Ask HN: Website with 6^16 subpages and 80k+ daily bots

Most people in that ecosystem try to justify that they are somehow better when they can write pointer-magic that nobody else can understand, and feel personally attacked immediately when you mention how much less complex and more maintainable the code would have been if they would have used Go or Rust or another memory safe language.

For me, because I work in cyber, Go is kind of somewhere the middle ground between intentionally crappy C code for offensive purposes and maintainable Go code for defensive purposes. Can't use rust because you can't write exploits in Rust without nullifying the reason you used Rust in the first place :D

Go has a lot of conventions and paradigms I could have an opinion against. The point behind it is that it has opinions, at all, which makes it more maintainable, even when you don't like the enforced opinions.

I'm not saying that there is no reason to use C, there is. But every time you choose C as a language you should be aware that you chose a maintenance burden that increases the risk of the codebase to be abandoned in the future.

Usually, a per-user access token with a 5 download limit per day is good enough, and can be scripted into peoples blacklist generation cycle.

Keep in mind, some ban-lists take awhile to compile and remove redundant subnets etc. It is important to hit the proxy/tor exit nodes first, than the usual country codes for nuisance traffic from users.

Have a nice day, =3

The text itself without the webfont (which acts like a session, basically) is useless for any kind of machine processing, because it contains the shifted characters as UTF-8. The characters are then shifted back with a custom webfont whose seed is the same as the served HTML, but is different for each client. If you detect a non-bot user, it's currently just setting the seed/shift to 0, and serves the real plaintext, but that's optional as the user doesn't notice a difference (only maybe in the copy/paste function).

For me this was the only kind of web technology I could come up with to find a different way to serve "machine-readable" and "human-readable" content and to be able to differ between them. Anything else that's based on e.g. WebCrypto API or other code would be easily bypassed, because it can run in headless Browser instances.

Though taking screenshots in a headless chrome would kind of work to bypass this, but OCR is luckily currently kinda shitty and the development costs for something like that would explode compared to just adding another rotation mechanism in the webfont :D

You would probably have to keep that for accessibility purposes. Though then however you are detecting bot/not might be easily tricked by a good bot - the CAPCH arms race is currently at a point where such things exclude more human requests than automated ones…

Charizard Fire Blast vs. Venusaur: 236-278 (65 - 76.5%) -- guaranteed 2HKO

Venusaur Razor Leaf vs. Charizard on a critical hit: 31-37 (8.6 - 10.3%) -- possibly the worst move ever

Worth noting that toxic gets downgraded to regular poison after switching out, which does 1/16th of damage every turn, and blocks other status like paralysis or sleep.

Leech seed would probably not do much, and is lost upon switching out.

Growth is ok, but since venusaur is slower, you only reduce damage by 33% on your second hit, not great.

Sleep powder would give you a chance, if it hits (75%) and if zard doesn't crit. But it would also waste your team's sleep if you are playing with sleep clause.

Q.E.D Charizard>Venusaur

That said it's not a transitive superiority, as we know Blastoise> Charizard, and Venusaur>Blastoise.

That said Charizard beats venusaur harder than venusaur beats blastoise, as the turtle has access to ice beam and blizzard, so it can at least deal non-stab super effective damage back before getting wrecked by razor leaf. And as a bonus gets a chance to crit or freeze.

Blastoise Blizzard vs. Venusaur: 158-186 (43.5 - 51.2%) -- 5.4% chance to 2HKO

Venusaur Razor Leaf vs. Blastoise on a critical hit: 256-302 (70.9 - 83.6%) -- guaranteed 2HKO

Finally while Zard doesn't have SE coverage moves against Blastois it is faster, so it can get 2 moves in before dying, either 2 slashes or a swords dance and a hyper beam, which deal the same damage but would leave zard roided against the next mon. (Or a slash +beam if you roll for a crit.)

Blastoise Surf vs. Charizard: 205-242 (57.1 - 67.4%) -- guaranteed 2HKO

+2 (swords dance) Charizard Hyper Beam vs. Blastoise: 194-228 (53.7 - 63.1%) -- guaranteed 2HKO

So while mon superiority by matchups are not transitive, that is, we cannot order starter pokemon from best to worst. We can definitely order their matchups from best to worst:

1) Zard vs Venusaur 2) Blastoise vs Zard 3) Venusaur vs Blastoise

With 2 and 3 being closer than 1 and 2.

The matchups themselves are transitive, and as such, in terms of starter matchups Charizard is the best, and Venusaur is the worst

QED