Turns out Github requires that a "User-Agent" header be passed. Curl does this by default.
This fixed it (obviously I'll be changing the user-agent, since I'm emulating Curl currently):
request
...
.set('User-Agent', 'curl/7.24.0 (x86_64-apple-darwin12.0) libcurl/7.24.0 OpenSSL/0.9.8r zlib/1.2.5')
...