Sorting by "Least recently joined" is interesting. The GitHub team are all there, naturally, but I'm intrigued what "tater" is about. Yehuda Katz is famously user ID 4 but tater shows up as user 611789 through the API.
Other than that, the first 10 pages or so are a real who's who of the Ruby scene in 2007-2008 :-)
See, I'm not entirely sure about this date ordering stuff.. because I'm around #80 by that method, but if I use the API, I'm #118. Try http://caius.github.io/github_id/ to see what your actual user ID is, as I think it's more truthful.
So how does this work? From the search its cheat sheet:
"@defunkt Get all repositories from the user defunkt."
Seeing as there _is_ a user called "a: (http://github.com/a) but he doesn't have a single line of code, no repositories and no active issues either; the search breaks somehow and returns the repository, issue and code (LOC?) count of ALL people.
For example trying it with "@b" (or any existing user after the at-sign) does yield the correct results (the respective counts for user b: http://github.com/b). Trying it with someone with no repositories, code and issues OR a user which does not exist (@thisuserdoesnotexist) results in the same behavior.
No, they are specifically searching for content by @{username} - refer to the cheat sheet on the search page. @{non-existent-username-or-user-with-no-activity} triggers this behavior.
At this time (4:48 AM EST, 2013-10-11), minutes after Hacker News changed the parent comment's timestamp from "1 hour ago" to "2 hours ago", these are the updated values:
Repositories: 4,236,957
Code: 962,598,538
Issues: 5,953,084
Users: 4,473,412
So in a space of time probably equal to either 1.5 hours or 2 hours, the numbers changed by these amounts:
This query is incorrect, because it doesn't include private repos and forks. The headlines on this page https://github.com/search are accurate. As of this comment.
Oh they rate limit and only allow access to the first 100 pages of results. Well that is that idea out of the window :P You could probably get around 7000 of them max, barely a scratch.
It'd take you about 48 days :)
When I checked that ID of the most recent user was 5663608. The github API will give you 5000 hits an hour if you authenticate your requests. You'd have a load of "not founds" but working up from 1 to 5663608 would get you every public user (no private accounts or banned / deleted).
5663608 / 5000 = just under 48 days worth of non stop API harrasment... maybe that explains why github keeps going down, someone is already trying this out :P