[blowski]

I’m surprised at the reaction in these comments. Somebody curiously pushing the limits of a service to see what would happen is very much in the spirit of all hackers. Meanwhile, GitHub responded appropriately, and his write up agrees.

[guraf]

The reactions were predictable when you consider:

1. Some HN users might/could have been personally inconvenienced by OP's action and they prefer resenting him rather than GitHub for whatever reason

2. Many HN users get paid a lot to work on SaaS themselves, so seeing a peer (however big it is) get abused for (what appears to be) entertainment is terrifying to them

[Panzer04]

It's a bit odd how hostile everyone here is acting. Sure, it's a bit silly, but hardly worthy of the kind of vitriol directed towards his "abuse".

[Mystery-Machine]

Someone potentially taking the service down for everyone, you know, just out of curiosity. Which part of this curiosity you need GitHub for? I'm curious how well GitHub handles DDoS attacks, what's their limit. Let's DDoS and find out, it will be fun!

[SparkyMcUnicorn]

> Someone potentially taking the service down for everyone, you know, just out of curiosity.

I think this is exactly why it's great, and it's basically turned into a GitHub advertisement. Either GitHub is simply unable to handle weird abuse methods and/or the abuse prevention is improved.

As an enterprise, wouldn't it be a bit concerning if your git host was unable to function (or respond appropriately) when presented with a random script kiddie?

This person didn't have bad intentions, but other people out there most definitely do.

[Mystery-Machine]

GitHub is very much able to handle one person doing this. Doesn't matter if you had bad intentions or you were just ignorant to bad side effects.

[ryaneager]

You really think one lone repo could take down all of GitHub? If GitHub doesn’t have stops in place to prevent that then they honestly deserve it.

[Mystery-Machine]

So doing a DoS attacks from a single machine is fine, because "your servers can handle that"? Really? Of course GitHub can handle this, but if the sole purpose is to see where's the limit, you're stressing our servers and wasting our resources for nothing. I'd ban you no questions asked. Go test perf/scalability issues on someone else's live site.

[2h]

because he is pushing the limits of a public service thats used by millions of people every day. the BEST CASE is basically what happened, GitHub finds out and disables the repo. worst case is he takes down the entire GitHub site and gets permanently banned.

dont fuck with shit I use.

[ryaneager]

Do you think GitHub’s architecture is so bad that one person can take it all down by committing to a single repo?