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Comment by QuiDortDine | Hacker News Reader

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QuiDortDine

How did you even get that username? Short ones go so fast, you must have been in the first 1000 users!

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

That shows up as a picture of a worm for me.

Edit: aha! The link forwards to https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/23570?v=4

https://api.github.com/users/est might be easier to read for getting the ID.

My ID is #2,715,751 and I still somehow have a 5-letter username

Mine is 23000ish and I still couldn't get "Stavros" (a friend got it first).

EDIT: Wait, how? His ID is 500k or so. Hmm.

Name recycle. For a while I had a username monitoring tool. Names drop, just like domains.

Hmm, I'll need to make sure that GitHub's Stavros... retires, then.

It will be an accident, that much is certain.

Same for #7,xxx,xxx. The space grows exponentially with the number of letters though.

4 letters at #8,016,155: https://api.github.com/users/jmoo

I somehow ended up with #510,566 https://api.github.com/users/smcl but I don't think I was a particularly early adopter.

I joined two years after they started which is earlier than I realised. And apparently we're both relatively early adopters given that there's supposedly >100,000,000 users now.

Seems like I'm just slightly older (230381) with a two letter username.

https://api.github.com/users/est

They created their account at "2008-09-07T22:46:14Z"

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.

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

Not to mention all the one- and two-letter combinations!

Well there’s about 1/26th as many of those.

I have a file by each of those names inwhich each bit represents one article that either has the string or not (1 or 0)

I'm sure someone wanted to know that.

There are some more three-character user names if you count dashes and digits, which are also allowed in GitHub usernames. Although I think the first one has to be a letter of the alphabet.

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

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