GitHub's trending page updates every few hours using an opaque ranking algorithm. Developers who want different signals (velocity over absolute stars, language-specific trends, spam filtering) hit a wall. Building an alternative means solving three hard problems: staying under API rate limits while tracking thousands of repositories, making velocity queries fast enough for real-time ranking, and detecting gaming without GitHub's internal fraud signals.

Shadowgraph is a Show HN project that tackles these constraints head-on. The creator posted about frustration with GitHub's trending algorithm and built a custom discovery layer that exposes repository velocity metrics through a public dashboard.…