"I stopped these at first with IP banning, and switched to Rack::Attack for throttling per-Twitter-ID."<p>I wonder what Twitter-ID he means. Is there an API to get a numeric ID for a given handle that stays the same even when you change your username?
If he means the username, wouldn't it be possible to programatically change the username after each request and thus avoid the throttling?
An interesting titbit of information from this post is the approx. # of visitors reaching the front page of HN can get you:<p>"BlinkLink managed to get about <i>50k pageviews</i> against <i>17k visitors</i>"<p>I'm not sure on how much other sources (Reddit, Twitter) contributed to that number though.