Maybe not as impressive since it's a number, but I got mine in 2021. HN names aren't terribly competitive, it seems. Maybe it's due to the more mature culture here.

> Maybe it's due to the more mature culture here.

Perhaps a bit of that, and perhaps a bit of a non-existent marketplace

HN is one of the only sites on the Internet where I was able to get my name in 2021.

So are you Charles I or II?

Actually he’s the spaniel. Works for DataDog.

On the Internet nobody knows I'm a King Charles Spaniel.

Except you. You know Ꙭ

Ah man, don’t give me those puppy dog eyes!

One. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=kingcharles

I managed to snag this one by emailing [email protected] to transfer it to me as the nick was dormant for years.

Was the account frozen?

Not sure. There were no comments or submissions since its creation.

Edit: I just realised, heh. You cheeky fella.

For what it's worth, this whole submission came about because another user was shocked that someone had registered the HN username "ford" in 2022.

Turns out another user named "fordprefect" existed and had commented on a poll from 2009, which surprised the heck out of both of us.

I got a 5 letter username less than 3 minutes ago

Yours does not include an English dictionary word or name though (unless sh counts, but that's shorter and less common than 'max'), but yeah 5-char words being available, I'm also not too surprised by.

This was the second 5 letter dictionary word I tried. :p

So now it's gone for all time? Thanks :p

What I've done on reddit for throwaways is use 123123 as password so they can be reused. Not a one has gotten 'hacked' yet over months of use, I'm quite surprised tbh. Maybe I should publish the password on the relevant accounts once I decide to stop using them. Ideally there'd be a time factor before it changes hands to avoid confusion and editing old posts, but I would probably forget (hence the dummy password strategy).

Related: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/01/my_open_wirel... "It wasn't me officer" (of course IP logs... and not that I'd do anything illegal on reddit anyway no sir)

26^5 is 11881376, surely there aren't that many users here yet (?)

And 36^5 is even a bit bigger. (Numbers are allowed. Think that's it though - case is recorded, but I don't think you can sign up Dheera, because dheera exists.)

Underscores and hyphens are allowed too, so it's at least 38^5 ≈ 79e6.