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Comment by ghusto | Hacker News Reader

Is it though? For one thing it doesn't stop squatting, since all an actual squatter has to do is create a repo with some legit looking code. All this does is inconvenience people like the author who have legitimate reasons for not having uploaded anything yet.

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Does the author have a legitimate reason for having not uploaded anything? I don't see how they're different than any other name squatter, they wanted to reserve the name while not using it. Another person who goes by rbishop wanted to actually use name. From the latter rbishop's perspective, Russ was name squatting his username.

Doing a bit of snooping, this post was March 2014, his first interaction on Github was February 2015. So he still didn't do anything on Github for 11 months after the name change.

> Does the author have a legitimate reason for having not uploaded anything?

Plenty of projects are using GitHub as a social hub. Pushing code isn't the sole use of a username there.

But was he using it as a social hub?

siva7 was, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38384928 . ("I was using Github still actively but hadn’t committed for quite some time in public.")

> Does the author have a legitimate reason for having not uploaded anything?

Sure, he mentioned it. He reserved the name in preparation for open sourcing some projects, but medical and personal issues delayed that happening for a while.

I didn't realize people needed a reason for not uploading code for a dueation. Wtf?

Use it or lose it is a good base policy. Just because it isn’t perfect does not change that. Two years(!) is a long time to be sitting idly on a name and is squatting regardless of intent or circumstance.

It seems like GH admins are capable of looking at a user and making a judgement call (no repos, no activity, no SSH keys, and a few forks) to determine that the username is being squatted. And based on the article, the author was just name squatting. I don't think there's a distinction between "legitimate" or not - use it or lose it.

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