In my experience the banning is too strict.

It is triggered very quickly and it seems to last forever (maybe 15min would be better?).

I ask pg to kindly consider making it a bit more lenient.

I doubt HN goes under deliberate/malicious attacks, etc...

I'm making a HN extension that preloads some data such as the comments and the links on the next page (it's still with reasonable delays).

But at the moment it's impossible for it to function without risking the user getting banned.

I've no doubt that HN is under pretty much constant deliberate, malicious attacks.

Pretty much any site with decent traffic is under constant attack, and the high profile of HN means it'll be under far more scrutiny than others.

I think it has become a part of the hacker culture.

In a way the ugly page represents the ugly terminal screens that the hacker was probably staring at for some time.

If you think there's a difference between hacking website X with ready-made tools and writing the attack yourself etc... you are not thinking like a hacker.

A hacker doesn't care what the way is. He thinks about the goal, the end result.

If there's a ready-made script that can help or do it for him? Sure why not?

Having said that I agree that it does require skill and it is not as easy as downloading some random scripts and typing in a website and pressing the 'hack' button.

@jackfranklin I know you probably just haven't gotten to it yet but for the sake of completeness, on the readme you can change the 'Validation Methods' section to show the validation object structure rather than method names with brackets.

Neat. But I don't understand why you used strings as part of the validation?

The "min_length(6)|required" isn't actual javascript code is it?

Would passing an object be better?

For example,

userForm.addValidation("username", "min_length(6)|required");

Becomes,

userForm.addValidation("username", {min_length:6, required:true});

Did I misunderstand something?

Hey,

Thank you so much for this. I've no idea why I didn't think of this initially - but I've now rewritten the plugin to do this instead. Hope you like it - and thanks again!

Jack

Great job! Gotta love the responsiveness. I hope you keep making it better.

This change appears to have been pushed already. Can't fault the responsiveness!

{yes: 'please'}

I modelled it off the way CodeIgniter validations as I always liked how they worked - but thinking about it this is a great idea - going to make this change sometime soon :)

Thanks!

I'm not a fan of surveillance cameras but I think they are different because they are passive.

People don't feel threatened by surveillance cameras because they think no one is watching that video 24/7 and it is used if something goes wrong or needs investigation.

Where as some random guy suddenly walking in with a camera makes them think that person must have some immediate and possibly malicious intention.

Fixed surveillance cameras might seem passive, but they really are typically more intrusive than this guy's project. That's what makes it so interesting to me. I totally understand how it'd be creepy to have someone physically walking around recording me, but in reality, a campus-wide set of "passive" surveillance cameras (say, at my workplace) will gather far more information about me than this guy could ever hope to record on his own.

Yeah I agree and with improvements in the technology it will get even worse. Cameras can already have pretty decent microphones and speech-to-text technology is pretty damn good so I wont be surprised if soon they start recording sound and analysing it in realtime. It wont cost all that much compared to a lot of other things.

However I was only trying to explain the behaviour of the people.

I think your assessment is right. Furthermore, I believe the intent of the video is to get people to question why these perceptions exist.

I had the exact same issue as well. And I'm working on a hacker news Chrome extension as well which caused me to refresh too many times. The blocking doesn't seem to be time limited. I restart my router which assigns me a new IP.

For development, you can copy some hacker news sample pages and put on a local server and edit your hosts file and use your fake local hacker news (at least for the parts that is possible) then you can refresh as much as you like.

I hope people behind Hacker News give us some details about how things work so we can adjust the extensions, etc...