Hacker News Reader

Comment by devin | Hacker News Reader

If anyone reading this is curious of their own, you can go to https://api.github.com/users/YOUR_USERNAME_HERE and fetch it.

My ID is just over 10,000. Crazy to think of the journey that I've had in computing since I signed up for GitHub.

View on HN

Fun story about that: In Ruby 2.x, the version GitHub originally launched with, every object implemented the method `id`, which returned the object id (in 3.x, it was renamed to `object_id`). Every object had this id, ActiveRecord models, strings, floats, integers, booleans, etc. Some objects had fixed object ids, like `true.object_id #=> 20`, `false.object_id #=> 0`, `123.object_id #=> 247 (2n+1)`. The `object_id` for `nil` is `4`.

Yehuda Katz was the first external user of GitHub after the cofounders, so his github user id is `4`.

The way Rails works, if you want to look up a user record, you do it by id:

    author = comment.author
    user = User.find(author.id)

Now, if there was some bug, and for some reason a comment had no author, `comment.author` would return `nil`, `nil.id` would return `4`, and the UI would show Yehuda as the author in the UI. People would ask, "Who is this Yehuda guy, and why is he commenting on my PRs?"

Similarly, when writing Facebook apps with Rails, when you'd hit that same bug you'd see Mark Zuckerbeg: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=4

These are the fun anecdotes that make perusing comments here so worth it. Thanks for sharing!

I love this story, makes me wonder how many other fun bugs on GitHub have been lost to time.

This is too funny. Thanks for sharing this tidbit!

1,202 if we're bragging.

TBH I'm not super invested in github. I pay for it (smallest plan) and use it as a repository and for forking other projects occasionally, and for hosting some small-time static sites. I've never really needed any of it's other features. Every time I go to github.com there's more and more cruft though, which to me means that I'm not their target customer and they will inevitably either alienate me or jack up their prices. Happens every time there's an acquisition so I'm kind of used to it now.

Github has remained surprisingly useful for quite a while post M$ purchase, but I'm old enough to know that everything M$ touches eventually goes to crap. It's like a law.

I remember using CVS and Subversion though, with very limited hosted options, and I thought Github was the bees knees at the time.

I am 22095 on GH but 213 on Sourceforge :-D I have a 5 digit user id on Slashdot as well (~20k mark if I recall).

My Slashdot ID's under 4,000. It makes me a little sad that I can't bear to use it anymore.

My ICQ number was 5 digits. Was always funny towards "the end" when I'd give it to people and they'd wait for more digits.

Yeah, I haven't been there in years.

3-digit Slashdot user id, reporting in.

I, too, wish Slashdot was worth visiting again. I spent so, so many years there, enjoying the hell out of it since it was Chips&Dips ...

Surprised to find I am #79.

I think that was down to being in a particular IRC channel when CW & co. were building it.

Congrats, never thought I'd see 2 digits in this thread haha

Ha, HN is exactly where I'd expect to see 2 digits personally

#72 here. Got access to contribute a small PR to one of Chris Wanstrath‘s projects.

I bow to you 7 times

Nice, someone even lower than my #297!

In fact now I think about it my claim to fame used to be that Github used one of my Rails plugins. I had written a really simple versioning system (Rails 2 I think) that I used for my blog and they used it, IIRC, for versioning wiki pages.

Mine is 2041.

When I was working at Microsoft I got transferred over to GitHub for awhile and someone there noticed my ID and made a big deal out of me having a 4-digit ID. :)

I never thought about it before then.

Thanks for sharing that link. My GitHub ID is 484.

I had no idea that I joined so early. It says I joined in 20/2/2008. I guess I was following some of the founders' work in Rails when GitHub was announced and must have signed up shortly after it got started.

I'm 13936 and I felt like I was SO LATE to the party when I signed up.

I'm 17722 and also felt late. I was a holdout on Subversion and was resistant to Git in general since SVN still worked fine and had good tooling, but eventually some client work moved to Git and thus eventually Github.

We must have joined around the same time, 17498. Funny to call us late when this would have been July 2008, or ~3 months after public launch.

I'm ~46,0000 and I thought I was early!

I'm around 1M and I have a three-character username, which also feels like I was early

I was too loyal to mercurial, only switched to git/github long after the battle was lost and won.

Hah! I was too. I was at a bar with Chris trying to convince him to base the company off of hg instead of git but they already had the domain name and had already started building it.

13274 here!

Hello late bloomers, 143370 here

Genuinely surprised to be just over 10k too! Felt late!

No idea how my two character handle made it through… Probably the wrong thread to ask anyone at GH to allow me to block notifications anytime anyone mentions "@ts" but I've come to accept it at this point, lol.

I was late to the party: 457,207

Created at 2010-10-27T23:42:22Z. 16 years! What a wild ride. I used to use bitbucket a ton back then. I loved it.

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

Top million though! Still earliest 1%.

For comparison, I'm 208,820 and we're in the same year: I got that number 2010-02-23. So GitHub more than doubled user count that year, impressive for a "late to the party" growth.

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

I'm at 18 years and ID 1653. It took them a while to gain traction.

They actually had meaningful competition back then, too. Bitbucket had free private repos and hg support! Back when that was still a topic.

hah, my cheat here is https://github.com/YOURHANDLE.png

Will redirect to an image file whose title is your user ID! :D

I love that https://github.com/yourhandle is an existing organization.

Genuinely surprised that I'm only 2,187. Weird to think about how quickly I must have jumped on it.

My user id is in the 2,660,000s, 2012 here and I joined when I was 13.

I can't believe I joined Github back in 2009. I was a hardcore Mercurial fan and user back then. :)

April 27th 2010 and I felt pretty good getting a five character name (my own name). My ID is 254XXX

Around 40000 and a real name with 4 digits. Thought I was late.

In the 40k range too. I was too cheap at the time to pay for anything or else I would have signed up earlier.

10126 here. I wouldn't have guessed it was that low.

You're going to crash the server.

Wow — I'm user 404!

I'm user angry unicorn... :}

It was going to crash, anyway.

Woah, January 2009 (in the 40,000s), like some others I felt I was late to the party. I guess not :).

938555 / 07.26.2011, late for the game but man 15 years, memories came flooding back

And here I thought I was doing well at 47979. That was January 2009, so not too bad.

wow, I'm in the 6.3 million group, 2014. I am surprised it's both that low and that old. Nothing compared to 5 or 6 digits, though. :D

Thanks for the link.

ID: 67,498 Created: 2009-03-26

17 years, a month and two days ago.

33000 something, nov 2008. Just interesting to see how the growth escalated in 2009 judging by other comments here as well.

I was a day after you, march 27th. #67730

heh, beat you by three days, ID 65973, 2009-03-23 :)

366; nbd

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

133882 / Oct 1st 2009

Nice, mine is 5082

926648 checking in.

I had just tried asking Gemini to help me get there, and it kept telling me to read line 2 of github.com, as if they were serving JSON on their homepage. :facepalm:

Reply on news.ycombinator.com