>According to the article that isn't true, mugshot sites have high Google scores because people tend to linger on them.

I can only speculate about causes, but I also have someone in another state with my name (even a matching middle initial) on mugshot sites, and the tiniest other references to me (my wedding registry for example) knocked it off the top Google results page immediately.

As for 99.9% of people not having a GitHub account: so what? I was giving a suggestion relevant to a typical HN user, not advice for the general population. The general advice is to do things like that. The point is that if a wedding registry on theknot.com (Hell, I'm not even sure I made that wedding registry; it might have been auto-gen'd from our Amazon registry) can outsell the undesirable sites on Google, you can easily make ten results happen that knock it off.

GitHub just happens to be an exceptionally good one for an HNer, since it's the kind of thing that an employer is likely to actually want to see.

Most people do have know enough to make sure they have accounts in their name on Google Plus, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Blogspot, Pinterest etc. which tend to rank very well in name searches.