[alexpadula]

It’s not, it’s just how hackernews works. You’ll see new projects hit 1k-10k stars in a matter of a day. You can have the best project, best article to you but if everyone else doesn’t think so it’ll always be at the bottom. Some luck involved too. Bots upvoting a post not organically I doubt is gonna live long on first page.

[worldsavior]

The stars are on GitHub, they can come from somewhere else, e.g. the author himself buying stars.

[Duendek86]

Hi, I'm the developer's father. Trust me, he hasn't bought a single star in his life—not even in Super Mario :p

[alexpadula]

This is hella common. Companies have too much money to spend.

[baranul]

But, star buying for GitHub is a thing too. This is why you have to look at things like number of contributors, forks, watchers, and pull requests. Just a lot of stars, without the other positive indicators, can be an indication that the project is not so engaging as it might seem or its supposed popularity is fake.

[Panzerschrek]

That's not how it works. My publication with (subjectively) better language barely had a couple of comments and github stars.