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Comment by coolsank | Hacker News Reader

Is it just me or the fact that Dagster has one of their competitors Mage.ai listed here as a repo with around 15% of fake stars seems like an odd coincidence?

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It’s possible that was the impetus of the blog post. Maybe they suspect Mage.ai of astroturfing GitHub stars and investigate it as above. They then publish a blog post that:

1. Indicates the astroturfing without actually specifically calling them out 2. Does so in a way where others can verify their work and use it on other repos 3. Uses their product to do so

Seems pretty brilliant to me.

If you’re going to accuse a competitor of fraud, writing a blog post showing your work seems like the most safe way to do it. People lie with statistics all the time of course.

I mean, they explain it at the top:

> we track our own GitHub star count along with that of other projects. So when we spotted some new open-source projects suddenly racking up hundreds of stars a week, we were impressed. In some cases, it looked a bit too good to be true, and the patterns seemed off

If their competitor has fake-looking star counts, I'd expect them to be the ones best equipped and most likely to suspect it.

They don’t mention what I think is their biggest competitor: Prefect.

[Blogpost author here] We ran the numbers for Prefect and several other repos in our space and they came out clean. As we note in the article, while some repos game the system, from what we can tell the number of abusers is actually fairly small.

or they used a more sophisticated star provider ?

It shouldn't be a surprise. Why are you surprised? Do you often pursue random activities irrelevant to your life for dozens of hours?

Yes I do.

Pretty standard for anyone ND

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