The hacker news API is served by firebase -- I'm sure google's infrastructure can handle that traffic

Ah thanks for mentioning this. I looked at the blog post and I seem to have prefixed an extra 1 to the number of requests done by my python script. I updated the post to include the actual calculation of 402 requests per second which is a lot less impressive but still much faster than my original approach on half the hardware.

Agreed, it would have been nice to see some sort of delay or rate limit.