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Comment by tobyjsullivan | Hacker News Reader

Weirdly, the hard part here is reliably knowing when you died. Messy solvable in a localized way. Really, really hard to solve on a global scale.

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Why not make it trigger on not logging in for N months, and after ignoring multiple attempts to notify you? This is what Google's inactive account manager does.

But Google's inactive account manager doesn't then publish all your emails on the open web.

There could be any secrets (API keys, etc) in a GitHub repo.

I was going to speculate more about how GitHub could handle this, but it turns out they already have a system where you name a successor and they get control of your public repos 7d after GitHub receives a death certificate or 21d after an obituary. But they don't include private repos: https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/setting-up-an...

That sounds like extortion to me. Like, stop using github and we will make all your stuff public despite you originally intending it to be private.

We are talking about the developer opting in.

We're talking about an optional feature for developers who want it, that you have to go and turn on.

(And it should have very clear warnings before you turn it on so you don't accidentally make things public that shouldn't be. Plus, there should probably be some sort of way to tag which repose would still need to stay private even after your death.)

Eh, if I don’t respond for a few months I’m probably dead enough. It’s something you’d enable yourself, so you’d know that all your repos were made public if you ever wake up from a 6 month coma.

If your executor sends GitHub a death-certificate, that problem is completely resolved.

A deadman switch should be good enough.

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