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Re:Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam e... by eli on Thursday February 26, 2026 @10:47AM (#47167641)
How would you know whether the account that did the scraping was banned?
Re:Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam e... by retlehs on Thursday February 26, 2026 @10:50AM (#47167678)
By visiting the account and noticing that it still has activity long after the report.
Re:Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam e... by hedora on Thursday February 26, 2026 @01:25PM (#47169966)
How do you propose GH take action without risking taking down legitimate projects due to brigades of false reports?
Re:Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam e... by adrianmsmith on Thursday February 26, 2026 @02:58PM (#47171236)
GH literally say in a parent comment:

> we can (and do) take action against those accounts including banning the accounts

Re:Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam e... by shimman on Thursday February 26, 2026 @01:41PM (#47170204)
That they use some of their trillion dollar marketshare to solve it, why are you acting like this is a hard problem? It's not. They're just too cheap and greedy to do anything about it.
Re:Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam e... by cortesoft on Thursday February 26, 2026 @02:01PM (#47170493)
Trillion dollar marketshare? How big do you think GitHub is?
Re:Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam e... by mardef on Thursday February 26, 2026 @02:09PM (#47170594)
GitHub is wholly owned by Microsoft, which has a 3 trillion market cap
Re:Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam e... by ThrowawayB7 on Thursday February 26, 2026 @07:15PM (#47174351)
One would expect people on Hacker News to know that a single business division doesn't have direct access to the funds of other business divisions of the same corporation.
Re:Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam e... by shimman on Friday February 27, 2026 @09:41AM (#47181021)
One would expect people on HN should know that companies subsidize failing BU all the time with their profitable BUs.

Sorry but why are you making excuses for these insanely greedy companies that don't want to hire people to solve a basic problem?

Re:Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam e... by grepfru_it on Friday February 27, 2026 @12:55AM (#47176996)
When I left, GH was valued at around $40 billion. Above the $8B they were purchased for. Well below $1T that is claimed
Re:Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam e... by shimman on Friday February 27, 2026 @09:40AM (#47181013)
Even if they were valued around $100million they would still have more enough resources to solve this problem. Stop excusing companies that hate hiring people and are so greedy they would rather punt this problem to the commons fucking over an entire community that literally enabled them to exist.

Come on here, even Meta hires people in Kenya to look at CP and snuff films to label this stuff. Meta! They literally profited off of a genocide and they still know how to do this.

Excuse after excuse for these greedy companies.

Re:Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam e... by DonHopkins on Thursday February 26, 2026 @03:45PM (#47171797)
How small do you think Microsoft is??!
Re:Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam e... by cortesoft on Friday February 27, 2026 @12:29PM (#47183055)
GitHub is not all of Microsoft.
Re:Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam e... by eli on Thursday February 26, 2026 @04:34PM (#47172279)
I'm confused. How do you know what account scraped your email address from github in order to send you an email?

Or do you mean going after the accounts of companies that make use of a likely scraped email address? That's not a bad idea either, but it has risks and isn't the same thing.

Re:Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam e... by tedivm on Thursday February 26, 2026 @04:55PM (#47172487)
Half the time they literally say it in the email. I just looked in my spam folder and just a few hours ago got an email titled "Your profile: Github", that started with:

> I came across your profile on GitHub. Given you're based in the US, I thought it might be relevant to reach out. > > Profile: https://github.com/tedivm

They aren't doing anything to hide it.

Re:Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam e... by grepfru_it on Friday February 27, 2026 @12:54AM (#47176990)
But hold on.

They could have git cloned your repo, used or otherwise analyzed your code which follows TOS then used the local git repo to pull your email address.

How is GitHub responsible here?

Re:Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam e... by influx on Friday February 27, 2026 @12:22PM (#47182996)
They could have, but it seems unlikely they targeted one or two repos and probably cloned thousands or more.
Re:Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam e... by eli on Friday February 27, 2026 @12:31PM (#47183079)
That identifies the company that sent the email not the github account that scraped it