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Life & fun · July 16, 2012

AN

A new error message from HN ...

Checking on some old material to provide some cross-referencing[1] I got this message: We've temporarily limited requests for old items. I've always taken it for granted that HN contained useful information that I'd be able to retrieve whenever I found the need, but this has brought me up short. Perhaps older discussions will eventually become unavailable. Will Google cache still have them? Will the Wayback machine still have them? How convenient will they be to find in the future. Probably this is a temporary glitch to prevent some overly enthusiastic crawler from bringing the site to a…

A new error message from HN ... launched on July 16, 2012 with 23 votes, #57 of 375 launches that month and more than 75% of that year's launches.

Alternativestop 15% of July 2012

In plain words

This post discusses a temporary rate limit encountered when accessing old Hacker News items. The author raises concerns about the long-term availability of historical discussions on the platform, questioning whether content will remain retrievable or become lost over time. They speculate that the limit may prevent excessive crawler traffic but express uncertainty about future accessibility through services like Google Cache and the Wayback Machine.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

In the maker’s words, at launch

Checking on some old material to provide some cross-referencing[1] I got this message: We've temporarily limited requests for old items. I've always taken it for granted that HN contained useful information that I'd be able to retrieve whenever I found the need, but this has brought me up short. Perhaps older…

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