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Comment by DorkyPup | Hacker News Reader

Author here. Woke up in today to see this on the front page, thank you to the person who submitted it! Initially, my biggest fear was the HN "Hug of Death" taking it down. Happily, Cloudflare's edge caching absorbed 19.24 GB of bandwidth in a few hours with a 98.5% cache hit ratio, so the origin server barely noticed.

The discussions here about DNS-level blocking and Pi-hole are spot on. It's interesting that the burden of a clean reading experience is slowly being offloaded to the user's network stack.

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Out of curiosity, do you have (and want to share) stats about requests per second? It's always nice to know these things for future reference.

No worries if not :)

Sure thing! I don't have the exact instantaneous peak since Cloudflare groups historical data by the hour on the free tier, but the peak 60 minutes last night saw 70,100 requests. That averages out to about 20 requests per second sustained over the hour. Wish I could be more granular but hope that helps a little.

Not the author, but last year I wrote about my experience being on #1 on HN [0]. I created a visualization of the requests hitting my server.

[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/surviving-the-hug-of-death

In Brave browser on Android device, the visualisation media(?) is blacked out. just wanted to give you a heads up.

Thanks for letting me know. It seems like when Brave is set to aggressively block tracking, it also blocks the canvas since it could be used for fingerprinting a device.

I'll see if an avg version is viable in the future.

Very cool post! I enjoyed it a lot! Do you have any more backend insights like this on your blog? I'd happily read those.

Btw. was the writing assisted by AI or is it all you?

Just wanted to say that article is so much deeper than it seems from the title, and also beautifully written. It was a great read!

I am glad to hear that, thank you!

I have done minor experiments with disabling javascript, it works most publications are far more readable with javascript disabled, you miss carousels and some interactive elements but overall a much better experience.

Can you add to clean reading experience by exchanging the unreadable font (Outfit Thin) with one that is readable?

Thanks for the deep insights! I feel like reading from an human fellow. Also you should put up a banner “no AI slop” hehe.

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