As strange of a question this is, can we just fire
Poettering from FOSS projects altogether? He seems to just cause endless drama and not actually improve the OS all of our respective industries depend on.
I've seen this a lot on the systemd GitHub Issues. A bug is reported, Pottering describes it as not a bug and closes it himself, then everyone else disagrees and says that it needs to be fixed.
Why is this on HN?
Because of the recent CVE-2017-9217. Apparently Poettering tried to veto reporting that bug as well.
The news here is the systemd behavior and debate over whether it's a bug, not whether Poettering is being downvoted. The title needs to be changed.
Suggest changing title to that of the item: "systemd can't handle ... user name startswith number".