguing that this is meaningless; you should argue that to smokel instead.