Hacker News Reader

Can you use hashcash or some proof of work system somehow? I don't know anything about this space.

They were only requesting the HTML, not using a headless browser.

There was the tarpit that sends out markov-chain-generated random words, loading very slowly . If the client has a limited number of concurrent requests, that could theoretically choke the client.

> a badly written bot

I think that it's fair to say that these bots aren't badly written. Their behavior is entirely intentional.