It was the night of December 24th, 1996. I turned on the family PC, then running Win95, and found my D:\ drive corrupted. Windows had no tools nor docs how to resurrect a corrupted filesystem. I cried, and two days later installed SuSE on a spare disk.

Some 20 years later, I restored about half of the disk lost in 1996, because Linux had the tools, and the docs, and encouraged me to learn.

A simple, but guilty pleasure of mine is reading HackerNews story titles (and titles only, most of the time), and tooting sarcastic reactions about them. It’s very therapeutic. (And for easier browsing, I made a HN-like website (read-only) for said toots of mine).

It can stop them nowadays, by firewalling some of the crawlers off. The reason it doesn’t stop them by default is because it serves them poisoned URLs, which it can later identify if the crawlers come back riding a headless Chrome. But once they do that, and hit a poisoned URL, there’s little reason to let them wander in an endless maze further: serve one request, and block the IP.

I’ve been running that on my own infra, and my daily number of requests went down from ~50+ million to… 2 million.