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Comment by rfoo | Hacker News Reader

Since your repo's name is public now anyway, could you please help us and post it here? I'm really curious about what happened. Since public GitHub activities were archived [1], if you post it here we can check if it were ever public or it's truly private at all time.

[1] https://www.gharchive.org/

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It seems the original ones (from the mastodon post) are

- https://github.com/emenel/dust

- https://github.com/emenel/portfolio

(based on https://archive.softwareheritage.org/browse/search/?q=emenel...)

Care to check them on gharchive? I bet they used to be public.

> based on

The data for The Stack’s dataset is sourced from the Software Heritage Archive, so checking that is redundant. We need different sources.

Even still, both repos had READMEs [1][2] clearly meant to be read by the public. The archival was only successful years ago, with a failed snapshot as far back as 2021 [3]. This really seems like they forgot it was ever public.

Now, this is only about it being a GitHub breach. Whether unlicensed (emenel/portfolio) or GPL (emenel/dust) code should be allowed in such datasets is a different matter.

[1] https://archive.softwareheritage.org/browse/origin/directory...

[2] https://archive.softwareheritage.org/browse/origin/directory...

[3] https://archive.softwareheritage.org/browse/origin/visits/?o...

I used SW Heritage to identify the repos that were used for training, since op did not post the repo names.

The “different source” is supposed to be ghactions.

I checked my GitHub archive data and emenel/dust is not there, but emenel/portfolio is. Note, GitHub archive is not 100% accurate and it is missing 319 hours.

How do I check this? I found a repo I'm pretty sure was always private on there that I deleted a while back. https://github.com/johncoates/JCBootstrap

There's no archived version on archive.org at least.

https://archive.softwareheritage.org/browse/origin/directory... shows a "snapshot date" of "11 August 2015, 07:28:00 UTC" - any chance it was public on that date such that the crawler could have accessed it?

I checked my GitHub archive (https://www.gharchive.org/) indexed data and the only repo that I saw for johncoates was LanscapeVideos, which has a last event time of 2015-06-09 07:09:52+02

It is important to note that GitHub archive is not 100% accurate and there is over 319 missing hours.

I can't find any reason why I would have made it public. I made the repo in 2014 for internal use and don't like to share projects like that. I'm pretty careful when releasing any code publicly. It's some code that other private projects depend on. I searched for any references in public code and there are none, so there should have been no reason to make it public.

Interestingly my public code with thousands of stars isn't in "The Stack".

This shouldn't be something where we're relying on recollection.

Presumably github repo privacy state has an audit trail. This would allow GH to prove / disprove claims on any given repo easily. I hope a rep steps in to do so.

Yeah I agree. Tried https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39771541 but there's nothing related to this repo. Does GitHub send an email out when you make something public? I don't have any emails related to this repo.

I just upgraded the tool at https://observablehq.com/@simonw/github-public-repo-history to use lowercase comparisons (previously it was case sensitive) so it's worth having another look.

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