Super sorry to the guy with the username reset on GitHub

There use to be a site called batcave.net that gave free space and a subdomain. I had the name search.. search.batcave.net until one day when they decided to take back the search subdomain name and use it for themselves. From that point I've avoid great common usernames that one day might be too great

> Mine was @username

It's not bad.

> tapped on the bare bum

That's a kind of public board too...

I get that at work. looking at my name, you would not think it common, but where I live, not only is it common, there are many of us with the same name at my employer.

One of my biggest pet peeves is people dumping whitespace-sensitive plain text without any kind of code blocks, rendering it completely unreadable.

I don't think it works for private channels.

Since, as OP says, non-members occasionally could find the channel, it was probably a public channel. The people who complained were probably "multi-channel guests". They'd see masked-out channel names except where they are explicitly allowed.

Slack's search actually had a bug where it would return results with matches inside hidden channel names, highlighting the censored section :)

In many email systems there is an undo send feature. Outside of those closed contexts where yanking a message out of the recipient’s inbox is possible, it is generally implemented by waiting a few seconds between when the UI says the message has been sent and when the message is actually sent. During that interval, an undo send option is offered which simply cancels the upcoming send action.

Probably just curious whats up.

It's a reminder that there are a lot of people out there.

Might be students, I vaguely remember freshers being challenged to call these numbers pretending to be from our rival university.

It's been 41 years since the song came out.

Assuming that Jenny was 21 when the song was written, (since there is a chance the number was written on a bar's bathroom wall) she would be at least 62 years old now.

Statistically, there's at least a 1 in 4 chance that Jenny is dead now, and there is no chance that she didn't change her number after receiving 800 million horny crank calls.

If I was less scrupulous, I can think of a few ways to easily monetize that. The first and simplest is to have a toll line that charges on call and have a recording on the 867-5309 numbers that refers them to call it.

Whether you go the sultry "really meet Jenny" angle or just try to find something that piques the interest of the average drunk male that would call, just to see what they're being referred to, you'd probably get enough takers to turn a tidy profit regardless of how crappy the ultimate toll line was. I doubt it takes all that much to convince callers that are already drunk and trying to do something they think is mildly funny already.

You need to go to stores in those areas and collect all the rewards points people have gifted to you by putting your number in at checkout!

I knew the guy who had 1-800-FUCK-YOU, and he used it to sell those classic bumper stickers: "How's my driving? Call 1-800-FUCK-YOU!"

There's a prank call podcast called The Snow Plow Show, and the guy set up a bot at a phone number that will automatically reply to callers with voice clips from a lady who yelled at him in a prank call one time. So fans of the show will put the number on windshields or craigslist ads so people will call the number and get yelled at, and the calls are all recorded so he can listen back to them later and pull out the better ones.

I think you should utilize a similar technology for your phone numbers.

This was my friend's grandfather's number in my area when I was growing up. His name was not Jenny...

Helluva good read! The early days of personal computing were wild, super interesting time :)

Yep, I got added to someones internal company trello board oncr. I commented a few times asking to be removed, and when it didn't happen, I started adding suggestions to their product designs. I got removed fairly quickly.

you need one of those new fancy GitHub EMU enterprises instead of a normal one. it is driven solely by an identity provider like Okta or AzureAD.

no one outside of your identity provider will ever know about you. your users have a read-only view of the greater github.com, but whatever access you give them within your enterprise.

it's impossible to make anything public in a GitHub EMU enterprise, and your users won't even be able to star repos outside of the enterprise, because that would reveal your presence.

if you can live without any public access to your stuff at all, have a look. you can convert your old enterprise org(s) to a Teams subscription and continue to publish open stuff there, but you'll need personal accounts there, like always.

There are 17576 three-letter combinations in the English alphabet.

Looks like they were #23,570 (see the URL https://github.com/est.png redirects to)

I got tzs and based on the tzs.png redirect URL trick from another comment I was number 322633.

I have a two-letter github username and I wasn't even an early adopter. I only bothered creating an account when it was clear that Github was more than a fad and a few of the projects I contributed to moved there. I tried just my initials and it worked.

Having a two-letter username is less exciting than simply a common word or name, though. Once in a while I get mentioned by accident in issues, or added to some organization. Twice I have had someone beg me to give it to them under the rationalization that it was "really cool" and I wasn't really "doing anything" with it...

EDIT: I just looked up my ID and apparently none of the first half-million people to sign up for a github account tried to brute-force the small-username space.

EDIT2: There are a few single-letter usernames with IDs in the millions, so I wonder if those are somehow "kept in reserve" by github admins and given out to friends or what's the story there.

Oh that made my day (the file changes that is…!)

This guy is a legend lmao

Totally shite PR.

"Fixes" things with even more typos.

Bumps it all asking to "approve and merge asap"! Lmao!

I don’t know who should be embarrassed here. That org for having 400K members or Github for apparently having no limits on how many emails can be sent out with a simple `@`.

In any case an honorable mention goes to the useless “lock this now” pile-on comments.

I think I stumbled on togithub.com, which simply does a 302 redirect to github.com, which keeps the url understandable and doesn't create the backlink. But I have no idea who actually runs the servers, so I instead went back to a text file.

It's only personal repos, that's why I don't want to create the irrelevant noise for lots of other people.

To me it just seems like noise when a "large" issue on a big project references a issue on my personal project with a single user. Having to scroll trough dozens of references would probably be annoying.

OK, that sounds like a bug unless those two letters happen to be directly preceded by `@`.

Hopefully "nullptr".

The empty string, right? That'd only be appropriate.

The First Name I registered on that account

To lol code?

llOlllO_lllOlOl_llOllOOl_llOllOO

Optional?

James Undefined.

Little Nully we call him

My coworker was naturalized and changed their middle name to null as part of that. To see what would happen

Remind me of this http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/7899171....

I do apologize. The core contributors are all in the habit of using backticks (`@ctz`) but an endless stream of new contributors come in and understandably aren't aware of GitHub-flavored markdown.

You should use info@ instead.

... didn't Elon always get those? He founded x.com in 1999 (with some other people).

I use dave@null.com. Sorry Dave.

Important to keep elected officials on their toes, or who knows what they'll come up with next

Thank you. I've been puzzled by that name for literally decades. I always assumed it was a *nix pathname joke about ./ and couldn't figure out why the order was reversed.

Yep, I have an incredibly common firstname@gmail.com email address and I get hundreds of emails daily with random bills, reservations, bank statements and so on.

I registered this username at one of the early big name webmail services. Not unimaginably rare, sure, but neither is it jsmith or the like.

You’d be shocked how many different people have signed up for stuff with that email address that I’ve had for like 20 years (and only ever log into so I can check on the mayhem). I’ve had bank notices, home sale records, 2 people creating Facebook accounts, and plenty of other stuff.

If my name were as common as yours, I think I’d be ready to choke someone.

I have my first name . last name @ gmail and it’s definitely a reminder of how big the world is. I had previously thought my name was fairly unique. I don’t engage anymore unless it’s a small business trying to get paid.

Thanks for starting this thread. I have my first initial and last name for Gmail and it's nice to know I'm not the only one getting all kinds of mail for other people with similar names!

Parent commenter probably would use the word antifeature for it

Hear hear!

;) Glad someone noticed it (or googled it, which to be fair is becoming even more commendable with time)

And in case you never saw the above xkcd, here's one for you: https://xkcd.com/1053/