[deleted]
Disabled at 22 million commits
71–80 of 145 posts
Re: Disabled at 22 million commits
#72So the author was purposefully trying to do the most extreme thing they could to see how git/GitHub act/break. I don’t blame GH at all. Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20230702215522/https://sh.itjust...
> So the author was purposefully trying to do the most extreme thing they could to see how git/GitHub act/break.
This is Hacker News. Hacking is about using, in particular, technology in surprising ways that were not intended by the creators.
Re: Disabled at 22 million commits
#73So the author was purposefully trying to do the most extreme thing they could to see how git/GitHub act/break. I don’t blame GH at all. Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20230702215522/https://sh.itjust...
So basically this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kzb6uf0U0k
Re: Disabled at 22 million commits
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Deliberately trying to create an extreme situation in order to find when/where/how a service breaks is inarguably "abuse" regardless of whether the intent was malign.
I addressed this in another downthread reply. Briefly, I agree. My quibble isn’t with the term “abuse”, only the nature of its intent.
The intent doesn't seem particularly relevant.
Re: Disabled at 22 million commits
#75So the author was purposefully trying to do the most extreme thing they could to see how git/GitHub act/break. I don’t blame GH at all. Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20230702215522/https://sh.itjust...
This is why we can’t have nice things.
Re: Disabled at 22 million commits
#76Sidestepping all of the ethical questions of embarking on this "research", I'm surprised the number was that low. Linux[0] itself has about 1.2 million commits, so apparently Linux is within an order of magnitude of bringing GitHub to it's knees? [0] https://github.com/torvalds/linux
There's a rough rule of thumb that you should expect to redesign your system to handle each order of magnitude increase in scale, and I figure it applies here too—gracefully handling that size of repo would require substantial engineering work, and they have plenty of time to handle it before human-oriented open source repos get even close to the current limit.
>
There's a rough rule of thumb that you should expect to redesign your system to handle each order of magnitude increase in scale
I rather know the rule: by good engineering, you can modify a system to handle a one magnitude increase with respect what it was designed for. As soon as a two magnitude increase can occur, you better redesign the system.
Re: Disabled at 22 million commits
#77I’m surprised at the reaction in these comments. Somebody curiously pushing the limits of a service to see what would happen is very much in the spirit of all hackers. Meanwhile, GitHub responded appropriately, and his write up agrees.
because he is pushing the limits of a public service thats used by millions of people every day. the BEST CASE is basically what happened, GitHub finds out and disables the repo. worst case is he takes down the entire GitHub site and gets permanently banned.
dont fuck with shit I use.
Re: Disabled at 22 million commits
#78More correct title would be "GitHub stopped abuse after 22M commits". There is absolutely nothing wrong with GH stopping that and it's very wrong to insinuate otherwise like OP is doing. Wouldn't be surprised if GH would permaban him.
I don’t think the author is trying to insinuate that GitHub is in the wrong in any way. They explicitly say they understand the decision, and anticipated that it would happen. I don’t want to quibble with the term “abuse”, because I think in this scenario it depends on whether intent is a factor and whether we should trust their stated intent. But depending on how you look at it, GitHub would be just as likely to ben…
Hire them? Why? There’s nothing technically clever or novel here. Anyone can create a shell script to generate random commits and push them. I’d bet even GPT-3.5 could handle that. Why should GitHub hire them?
Re: Disabled at 22 million commits
#79I’m surprised at the reaction in these comments. Somebody curiously pushing the limits of a service to see what would happen is very much in the spirit of all hackers. Meanwhile, GitHub responded appropriately, and his write up agrees.
Someone potentially taking the service down for everyone, you know, just out of curiosity. Which part of this curiosity you need GitHub for? I'm curious how well GitHub handles DDoS attacks, what's their limit. Let's DDoS and find out, it will be fun!
> Someone potentially taking the service down for everyone, you know, just out of curiosity.
I think this is exactly why it's great, and it's basically turned into a GitHub advertisement. Either GitHub is simply unable to handle weird abuse methods and/or the abuse prevention is improved.
As an enterprise, wouldn't it be a bit concerning if your git host was unable to function (or respond appropriately) when presented with a random script kiddie?
This person didn't have bad intentions, but other people out there most definitely do.
Re: Disabled at 22 million commits
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Microsoft’s azure docs repo has 1.1M commits, and it’s many gigabytes big. I made the mistake of trying to clone it to fix an issue in the docs I ran into. Ended up just editing it on GitHub because fuck that. https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/azure-docs
You can clone a few latest commits git clone -–depth [depth] [remote-url]
I dont think that works:
> git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/azure-docs
Cloning into 'azure-docs'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 107158, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (107158/107158), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (101843/101843), done.
Receiving objects: 17% (18217/107158), 780.25 MiB | 43.72 MiB/s