Comment by accurrent
17 hours ago
Eh IMO any metric like this can be gamed. My project that reached hn front page was coded in a short time (and yes some ai was used), but otoh I think it was something that showed hey you can do this really interesting thing (in my case vlm based indoor location).
Also its not uncommon for weekend projects to be done in a shprt span with just a "first commit" message dump even pre-AI.
Yes, any metric can be gamed. But I believe measuring the entropy of a repository, comparing state of the code-base over time can be done deterministically, which would make it harder to game it.
So either we are going to completely avoid automation and create a community council to decide what deserves to be shown to rest of the community or just let best AI models to decide if a project is worth show up on front page?
Or we can do all of the above :)
Isn't it possible to fabricate the timestamps on commits and then push them up all at once? If you're planning on literally checking that the commits are publicly available for a certain amount of time, that seems like it would needlessly punish projects that someone worked on offline and then happened to push up once it was completed.
What about hardware projects without a code base? Those are fun too and deserve front page
I suspect automating "code base over time" metric is tricky. Not everyone will be using git or a vcs and somethings dont need a codebase to be shared.