Yet another Hacker News

83 points darkwater 2 hours ago 73 comments

tempest_ 2 hours ago | parent

I assume this is because of LLM scraping.

nijave 2 hours ago | parent

Presumably but I wish they'd also focus on optimizing code/making pages fully cacheable instead of rate-limits and blocking

swatcoder 1 hour ago | parent

Making requests is inherently cheaper than delivering responses, even with caches. Efficiency improvements can buy a little time on a given resources but won't solve the problem of bot saturation now that everybody can spawn a custom bot in about 12 seconds and is being encouraged to do so.

Rate limits, blocking, and pay-per-use are the only roads out and even those might not last as models get better at hacking and masquerading.

The internet we want to use LLM's with is simply not one that can support LLM's, and with LLM's not going anywhere, the whole experience of the internet is going to be forced into some radically less open and more expensive paradigm.

Policies like this just represent the beginning of the transition.

jayd16 1 hour ago | parent

The limits are for API requests, no? Or is this just an unrelated performance complaint?

Frieren 2 hours ago | parent

We need a new non-commercial version of the internet. Free of bots, free of ads, ... you pay to access social media optimized to be interesting enough to be worth paying instead of addictive enough to keep you scrolling to show you more ads.

It may look impossible right now. But what is impossible for real is to continue as we are. The damage that internet does to society is increasing by the day while its value is reduced (economic value, social value).

phoe-krk 1 hour ago | parent

> We need a new non-commercial version of the internet.

Except it's non-commercial, therefore valuable, therefore commercialized, therefore commercial.

You'd need a force strong enough to prevent it from falling prey to this tragedy of the commons, and that force would need to be stronger than the incentives to commercialize it. And that's where plenty of contemporary scraping-based salaries lay.

immortalist 1 hour ago | parent

Impossible to create

OtherShrezzing 1 hour ago | parent

I'm not so certain. I used to buy a broadsheet newspaper, which was full of ads. Now I pay a few hundred a year, and get the same newspaper online, with no ads at all.

So, the precursor to online media has already gone through this paradigm shift.

pixl97 1 hour ago | parent

I mean, what you're saying is "If I pay for a product ads go away"

Which is partially true, but it only shifts the distribution of the problem. Once your service gains enough popularity network effects cause it to gain value. You have to worry about high priced buyouts of the entire service (great for the site owner, terrible for the users).

Zambyte 1 hour ago | parent

It's not, it just requires creativity. One example I can think of is limiting connectivity by distance between nodes. Something like Meshtastic seems unlikely to ever be commercialized in the same way that the Internet has been. Sure, you would lose some useful applications of the Internet, but you would gain other things.

armadyl 1 hour ago | parent

Also for better or for worse the ad-centric model to some extent has allowed more people to access information.

Gating everything behind paid (but with no ads) likely would hurt a significant amount of lower income users.

heavensteeth 1 hour ago | parent

That's this internet. Nothing precludes you from dropping big tech and solely engaging with the "indie web"[0][1] if you so choose. You're free to build your own website with its own RSS feed, join webrings[2] of like-minded people, and engage organically.

[0] One of many similar initiatives, I'm sure. Not an endorsement.

[1] https://indieweb.org/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring

pixl97 1 hour ago | parent

This is fine when you hide in the dark forest, small and unassuming, but the moment something discovers you, then you get ate by a predator.

Your human engagement will attract said predators because it's a unique information signal.

9dev 1 hour ago | parent

Careful what you wish for. The ticket to entry will (have to) be a proof of identity, the ultimate nail in the coffin of privacy and anonymity on the web.Outside of that, chaos.

godwinson__4-8 1 hour ago | parent

> We need a new non-commercial version of the internet.

> you pay to access social media optimized to be interesting...

So is it commercial or non commercial?

Nothing is stopping you from creating a social network that is pay gated. Go build it. If you can't get anyone to sign up perhaps you'll realize it's not so easy as scapegoating addictive social media.

There is a whole cottage industry of people who legitimately make their living criticizing Facebook. It's a consumer software product. Yet few of these people seem to have their conviction extend to building an alternative that ever catches an audience. Why is that? Because addiction? Any other excuses?

dwedge 34 minutes ago | parent

It only proves your point because it wasn't successful in the end, but I really enjoyed the experience on app.net (a paid version of Twitter) while it still existed. Personally I think they lost it where a lot of these alternative platforms lose it - they try to build an ecosystem that is always coming soon and ends up scattered instead of focusing on one product

toomuchtodo 1 hour ago | parent

AT Protocol and PDS’. BitTorrent to share and distribute bundles of data.

ddtaylor 2 hours ago | parent

> A request that arrives with no credentials gets 60 requests per hour per IP address.

One request per minute.

mplanchard 2 hours ago | parent

Average, yes, but the way they phrase it, it could be a token bucket or similar, where you can do 60 quick requests and then be blocked for a bit while the bucket refills

sandeepkd 1 hour ago | parent

More like you have 60 requests, you can exhaust them in a single second or spread them differently as per your choice.

Jaxan 1 hour ago | parent

Doesn’t help with scrapers though. They use a unique IP for each query.

MeetingsBrowser 1 hour ago | parent

Hopefully they bump this up.

Browsing open issues or reviewing a few PRs will easily use more than one request per minute.

The limits are based on the average user but I wonder if the most common interaction is to view a readme and bounce.

I don’t know that putting a paywall up to learn from or even consider contributing to public projects is a good thing.

silverwind 57 minutes ago | parent

Or a lot more with IPv6.

ddtaylor 44 minutes ago | parent

Most connections or VPS have a shared 64bit prefix that acts similar to an IPv4 address in that it's easy to block.

Yes, you get 64 more bits to make whatever addresses you want, but the prefix is still your fingerprint.

sparkling 2 hours ago | parent

I noticed that recently Github.com has some kind of weird bot detection on public repos. I have a browser extension for switching User Agents for a specific legacy site, sometimes i forget to turn it off and Github will require me to login to view public repos.

All of this is most likely due to mass scraping by LLMs. Welcome to the total shitification of the web.

Macha 1 hour ago | parent

The post is about gitlab but on the subject of GitHub, the rate limit I seem to have for viewing commit history seems to be 0 for logged out users and viewing source files seems to be about 5/hour.

296012 2 hours ago | parent

Congrats on making the world worse with AI. All this performative data scraping and uploading and no progress at all.

speedgoose 1 hour ago | parent

No progress?!

micromacrofoot 1 hour ago | parent

what are you talking about? it's progressing a lot of money into specific people's pockets

ephemerally16c4 1 hour ago | parent

Making the privileged money and giving them the power to manipulate the mass is progress to some.

jtwaleson 2 hours ago | parent

I think it's because people are building agentic flows, reducing the amount of developer seats needed. It's the first step towards usage based pricing.

cush 1 hour ago | parent

Providing kickbacks to the repos being scraped would be a good way to help fund open source projects and pay creators like streaming services do. Seems like they're headed in this direction - it would be a massive product differentiator over GH

latexr 1 hour ago | parent

Three minutes after kickbacks were announced there would be a flurry of new repos being created with bots repeatedly scraping them just to get those kickbacks.

anamexis 1 hour ago | parent

Presumably whoever is doing the scraping would need to pay, to get rate limits conducive to scraping.

cush 6 minutes ago | parent

Correct

sph 1 hour ago | parent

Also known as the Cobra effect

aprentic 1 hour ago | parent

My first reaction was that I really like this idea.

If we had a system where people who access projects pay and popular FOSS developers get paid for it we'd have much better alignment.

My second thought was that bots would immediately try to circumvent such a plan. They'd probably spam Gitlab with fake repos to try to harvest those payouts.

cush 8 minutes ago | parent

> They'd probably spam Gitlab with fake repos to try to harvest those payouts.

Yeah I wonder if the math would shake out to make that make any sense. Each bot would require a paid subscription, so the only incentive for them to do this would be if there was some discoverability algorithm or SEO that that traffic helped push the content to real users

MeetingsBrowser 1 hour ago | parent

I like the idea, but that wasn’t my read.

The guidance given seems to hurt open source projects, not help.

> Make the project private if the traffic is not coming from the audience you built it for, which stops anonymous callers reaching it at all. Or upgrade to Premium or Ultimate for much higher limits.

serhack_ 1 hour ago | parent

I would spend thousands of dollars for gitlab in terms of: 1) better UX for admin panel, I'm not sure what I've enabled and what not. Several buttons do not disable the rest of the settings, leaving me with some doubts (e.g. if I disabled grafana, why is there a setting that talks about where/how I store?) 2) a minimal version of gitlab without all the AI

theokrueger 1 hour ago | parent

Github would hit four nines if they followed suit. no clue why the dont try

pkaye 1 hour ago | parent

Doesn't GitHub already have rate limiting especially if you are not logged in?

Jaxan 1 hour ago | parent

Yes. A lot is not accessible if not logged in.

theokrueger 15 minutes ago | parent

it's too generous and contributes to their reliability woes

shimman 47 minutes ago | parent

Because that would go against MSFT's wishes on pushing LLM driven development if they started acknowledging that these tools are more damaging than helpful.

Retr0id 1 hour ago | parent

I understand why they're doing this, but the anticausative title kinda rubs me the wrong way.

bearjaws 1 hour ago | parent

I am honestly surprised they aren't going lower at this point.

Gitlab must pay a fortune to bot traffic, most of which is malicious or garbage at best.

demibabs 1 hour ago | parent

Damn, we’re even having Claude write important press releases now

vips7L 1 hour ago | parent

sad days

zb3 43 minutes ago | parent

"Write a post about decreasing limits so that this information is as obfuscated as possible."

Jeremy1026 38 minutes ago | parent

I put the text in to gptzero's AI checker and it came back with being Highly Confident it was 100% AI written. I don't think I've ever seen it that confident that the entire thing was AI before.

rcxdude 36 minutes ago | parent

Claude's style is obvious enough I don't think you really need the checker.

svachalek 24 minutes ago | parent

Hmm I don't know if they've updated it, but I'm not smelling any of the Claudisms I know so well. No convoluted sentences, metaphors, therapy-speak, 'it's not' constructions, "load bearing" etc etc.

wiether 10 minutes ago | parent

My FF being in French, I was automatically served a French version and I just couldn't understand what I was reading. Each sentence unclear, no link between sentences...

jmclnx 1 hour ago | parent

> The requested URL was not found on this server.

Getting that so I do not know exactly what they are doing. From the title I am guessing they are restricting or throttling if downloads exceeds some value.

bob1029 1 hour ago | parent

If you are using LLMs to interact with sites like GitLab and GitHub, and you have the option to use a GraphQL API, you should jump on it immediately.

GraphQL is absolutely terrible for human developers to interact with, but it's like Facebook could see into the future back in 2012. I cannot imagine a more perfect API surface for agents. With the REST API on GitHub, you can consume maybe 10 issue JSON blobs before your context window is blown out. With GraphQL constraining the results you can easily read hundreds in the same token budget.

Additionally, the # of requests your agents need to make can be reduced in many cases since GraphQL can join across types whereas REST APIs cannot. You essentially get savings in two dimensions here. Quota and raw token volume per logical response.

aschobel 1 hour ago | parent

mine just is the gh cli. is the advantage of graphql that they can compose a query that would take multiple cli invocations?

mattkrick 57 minutes ago | parent

CLI still has the possibility of being a little more token efficient, at worst it may use graphql behind the scenes.

For our company, we advertise the graphql schema to bots and they can one-shot whatever task they're trying to do. I've found that it's so good that I cancelled building an an MCP server and any skill. Just a well documented GQL schema. It's pretty remarkable.

enormousness 24 minutes ago | parent

I think you might also have a GQL schema that's particularly well suited to what those bots need. Either that or your backend schema is relatively simple and the GQL schema covers all its possible data compositions.

sockbot 52 minutes ago | parent

no the advantage of graphql is that the caller can limit the response to only the information that they need. in a REST API the caller has to filter out the extraneous information. using LLMs to do the filtering uses up context window

CharlieDigital 36 minutes ago | parent

This is not fully true.

Most agents will use curl | jq to slice what they need (assuming a known API)

philipp-gayret 44 minutes ago | parent

Although that may be true, the quota at least on GitHub depends on what you're quering. We worked directly with GitHub and a complex enough organisation hit with a GraphQL query can actually hit your hourly app limit before you even get a response.

As for GitLab, having hosted it for medium size organisations (~200 devs) and seeing how monorepo's work (they don't, we had GitLab's team show us that one page view made 50K db queries on our setup), please consult with your local admin team before firing GraphQL at it.

iamEAP 33 minutes ago | parent

I work closely with the team responsible for a large, self-hosted GitHub Enterprise instance. This is good advice for clients/consumers of GH data, but it can very easily lead to a lot of strain on the server-side. It’s not obvious what fields that you request are simple reads from tables or actually end up invoking git under the hood.

You could argue the rate limit guards should better reflect that, but that’s just not the reality of the system. Likely speaks to a lot of stability issues GitHub has been facing lately.

enormousness 27 minutes ago | parent

Isn't it kind of part and parcel of any GraphQL deployment to update it efficiently?

kccqzy 12 minutes ago | parent

That is true for almost any GraphQL backend not just GHE.

dieselgate 11 minutes ago | parent

> It’s not obvious what fields that you request are simple reads from tables or actually end up invoking git under the hood.

I'm not familiar with graphql but what would make something "invoke git", is it a technical thing or hyperbole?

bob1029 11 minutes ago | parent

All of the queries my agents use select fields like issue title, body, labels, createdAt, updatedAt, etc. That's about it. I would hope that stuff is cached and efficient to read. I do not think GraphQL is a good way to interact with git. Running git on the CLI is the best way to interact with git.

MeetingsBrowser 1 hour ago | parent

Worst case, this could be the start of a paywall to learn from, contribute to, or host open source projects.

Hopefully they find some kind of carve out for OSS projects while still blocking the egregious offenders.

rkagerer 50 minutes ago | parent

60 requests per hour per IP if you haven't signed in... well that's unfortunately low.

lateatdesk 49 minutes ago | parent

60 requests an hour per IP seems low for a school or office network. A few people browsing issues and source files could use that up quite fast.

throwitaway222 45 minutes ago | parent

Walk back in 10...9...

mschuster91 22 minutes ago | parent

> You get 429 Too Many Requests with RateLimit-* headers and a Retry-After. Wait the interval it gives you, then retry.

Is there a test endpoint where one can validate the behavior of their ratelimit detection? Basically I do not want to cause excessive load on your servers just to test my implementation.