Ruby toolbox has a wonderfully simple way of crowdsourcing it -- categorizing a ...

liorgrossman · on July 14, 2020

I didn't know that (and BTW Ruby-Toolbox is a great source of inspiration)

I think the challenge with that is that there's no standardization of categories. Both GitHub and npm have the concept of "topics/keywords" that developers can choose. Problem is that every maintainer chooses slightly different keywords, so it becomes ineffective as a tool for discovery.

We still haven't fully figured out what the optimal solution might be like.

type0 · on July 15, 2020

> We still haven't fully figured out what the optimal solution might be like.

Recommender system based on the kind of keywords in the description, starred project from main contributors etc

liorgrossman · on July 15, 2020

I think it would be a good start, but would still require some human vetting. We played with some simple NLP solutions (trying to run TF-IDF on the keywords/description/readme of packages to determine the category), the results weren't great honestly, so we opted of curating everything manually for now.