[HN Gopher] Magit manuals are available online again
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Magit manuals are available online again
Author : vetronauta
Score : 108 points
Date : 2025-11-14 12:09 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| cratermoon wrote:
| "Thanks to LLM scrapers, hosting costs went up 5000% last month"
| ssivark wrote:
| Uggghhhh! AI crawling is fast becoming a headache for self-
| hosted content. Is using a CDN the _" lowest effort"_ solution?
| Or is there something better/simpler?
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Nah, just add a rate limiter (which any public website should
| have anyways). Alternatively, add some honeypot URLs to
| robots.txt, then setup fail2ban to ban any IP accessing those
| URLs and you'll get rid of 99% of the crawling in half a day.
| LtWorf wrote:
| If only it were that easy.
| macintux wrote:
| And for many people, "easy" is hardly the word to
| describe that.
|
| No wonder small businesses just put their information on
| Facebook instead of trying to manage a website.
| nijave wrote:
| The poison's also the cure! Just ask AI for a haproxy
| rate limit config
| kstrauser wrote:
| I gave up after blocking 143,000 unique IPs hitting my
| personal Forgejo server one day. Rate limiting would have
| done literally nothing against the traffic patterns I saw.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| 2 unique IPs or 200,000 shouldn't make a difference, ban
| the ones that make too many requests automatically and
| you basically don't have to do anything.
|
| Are people not using fail2ban and similar at all anymore?
| Used to be standard practice until I guess before people
| started using PaaS instead and "running web applications"
| became a different role than "developing web
| applications".
| nijave wrote:
| It makes a difference if there's 143,000 unique IPs and
| 286,000 requests. I think that's what the parent post is
| saying (lots of requests but also not very many per IP
| since there's also lots of IPs)
|
| Even harder with IPv6 considering things like privacy
| extensions where the IPs intentionally and automatically
| rotate
| nijave wrote:
| Depending on the content and software stack, caching might be
| a fairly easy option. For instance, Wordpress W3 Total Cache
| used to be pretty easy to configure and could easily bring a
| small VPS from 6-10req/sec to 100-200req/sec.
|
| Also some solutions for generating static content sites
| instead of "dynamic" CMS where they store everything in a DB
|
| If it's new, I'd say the easiest option is start with a
| content hosting system that has built-in caching (assuming
| that exists for what you're trying to deploy)
| kace91 wrote:
| >I immediately burned down my account with that hosting
| provider1, because they did not allow setting a spending limit.
|
| Is this true? He mentions the provider being AWS, surely some
| sort of threshold can be set?
| no_wizard wrote:
| As far as I am aware, there is not. It's been a long standing
| complaint about the platform.
| nijave wrote:
| If it's AWS, yes it's true. All the billing is async and some
| as slow as daily (although it can be very granular/accurate).
|
| In addition, it's a pay-per-use platform
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| Unless something has changed recently, all you can do is set
| budget alerts on billing updates. Runaway costs for people
| simply testing AWS is common. (On the bright side, again unless
| something has changed recently, asking them in support to scrap
| them works.)
| electroly wrote:
| There are two widely understood downsides of AWS:
|
| 1. High egress costs
|
| 2. No hard spending limits
|
| Both of these were problems for the author. I don't mean to
| "blame the victim" but the choice of AWS here had a predictable
| outcome. Static documentation is the easiest content to host
| and AWS is the most expensive way to host it.
| nijave wrote:
| Really high bandwidth costs in general. I've never worked
| anywhere large enough to hit them, but I've heard inter-AZ
| traffic in the same region can become quite expensive once
| you're big enough
| mystifyingpoi wrote:
| This is true. There are services that force use of multi-AZ
| deployment, like their version of Kafka, or basically
| anything that creates autoscaling groups between AZs (like
| EKS). Without tight monitoring stuff can get out of hand
| fast.
| themafia wrote:
| What surprised me is you get charged both ways. $0.01/GB
| egress out of the source AZ and $0.01/GB ingress into the
| destination AZ. So it's easy to underestimate the billing
| impact by half.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| I don't know exactly what the website was, but if it's just HTML,
| CSS, some JS and some images, why would you ever host that on a
| "pay per visit/bandwidth" platform like AWS? Not only is AWS
| traffic extra expensive compared to pretty much any alternative,
| paying for bandwidth in that manner never made much sense to me.
| Even shared hosting like we did early 00s would have been a
| better solution for hosting a typical website than using AWS.
| anamexis wrote:
| AWS CloudFront pricing seems pretty competitive with other
| CDNs, at least for sites that are not very high traffic.
|
| https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > AWS CloudFront pricing seems pretty competitive with other
| CDNs
|
| Sure, but it's unlikely you actually _have to_ place a CDN in
| front of your manual, it 's mostly text with few images.
| People default to using CDNs way too quickly today.
| anamexis wrote:
| The whole point of CDNs is to host static assets, why
| wouldn't you use one? They are dead simple to use.
| DiabloD3 wrote:
| Far more expensive than just having a dumb server
| somewhere at some normal host.
|
| People simply do not understand how expen$ive AWS is, and
| how little value it actually has for most people.
| anamexis wrote:
| Most people will never make it past the free tier on any
| of CloudFront, Cloudflare, Netlify, Render, etc.
|
| You can just drag and drop a folder and have a static
| site hosted in a few minutes.
| nijave wrote:
| It's really a tradeoff of saving time by paying more
| money. A lot of people chose it when they'd rather not
| pay more money and end up unhappy
|
| A lot of other people also pick it for very narrow use
| cases where it wouldn't have been that much more time to
| learn and do it themselves and end up paying a lot of
| money and also aren't happy
|
| It's pretty nice for mid-size startups to completely
| ignore performance and capacity planning and be able to
| quickly churn out features while accumulating tech debt
| and hoping they make it long enough to pay the tech debt
| back
| dandeto wrote:
| A year ago I researched this topic for a static website
| of my own. All providers I looked at were $5 and I want
| to say the cheapest I found was slightly lower. By
| comparison, I am still within free tier limits of AWS S3
| and cloudfront (CDN) since I am not getting much traffic.
| So my website is on edge locations all over the world as
| part of their CDN for free, but if I host on a single
| server in Ohio it costs $5/month.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Because caddy/nginx/apache (any web server really) can
| serve that content as well as any other? Better question
| is; why default to using more things before you actually
| need them?
|
| Personally, software engineering for me is mostly about
| trying to avoid accidental complexity. People obsessing
| about "web scale" and "distributed architecture" before
| they even figured out if people actually want to use the
| platform/product/tool they've used tends to add a lot of
| complexity.
| anamexis wrote:
| How is setting up a web server not using more things than
| you need when you could just drag and drop a folder using
| one of many different CDN providers? (Or of course set up
| integrations as you want)
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Just because you're using a UI doesn't mean it isn't more
| complicated. I'm thinking "complexity" in terms of things
| intertwined, rather than "difficult for someone used to
| use GUIs".
| anamexis wrote:
| And configuring a web server as well as the server it is
| running on is not intertwined complexity?
|
| You're welcome to set up the CDN with a CLI...
| everforward wrote:
| > Because caddy/nginx/apache (any web server really) can
| serve that content as well as any other?
|
| That's not really true if you care about reliability. You
| need 2 nodes in case one goes down/gets rebooted/etc, and
| then you need a way to direct traffic away from bad nodes
| (via DNS or a load balancer or etc).
|
| You'll end up building half of a crappy CDN to try to
| make that work, and it's way more complicated than
| chucking CloudFlare in front of static assets.
|
| I would be with you if this was something complicated to
| cache where you're server-side templating responses and
| can't just globally cache things, but for static
| HTML/CSS/JS/images it's basically 0 configuration.
| mystifyingpoi wrote:
| > That's not really true if you care about reliability
|
| While reliability is always some concern, we are talking
| about a website containing docs for a nerdy tool used by
| a minuscule percentage of developers. No one will
| complain if it goes down for 1h daily.
| SatvikBeri wrote:
| Seems like the maintainer just tried AWS out of curiosity, and
| never needed to optimize hosting until scrapers suddenly
| slammed the site.
| throwup238 wrote:
| Especially when Cloudflare Pages is free with unlimited
| bandwidth, if you don't need any other backend. The only limit
| is 100 custom domains and 500 builds per month in their CI/CD,
| the latter of which you can bypass by just building everything
| in Github Actions and pushing it to Pages.
| phplovesong wrote:
| I quit emacs 10 years ago. But i have fond menories from magit.
| Why was the manual taken offline?
| auslegung wrote:
| https://github.com/magit/magit/issues/5472
| IceDane wrote:
| Why didn't you just follow the link and find out?
| phplovesong wrote:
| Link did not show any data on the why. Im not reading a long
| blamegame on the why on some random issue.
| agumonkey wrote:
| he's waiting for the magit-transient shortcut :fff
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| I love Magit, it's the only git gui I can stomach (it helps that
| I use Emacs already).
|
| I donated a bit of money to help tarsius offset the cost of AWS
| LLM abuse, well deserved for the value I've gotten from his
| tools.
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(page generated 2025-11-14 23:00 UTC)