Congratulations on creating the one billionth repository on GitHub

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

The Billionth Repo and Its Name

  • GitHub repository ID 1,000,000,000 turned out to be a public repo literally named “shit,” which many found perfectly on-brand and very funny.
  • The repo was briefly renamed (“historic-repo” / “repository”) and then changed back, with people preferring the original name because it preserved the joke.

Was It Deliberate? Vanity IDs and Gaming the Counter

  • Some suspect the owner aimed for the billionth ID, noting two repos created close together and low prior activity.
  • Others argue it’s mostly luck: multiple people could script repo creation, but only one wins, and rate limits plus global traffic make it non-trivial.
  • A few reference similar “magic number” hunts (e.g., specific PR numbers, Facebook diff IDs, internal bug trackers) and office stories where people tried to grab milestone IDs.

Visibility into GitHub’s Growth & Enumeration Concerns

  • Commenters are surprised GitHub’s API makes it easy to infer repository-creation rate and enumerate repos.
  • Some say most companies hide such growth metrics to obscure trajectory from competitors and investors.
  • Others argue GitHub’s “moat” is so large it doesn’t matter.
  • Security angle: easy enumeration enables scanning new repos for leaked secrets; GitHub and many providers now auto-scan and sometimes auto-revoke exposed credentials.

ID Sequences, Locks, and Overflow

  • Discussion on whether a global, sequential ID implies a global lock; some think repo creation is infrequent enough that it doesn’t matter, others point to sharding/range allocation as alternatives.
  • People note GitHub’s own OpenAPI already has 32-bit overflow issues in other areas and joke about hitting limits for repos next.
  • Several share war stories of systems approaching int32 (or even 16-bit) limits, urgent migrations to 64-bit, schema redesign, and the wide blast radius (foreign keys, APIs, ORMs, analytics).

What Most Repos Represent

  • Some see the “shit” name as accidental meta-commentary on the vast number of purposeless or abandoned GitHub repos.
  • Others suggest many are simply student experiments, which is framed as a positive: modern hosting is vastly easier than old-school CVS setups.

Repository Ecosystem & Search

  • People wonder about total repos across GitHub, GitLab, Forgejo, Codeberg, etc.; APIs for several platforms also allow enumeration.
  • A software-archiving project is mentioned as having cataloged hundreds of millions of public repos, with limited but existing search over that corpus.

Culture Around Round Numbers

  • Multiple anecdotes from OpenStreetMap, corporate help desks, and internal bug trackers show a long tradition of chasing or celebrating “cool number” IDs, sometimes leading to rate-limiting or ID-skipping to prevent abuse.