Hacker News Reader

Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

As someone who used to care about streaks, it only takes one small commit and it can be a small reword of a readme ;)

I used to hold a mental backlog of easy commits to keep my streaks going when I was too busy to do real work

I just gave up and decided to make myself a rockstar with a couple of lines in the command line using /avinassh/rockstar. :)

the way I see it, it validates that I am capable of following simple directions and running a python script :3 that's got to be a valuable asset in an employee, right?

Or a little cronjob that commits harmless changes later in the week? :P

I don't care about the contribution streak, but do have friends who comment on theirs on Twitter now and then. I suppose it's just another thing to be proud of...

There actually are a handful of tools that let you cheat including one that lets you write text onto the chart.

And then what's the point? You aren't proving anything to the world, and they can trivially see that you didn't do any real work. It's like saying "I'm going to write a part of my novel every day from now on", then every day you type one letter. It's very clearly gaming the system, and for absolutely no gain. You gained no skills, you didn't show yourself to be of value, you don't even get an imaginary reward. The intrinsic reward of tracking systems is lost because deep down you know you didn't do anything.

Exactly, I do agree with what you said.

But, this is true whether you commit a few irrelevant lines manually or automatically. So if you're going to do it just for the sake of showing off, at least make it efficient, no? :P

Reply on news.ycombinator.com