
GitHub user 4148 just starred 129k repositories and still counting - reimertz
https://github.com/4148
======
stephenitis
A case of github not limiting a particular api endpoint? I don't see any real
harm in this guy sorta running amok. It does make the feature of staring repos
less... something.

There was a good talk I would recommend watching by Jeremy Edberg (Architect
from Netflix/Eeddit that said to put limits on everything)

[http://www.heavybit.com/library/video/2013-08-13-jeremy-
edbe...](http://www.heavybit.com/library/video/2013-08-13-jeremy-edberg)

"As I mentioned before, you need to watch your limits. You should also put
limits on everything. Put a hard number of limit on number of API requests
that could be made from any one IP. Make it a thousand a second, something
absurdly high. Because you know what? One day, that's going to happen and
you're going to be really glad that that limit was there because now you've
blocked somebody from completely taking down your service, maybe because they
just wrote a bad robot or something, you know? They were trying to scrape your
site, they screwed up, they're hitting you 10,000 times a second. At least, it
won't take you down. Or, maybe perhaps, you've been linked from the Yahoo
front page, which is what took down Reddit the first time when somebody put a
Reddit button on a page that was linked from the Yahoo! home page. We
basically DDoS-ed ourselves with the Reddit buttons. We quickly figured out
how to put that on a CDN, so we didn't have to deal with that problem
anymore."

~~~
minimaxir
There _is_ a 5,000/hour rate limit.
([https://developer.github.com/v3/activity/starring/](https://developer.github.com/v3/activity/starring/))
So 120,000 repo Stars a day at maximum utility.

You can get a list of _all_ GitHub repos and derive their IDs with some
BigQuery shenanigans on the GitHub Archive, then just feed the IDs into a
while-loop. Simple to implement, albeit not necessarily _ethical_.

EDIT: 5,000 limit is not endpoint specific. But if you use it all for one
endpoint...

~~~
codinghorror
That seems like a super high limit.

~~~
minimaxir
It's high because the 5,000 limit is _globally shared_ for all non-search
queries:
[https://developer.github.com/v3/rate_limit/](https://developer.github.com/v3/rate_limit/)

------
martin_
Seems like a good way to gain attention to ones repositories. Greenhat[1] is
interesting. I wonder how deceptive this is to recruiters, and if GitHub can
do anything to try and validate commit histories / distinguish or weight vs
open source contributions and individual projects.

[1] [https://github.com/4148/greenhat](https://github.com/4148/greenhat)

~~~
jack-r-abbit
Why would you ever want that? After seeing that script, I checked his own and
sure enough... he runs it on his own. It only took a few clicks to see that it
just changes some number on one file a few times a day. If you are "decorating
your calendar" like that to impress people, you're just going to look foolish.
Or is there some grand plan I'm missing?

~~~
wingerlang
It's a funny thing that exposes sort of a vulnerability in something that is
supposed (?) to show ... something good? productivity?

------
sudo_bang_bang
The user is also the author of this, which will artificially inflate the
number of commits a user has made of a calendar year.
[https://github.com/4148/greenhat](https://github.com/4148/greenhat)

Perhaps 4148 is testing something out related to that or a new project and the
script went bad?

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h00k
I was all, "Hey, someone starred my repo!" It was this.

~~~
reimertz
I feel you bro, same happened to me.

~~~
agnivade
Exactly man. A great start to the day .. now this .. :(

------
codinghorror
Rate limit EVERYTHING. I learned this lesson the hard way early on at Stack
Overflow. ;)

~~~
dmcginty
Do you (or anybody else) have any advice on how to figure out how to come up
with limits for things? Somebody else mentioned that Github limits stars to
5000/hr, but that definitely seems high. How would you decide on how to limit
something like this?

~~~
notwhereyouare
that's more of a query limit, not just starring.

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Implicated
I'm kind of feeling left out, none of mine.

~~~
djblue
Same here :(

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aaronpk
I kept getting notifications that "4148 starred your repo" and I was very
confused because it was a seemingly unrelated set of repos!

------
mrsmn
I've seen a few users with 100k-plus starred repositories so nothing
exceptional there. What would be interesting to know is when this "starring
frenzy" actually started. Considering the user joined Github in November 2013
that equals to about 5.5k stars/month.

~~~
komaromy
They're now at 134k, so I'd guess it started recently.

------
josu
About Stars

Starring a repository allows you to keep track of projects that you find
interesting, even if you aren't associated with the project.

When you star a repository, you're actually performing two distinct actions:

-Creating a bookmark for easier access

-Showing appreciation to the repository maintainer for their work

Many of GitHub's repository rankings depend on the number of stars a
repository has. For example, repositories can be sorted and searched based on
their star count. In addition, the Explore page shows you popular repositories
based on the number of stars they have.

[https://help.github.com/articles/about-
stars/](https://help.github.com/articles/about-stars/)

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asaka
I don't followed him before, but when I clicked the title and saw I have
followed him. Now my GitHub timeline is full of him ...

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nodesocket
Seems like they should remove the ability to star via the GitHub API. A star
should indicate physical/human interaction.

~~~
tmerr
Any feature you remove from the API will be replaced with a python mechanize
script that does the same thing but less efficiently.

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tomphoolery
hey he starred my projects! thanks 4148!

~~~
mrsmn
Starred one of my projects too, but within 134k stars it makes me feel kind of
insignificant ;)

~~~
dmolony
Not as insignificant as not being starred.

~~~
mrsmn
True that ;)

------
mattexx
meh

