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Fn 1: https://github.com/HackerNews/API
Like, people with skills to run an attack are also more likely to actually enjoy participating here. It'd be like someone trying to take down Stack Overflow. Even if you can do that – especially if you're the kind of person who could do that – you'd probably be shooting yourself in the foot, right?
So this might be naive, but... what interest would someone have in taking down HN? Like, people with skills to run an attack are also more likely to actually enjoy participating here. It'd be like someone trying to take down Stack Overflow. Even if you can do that – especially if you're the kind of person who could do that – you'd probably be shooting yourself in the foot, right?
IP based rate limiting probably (?)
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 a part of Google, so I guess you could say Google is hosting the HN API now.
With that, comes everything they are doing to prevent malicious ddos attacks.
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…
Interesting. The API README states:
> There is currently no rate limit.
I guess that's wrong/out of date. I wonder when that changed?
Historically HN has not been hosted on infrastructure that would be particularly resistant to DDoS attacks, nobody has been DDoSing it.
IP based rate limiting probably (?)
This doesn't really do much against all but the most trivial denial-of-service attacks.