Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmduke | Hacker News Reader

As much as I love GitHub, I think the exploration paradigm could use a little work -- it seems to have something of a flywheel effect, where popular repositories receive more exposure, thus more stars/forks/watches, thus appear as 'trending', thus become more popular. (For example: currently trending as #3 in Python today is the official Django repository; and trending as #2 today is the official AirBNB javascript style guide, which has been boasting around 4,000 stars and hasn't been updated in around ten years.)

I'd kill for a GitHub StumbleUpon: click a button (filtering for, say, vertical or programming language) and get transported to a repository that has a baseline level of merit (say, at least three stars).

View on HN

Check out my site, Cocoa Controls (and sign up for my weekly newsletter), which does roughly what you want for iOS content. I curate everything that shows up on there, and—in a lot of cases—the content I post initially has zero watchers/zero forks on GitHub.

http://www.cocoacontrols.com

So, I really really love cocoacontrols. Thought you should know. Awesome work.

thanks, that always makes me happy to hear! :)

Have to agree, Cocoa Controls is one of the first blogs I read daily on NewsBlur.

I've found one of the best ways to do the "stubmleupon" concept is to follow dozens of devs who star interesting repos (sometimes solely for that reason) and check your news stream often. I follow devs from a wide variety of backgrounds, which yields numerous libraries that I might not otherwise be aware of (and sometimes months ahead of HN exposure). One of the best things I've done with my GitHub account.

A solid example is: https://github.com/fogus

How do you find these devs who star interesting repos?

Edit: after some thought and poking around, one way to find these devs is to just look at the profiles of devs who run projects you use. If they've starred a lot of repos, see if they star things you would be interested in. If so, follow them. Easy.

Your example is spot on. Additionally, I use twitter, authors of books, authors of research papers, see who these devs follow, and numerous other ways of traversing the GitHub social graph.

this is exactly what i do too.

Another great person to follow is Ilya Grigorik ... https://github.com/igrigorik

He spents a lot of time following repos, and literally built the github archive just to keep up with this.

for the interested:

http://www.githubarchive.org/

http://us5.campaign-archive2.com/home/?u=439aa16a39e4b10e0b6...

Thanks! I use the same technique as you and have found many interesting repositories via https://github.com/swannodette and https://github.com/namin.

Many open-source news sites suffer from the same flaw. It's lazy to call something like this 'exploration' when you're re-hashing the same projects over and over.

Edit: sorry if I sound harsh on it. I think it's very necessary! But there needs to be more thought on how to find new and interesting projects.

  > click a button (filtering for, say, vertical or programming
  > language) and get transported to a repository that has a baseline
  > level of merit (say, at least three stars).

Below is a search for repos with at least three stars sorted by date updated. You can filter by language by clicking a language listed on the left side of the page.

https://github.com/search?q=stars%3A%3E2&s=updated

Reply on news.ycombinator.com