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Ask HN: How does Hacker News avoid (successful) DDoS attacks?

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Re: Ask HN: How does Hacker News avoid (successful) DDoS attacks?

#21

Post by sargstuff »

codesections wrote: post #8
capableweb wrote: post #7

It does have a rate limit, it's just very very high. I've hit it sometime when trying to download every single item since day 0. But it's very lenient, you have to run multiple threads downloading as fast as they can in order to hit it. The API is not hosted by HN/Ycombinator themselves. If I recall correctly, it was initially hosted by Firebase which is/was a company seed-funded by Ycombinator. It (Firebase) is now…

> It does have a rate limit, it's just very very high. I've hit it sometime when trying to download every single item since day 0. Interesting. The API README states: > There is currently no rate limit. I guess that's wrong/out of date. I wonder when that changed?

Would hazzard a guess, matches service provider account limits. (hopefuly not because got billed for exceeding account limits)

Re: Ask HN: How does Hacker News avoid (successful) DDoS attacks?

#22

Post by gardenhedge »

krapp wrote: post #20
gardenhedge wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of disdain for HN on Twitter for some reason

It's one of the few places we can vent about HN without being reprimanded, rate limited and eventually banned.

does HN rate limit people?

Re: Ask HN: How does Hacker News avoid (successful) DDoS attacks?

#23

Post by krapp »

gardenhedge wrote: post #22
krapp wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's one of the few places we can vent about HN without being reprimanded, rate limited and eventually banned.

does HN rate limit people?

Yes. You'll get a message saying that "you're posting too fast." That's because you've been limited to only a few (four or five) posts per hour. You'll never be told when this is applied to your account, or what the limit is, or when it's lifted, if it is. They also used to purposely slow response times as a way to drive certain posters away but I think they've stopped that. They also shadowban, but at least that's reversible. Unless you vouch for the wrong people, then you lose your vouching privileges.

Basically, the mods will tweak anything and everything they can to either increase the quality of your comments or decrease the damage they do, with banning outright as a last resort.

Re: Ask HN: How does Hacker News avoid (successful) DDoS attacks?

#24

Post by hayst4ck »

You can hit the rate limit, just open 50 tabs and try to load them all at once. You will get IP banned, likely if there are a lot of cache-miss queries (querying old pages rather than recent ones).

There are many services you can use that will filter traffic and prevent DDoS. It's relatively easy to shift traffic to them if there is a problem.

Lastly the content of HN is almost entirely text, high read, very low write. Nearly all writes are behind an account, signup can be protected by a captcha or turned off entirely. The architecture means that reads can be cached, and the caching, serving, and traffic layers (assuming they are there) can likely scale horizontally nearly unbounded.

Then hacker news is full of tech folks who would probably enjoy investigating a DDoS.

DDoSing seems high risk low reward.

Re: Ask HN: How does Hacker News avoid (successful) DDoS attacks?

#25

Post by hackerman123469 »

Archipelagia wrote: post #18
gardenhedge wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of disdain for HN on Twitter for some reason

To be fair, there's a lot of disdain for pretty much everything on Twitter

There's a lot of disdain for Twitter on Twitter.
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