Ask HN: Why Is My VPN's IPs Blocked from Hacker News?

Re:Ask HN: Why Is My VPN's IPs Blocked from Hacker News? by dang on Wednesday January 03, 2018 @05:34PM (#16065992)

This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. If the unban link described there doesn't work for you, please email us and we'll take care of it.

I'm sorry that this is necessary, btw. We hate it when legit users get blocked, but HN is also hit by a ton of crawlers and it's hard to distinguish the two. Since our app server runs on a single core, we don't have a drop of spare performance.

Some big improvements which we've been working on for months will hopefully roll out soonish, which should allow us to loosen things up quite a bit.

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Re:Ask HN: Why Is My VPN's IPs Blocked from Hacker News? by ploggingdev on Wednesday January 03, 2018 @08:51PM (#16067334)

> Since our app server runs on a single core

Wow. Couple of questions :

* where is the server hosted and do you have a db server and maybe a cache server as well? What are the specs of the server?

* how much traffic does HN receive? Daily or monthly hits.

> Some big improvements which we've been working on for months will hopefully roll out soonish

If you're allowed to talk about it, what are the improvements?

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Re:Ask HN: Why Is My VPN's IPs Blocked from Hacker News? by sctb on Thursday January 04, 2018 @09:35PM (#16076041)

We’re recently running two machines (master and standby) at M5 Hosting. All of HN runs on a single box, nothing exotic:

  CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2637 v4 @ 3.50GHz (3500.07-MHz K8-class CPU)
  FreeBSD/SMP: 2 package(s) x 4 core(s) x 2 hardware threads
  Mirrored SSDs for data, mirrored magnetic for logs (UFS)

We get around 4M requests a day.

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Re:Ask HN: Why Is My VPN's IPs Blocked from Hacker News? by ezekg on Wednesday January 03, 2018 @06:57PM (#16066684)

Just curious--why is HN run on only a single core?

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Re:Ask HN: Why Is My VPN's IPs Blocked from Hacker News? by dang on Thursday January 04, 2018 @01:02PM (#16072467)

Arc is implemented in Racket and uses its green threads, which don't do multiprocessing.

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Re:Ask HN: Why Is My VPN's IPs Blocked from Hacker News? by soegaard on Thursday January 04, 2018 @06:44PM (#16075178)

The standard Racket threads do run on a single core. Racket (not Arc) does however support two forms of parallelism, namely futures and places.

http://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/parallelism.html

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Re:Ask HN: Why Is My VPN's IPs Blocked from Hacker News? by thomastjeffery on Wednesday January 03, 2018 @09:03PM (#16067394)

I assume it doesn't handle any multithreading yet.

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Re:Ask HN: Why Is My VPN's IPs Blocked from Hacker News? by tvmalsv on Thursday January 04, 2018 @04:30PM (#16074255)

I don't know if changes were made on your end or if my VPN host rotated to an unblocked IP address, but everything is working for me now, with or w/o the VPN connected.

If it was something you guys did, awesome, thanks!

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