Measuring the impact of HackerNews on open source GitHub projects
Carmen Jaramillo · Bin Bin Lee · Brian Zelip
Data Mining LEEP Day, Fall 2014
Hypothesis
Posting information about a project on Hacker News makes a big impact on open source projects.
...we set out to detail this impact.
Method
- Pick 5 public projects
- Identify the project's initial post on HN
- Collect before & after data via GitHub & GitHub Archive APIs
- Present findings
The before & after evidence
Increases in...
- forks
- stars
- watchers
- pull requests
Data collection work
- read about and practiced the 2 GH APIs
- GitHub API via command line, see https://developer.github.com/v3/
- GitHubArchive API via Google Big Query, see http://www.githubarchive.org
#*&@% Snafus
- Obtaining precise before & after data was difficult
DATA!
Issues Filed
|
Nightmare |
SweetAlert |
Postgres |
Grid |
Bootstrap |
| Before |
4 |
2 |
0 |
na |
na |
| Day of |
1 |
11 |
1 |
na |
na |
| After |
3 |
13 |
0 |
30 |
45 |
DATA!
Pull Requests
|
Nightmare |
SweetAlert |
Postgres |
Grid |
Bootstrap |
| Before |
1 |
5 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
| Day of |
1 |
5 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
| After |
4 |
38 |
0 |
24 |
92 |