Comment by jomar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jomar | Hacker News Reader

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It's just gone live in the last day or so. The designer talked about it here a few weeks ago: https://twitter.com/pifafu/status/1265773172520914944

Personally I don't see much reason for this to be implemented via a git repository (rather than a text field in a database, like the existing Bio text), other than "we're GitHub, everything's a git repository, so why not".

At the moment, it's a single-file repository. Perhaps they have some ideas for other things that could be served from there too.

Weirdly at the moment it's required to be a public repository. This seems counterproductive: if it's my personal information blurb I don't much want other people looking at its history and I certainly don't want them forking it. (Are there any non-malicious reasons for doing that?)

To be honest, I'm not too concerned. Making it a git repo makes the history more readily available, but a bad actor could still get it from internet archive or other archive sites. And if the concern about forking is that someone could impersonate you, they could do so with a few extra steps by just looking at the rendered HTML of the README. I know there's something to be said for making malicious behavior more difficult to achieve, but in this case the amount of extra work someone would have to do is minuscule if this weren't implemented as public repos.

You can rewrite GitHub history and keep one commit. I was doing it for GitHub pages, because I didn't want to expose my blog edits.

Are there malicious reasons for doing that?

> This seems counterproductive: if it's my personal information blurb I don't much want other people looking at its history and I certainly don't want them forking it.

Taken to its logical conclusion, this would mean you're opposed to the existence of web archives (which you probably aren't).

> Weirdly at the moment it's required to be a public repository.

I guess they didn't want any past private repository to have its README public just because they added a profile feature.

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