Hacker News Reader

I would block it, if I was the maintainer. As the linked post mentions, automated requests can "ramp up" at any moment, risking server stability. By preemptively blocking automated parsing (on a resource which primary usage is individual requests, not mass ones) I would avoid future problems for myself. Let them contact us via support if they really need an exception.

In general I would rate limit by IP anything connected to the internet.

View on HN

So the answer is it's just speculation and has never been seen in the wild :)

Sure, you can interpret my answer like that, if that makes you happy.

Kind of a snarky response. Obviously this has been seen in the wild. If you created an intrusion detection system to look for suspicious requests, I think one occurring over and over and at a regular interval would clearly be seen as malicious and not a genuine user.

> Obviously this has been seen in the wild.

Can you provide an actual example? I see it come up a lot in these conversations, but I'm really skeptical that anyone actually does this analysis. It seems like rate analysis (either requests or bandwidth) would achieve the same result in a far simpler manner, so I suspect that is what actually happens.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com