Live data from Hacker News

ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state

buchodi.com

491–500 of 668 posts

Re: ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state

#491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That still doesn’t explain why you can’t even start typing until that check proceeds. You could condition the outbound request from being processed until that’s the case. But preventing from typing seems like it’s just worse UX and the problem will fail to appear in any metrics you can track because you have no way of measuring “how quickly would the user have submitted their request without all this other stuff in t…

I developed the first version of Google's equivalent of this (albeit theirs actually computes a constantly rotating key from the environment, it doesn't just hard-code it in the program!). The reason it has to block until it's loaded is that otherwise the signal being missing doesn't imply automation. The user might have just typed before it loaded. If you know a legit user will always deliver the data, you can use t…

That doesn't make sense. The server would wait to process anything until after you received the signal. If it doesn't arrive within a reasonable period of time that tells you something, the same as right now.

If you mean that you can infer client side tampering with the page contents you could still do that - permit typing but don't permit the submit action on the client. The user presses enter but nothing happens until the check is complete. There you go, now you can tell if the page was tampered with (not that it makes much difference tbh).

Re: ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state

#493
When using ChatGPT Android app with some NextDNS block lists, I get an error modal in app saying "security misconfiguration blah blah".

Clearly I'm blocking some tracker and it's upset about that. I allowlisted a sentry subdomain and since then got no more complaints.

Re: ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state

#494
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting to me that OpenAI considers scraping to be a form of abuse.

Scraping static content from a website at near-zero marginal cost to its server, vs scraping an expensive LLM service provided for free, are different things. The former relies on fairly controversial ideas about copyright and fair use to qualify as abuse, whereas the latter is direct financial damage – by your own direct competitors no less. It's fun to poke at a seeming hypocrisy of the big bad, but the similarity…

"near-zero marginal costs". For whom exactly????

https://drewdevault.com/2025/03/17/2025-03-17-Stop-externali...

Re: ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state

#495
post #401
post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the parent is just pointing out that these things lie on a spectrum. I have a website that consists largely of static content and the (significant) scraping which occurs doesn't impact the site for general users so I don't mind (and means I get good, up to date answers from LLMs on the niche topic my site covers). If it did have an impact on real users, or cost me significant money, I would feel pretty differ…

Putting everything on a spectrum is what got us into this mess of zero regulation and moving goal posts. It's slippery slope thinking no matter which way we cut it, because every time someone calls for a stop sign to be put up after giving an inch, the very people who would have to stop will argue tirelessly for the extra mile.

What mess are you talking about? The existence of LLMs? I think it's pretty neat that I can now get answers to questions I have.

This is something I couldn't have done before, because people very often don't have the patience to answer questions. Even Google ended up in loops of "just use Google" or "closed. This is a duplicate of X, but X doesn't actually answer the question" or references to dead links.

Are there downsides to this? Sure, but imo AI is useful.

Re: ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state

#496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite sure even literal thieves would consider thievery a form of abuse.

Yeah, they know it's bad, they just don't think the rules apply to them.

The rules are that a large corporate AI company is able to scrape literally everything, and will use the full force of the law and any technology they can come up with to prevent you as an individual or a startup from doing so. Because having the audacity to try to exploit your betters would be "Theft".

Re: ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state

#497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d argue putting everything in terms of black and white is the bigger issue than understanding nuance

Generalizing with "everything", "all", etc exclusive markers is exactly the kind of black/white divide you're arguing against. What happened to your nuanced reality within a single sentence? Not everything is black and white, but some situations are.

The person he's replying to argued against putting things on a spectrum. Does that not imply painting everything in black and white? Thus his response seems perfectly sensible to me.

Re: ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state

#498

Hey! I'm Nick, and I work on Integrity at OpenAI. These checks are part of how we protect our first-party products from abuse like bots, scraping, fraud, and other attempts to misuse the platform. A big reason we invest in this is because we want to keep free and logged-out access available for more users. My team’s goal is to help make sure the limited GPU resources are going to real users. We also keep a very close…

Abuse from scraping has long been a serious problem for many, good job!

Re: ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state

#499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That still doesn’t explain why you can’t even start typing until that check proceeds. You could condition the outbound request from being processed until that’s the case. But preventing from typing seems like it’s just worse UX and the problem will fail to appear in any metrics you can track because you have no way of measuring “how quickly would the user have submitted their request without all this other stuff in t…

I developed the first version of Google's equivalent of this (albeit theirs actually computes a constantly rotating key from the environment, it doesn't just hard-code it in the program!). The reason it has to block until it's loaded is that otherwise the signal being missing doesn't imply automation. The user might have just typed before it loaded. If you know a legit user will always deliver the data, you can use t…

This perfectly explains the trade-off. But from a pure UX perspective, freezing the input pipeline feels uniquely hostile. They could buffer the keystrokes invisibly in the background instead of locking the cursor, which creates the jarring perception that the site is actively fighting the user.

Re: ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state

#500
post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The people most likely to get caught by these systems are exactly the ones who care most about their privacy, and not the bots that they are apparently targeting. In my brief experience with abuse mitigation, connections coming from VPNs or unusual IP ranges were very significantly more likely to be associated with abuse. It depends on your users. VPNs aren’t common at all, even though you hear about them a lot on…

The solution is for more people to use Tor routinely. Like I'm doing right now.

How does the Tor network counter abuse? Like, say you're hosting a service on the Tor network, what does the Tor network offer if anything to defend against e.g. DDoS attacks?
Post reply on HN