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.
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.
@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.
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.
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...
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.