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Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

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Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

#221

Post by heikkilevanto »

csense wrote: post #209

I find it interesting that a substantial number of people seem to think it's wrong or unethical to cold-email someone about a potential recruitment or business opportunity if they post their email in a public place, such as commits in a public Github repo. I feel like if you don't want companies to cold-email you, you shouldn't make your email public. Github provides noreply email addresses for this purpose.

> I find it interesting that a substantial number of people seem to think it's wrong or unethical to cold-email someone about a potential recruitment or business opportunity if they post their email in a public place

I find it interesting that some fucking spammers think that just because they found out my email somewhere, they should be allowed to waste my time and resources for their shit.

That is explicitly illegal here in EU. Unless I have clearly given you my consent, you are not allowed to spam me. Is informed consent really such a difficult concept to understand?

Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

#222

Post by martinwoodward »

TheSaifurRahman wrote: post #78
martinwoodward wrote: post #31

Martin from GitHub here. This type of behaviour is explicitly against the GitHub terms of service, when we catch the accounts doing this we can (and do) take action against those accounts including banning the accounts. It's a game of whack-a-mole for sure, and it's not just start-ups that take part in this sketchy behaviour to be honest. I've been plenty of examples in my time across the board. The fundamental natur…

Are no-reply emails associated with the accounts if the username is changed? That's one reason why I switched back to my personal email.

Since 2017 they are yes.

Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

#223

Post by nickphx »

martinwoodward wrote: post #31

Martin from GitHub here. This type of behaviour is explicitly against the GitHub terms of service, when we catch the accounts doing this we can (and do) take action against those accounts including banning the accounts. It's a game of whack-a-mole for sure, and it's not just start-ups that take part in this sketchy behaviour to be honest. I've been plenty of examples in my time across the board. The fundamental natur…

How about improving the processing of abuse reports for repos hosting windows malware that is actively being advertised to potential victims? https://github.com/preconfigured/dl/blob/main/ms-update32.ex...

Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

#224

Post by gettingoverit »

david_allison wrote: post #177
martinwoodward wrote: post #31

Martin from GitHub here. This type of behaviour is explicitly against the GitHub terms of service, when we catch the accounts doing this we can (and do) take action against those accounts including banning the accounts. It's a game of whack-a-mole for sure, and it's not just start-ups that take part in this sketchy behaviour to be honest. I've been plenty of examples in my time across the board. The fundamental natur…

> when we catch the accounts doing this we can (and do) take action against those accounts including banning the accounts. This isn't my experience. I requested that you looked into a spammer in July 2025, you ignored my reply and the account is still active. ---- Thank you so much for the report. We're sorry to hear you're receiving unwanted emails, but it's always a possibility when your public contact information…

I reported spammers ~5 times to GH, and every time the account went down in a couple of hours. Obviously mileage may vary, but I don't want the whole HN to think this process is completely broken.

Please keep reporting spammers, usually it works.

Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

#225

Post by david_allison »

gettingoverit wrote: post #224
david_allison wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when we catch the accounts doing this we can (and do) take action against those accounts including banning the accounts. This isn't my experience. I requested that you looked into a spammer in July 2025, you ignored my reply and the account is still active. ---- Thank you so much for the report. We're sorry to hear you're receiving unwanted emails, but it's always a possibility when your public contact information…

I reported spammers ~5 times to GH, and every time the account went down in a couple of hours. Obviously mileage may vary, but I don't want the whole HN to think this process is completely broken. Please keep reporting spammers, usually it works.

To confirm: is this email spammers, or spam on GitHub?

I've had decent success with on-GitHub action (I'd wager ~80% action taken), but the effort to report email spammers doesn't seem worthwhile.

Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

#226

Post by david_allison »

blobbers wrote: post #192
david_allison wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They already do[0] 62114487+david-allison@users.noreply.github.com this includes a unique ID which survives account renames, and the name of the GitHub account at the time. [0] https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/reference/ema...

How does the spammer get through this then?

If used/implemented correctly, they don't.

* This is an optional feature via git config, with a further GitHub setting to reject commits pushed using your personal email address.

* If the GitHub setting is disabled, some GitHub-generated commits/fixups use your personal email (e.g. squash merge in the GitHub UI).

* I use my personal email in file-level copyright headers, even if the commits use the GitHub noreply email.

* I have my personal email on my GitHub profile, visible to logged in users.

Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

#227

Post by ThrowawayB7 »

mardef wrote: post #172
cortesoft wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trillion dollar marketshare? How big do you think GitHub is?

GitHub is wholly owned by Microsoft, which has a 3 trillion market cap

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 emails to users

#228

Post by mattpal21 »

Yo, I also got the email:

""" Hi Matt,

I found your GitHub and thought you might like what we're building. We're developing an open source SDK that runs LLMs directly on-device.

We're getting about 45 tokens per second on iPhones, with support for Swift, Kotlin, React Native and Flutter. There's also a fully offline voice pipeline built in, so everything runs locally. We recently got into Y Combinator and are focused on expanding support to more edge devices and continuously improving performance.

If you're curious, here's the repo: github.com/RunanywhereAI/runanywhere-sdks

Feel free to reply to this email with any feedback or ideas you'd like to explore with on-device AI, or if you'd be interested in contributing. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Best, Aditya """

Just to share the entire email, I think it's pretty well written, I went ahead and talked to the team, they were very curious and took my feedback regarding their flutter sdks very seriously, and they seem to be great people. Also, just an fyi, I tried their sdks, it's great! and I've been loving their apps as well.

I think their team is great, and I asked them for adding the rag implementation, they did it in less than week and it's pretty impressive. I think it's worth checking it out, It's easier to demean someone in public like that but might be worth checking.

Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

#229

Post by mattpal21 »

cyann wrote: post #88

Got this spam today on my GitHub address, YC affiliated: From: henry@joincactuscompute.com Hey, I hope all is well with you, just reaching out as you seem to be interested in on-device speech models. Cactus is a low-latency AI engine for consumer devices like phones, Macs, wearables, Raspberry Pis, etc. We support transcription models like Whisper & Parakeet, benchmarks available in the attached GitHub repo. GitHub:…

Atleast they didn't ask for stars lol, but great to see how fast they're iterating!
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