News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:GitHub's Explore Email by jmduke on Monday November 11, 2013 @03:27PM (#6713755)
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).

Re:GitHub's Explore Email by aaronbrethorst on Monday November 11, 2013 @04:38PM (#6714244)
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

Re:GitHub's Explore Email by xauronx on Monday November 11, 2013 @04:58PM (#6714365)
So, I really really love cocoacontrols. Thought you should know. Awesome work.
Re:GitHub's Explore Email by aaronbrethorst on Monday November 11, 2013 @05:52PM (#6714680)
thanks, that always makes me happy to hear! :)
Re:GitHub's Explore Email by conesus on Tuesday November 12, 2013 @04:24AM (#6716710)
Have to agree, Cocoa Controls is one of the first blogs I read daily on NewsBlur.
Re:GitHub's Explore Email by hashtree on Monday November 11, 2013 @04:19PM (#6714124)
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

Re:GitHub's Explore Email by samirahmed on Monday November 11, 2013 @07:50PM (#6715152)
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.

Re:GitHub's Explore Email by mh- on Tuesday November 12, 2013 @12:13AM (#6715987)
Re:GitHub's Explore Email by jpadvo on Monday November 11, 2013 @05:54PM (#6714688)
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.

Re:GitHub's Explore Email by hashtree on Monday November 11, 2013 @08:58PM (#6715375)
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.
Re:GitHub's Explore Email by fogus on Tuesday November 12, 2013 @08:41AM (#6717707)
Thanks! I use the same technique as you and have found many interesting repositories via https://github.com/swannodette and https://github.com/namin.
Re:GitHub's Explore Email by mattgreenrocks on Monday November 11, 2013 @04:27PM (#6714172)
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.

Re:GitHub's Explore Email by subsection1h on Monday November 11, 2013 @05:31PM (#6714573)

  > 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

[deleted]
Re:GitHub's Explore Email by jmduke on Monday November 11, 2013 @04:06PM (#6714031)
Well, that was a double whammy of me typing 'ten years' instead of 'ten months' and also reading the wrong commit timestamp. I think my point is still valid, but thanks for pointing that out -- awesome work, btw!
Re:GitHub's Explore Email by _harry on Monday November 11, 2013 @04:11PM (#6714066)
I deleted my comment because I realized it was tangential to your point and don't want to sidetrack discussion. Carry on!