Mark Polyakov

How to get 500 stars on Github and reach the front page of Hackernews in 5 days flat.

  1. Spend years learning programming, reading textbooks, and studying computer science at a prestigious university.
  2. Work hard on side projects that you’d use yourself, are fun, or are technically challenging.
  3. Delete all code and forget all skills developed during steps 1 and 2.
  4. Find the current hype train (at time of writing: large language models).
  5. Fork an existing repo, change five lines of code to make it do something slightly unexpected (in this case, run an LLM on the CPU instead of the GPU).
  6. Comment about it in a couple github threads, hackernews threads, etc.
  7. Wait 5 days. Don’t worry, other people will do the heavy lifting.
  8. Et voilà!