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Comment by Grombobulous | Hacker News Reader

What is the cost of Anubis for honest people? I’m legitimately confused by that one.

I don’t like the cloudflare checkbox or click all the buses to access this website but Anubis you just sit there for a split second and do nothing.

That’s what people like about Anubis.

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> What is the cost of Anubis for honest people?

I just made a post of one of the costs of Anubis for honest people before I saw your comment. Linking it here instead of copying: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50358838

Interesting, if I understand correctly it seems like Anubis is just being used in a use case inappropriate way here?

The Arch equivalent to this would be building AUR packages from source, which seems to universally work fine without any of these issues.

Are NixOS repos putting their source behind Anubis or something? I’m tempted to start on an “I don’t like NixOS” rant but I don’t know who owns these forges.

It's sort of a mix between AUR and regular pacman repositories. On Arch, you have PKGBUILDs that list upstream URLs for your package sources. For example: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/ap...

then some process takes those PKGBUILDs, downloads the sources from the upstream URLs, and builds them into the binary packages that end up in the official pacman repositories.

The same process happens on NixOS to build their official repository (which is called the "Nix Binary Cache"). So most NixOS users, when installing software, they are just downloading prebuilt binary packages from official NixOS servers just like pacman does on Arch. I, however, disable the Nix's official package repository so when I install software it is like building from a PKGBUILD: it needs to download the sources from the upstream URL and build the package.

I'd imagine the reason I run into this issue a lot more than you do is usually you only install a couple of packages from the AUR. The vast majority of your packages are going to come prebuilt from official Arch repositories. Whereas on my systems, 100% of the software is being built from source. So if any of my software is developed on a site using anubis to protect their source tarballs or patch files, I will hit this issue.

I imagine that when I install AUR packages that are building from source, the community AUR maintainers have already figured out these issues if they exist, while you are left as the person figuring them out for every single package since you’re building from source.

Maybe the problem here is that people are using Anubis without understanding what its purpose is. If you are publishing open source code in a forge you should want and encourage bots and other automated systems to download your code.

For me to open 5 pages, which is more than often when I search with google etc, that all have Anubis, will take more time for them to load than that I ask chatgpt and it generates an answer from web search, at least in some cases. It is 100% virtue signaling that has no technical fundamentals to deter scrappers, which likely implement better solvers and have virtually unlimited amount of time and compute to spare, it just punishes me who have a body and a limited time budget. Humiliating even for a split of a second. Now I just skip any website that I do not care enough and has Anubis; the ones I have to visit, I will remember their mindless choice forever.

We can make up unrealistic scenarios all day long but I just don’t believe for a second that anyone is this inconvenienced by it.

The idea that you’re in desperate need to get information from 5 web pages as quickly as possible like you’re a contestant on The Amazing Race is ridiculous. This is the definition of dramatic.

Anubis finishes up in less time than takes to read this sentence.

Do it 20 times in the search for one article, and encounter at least a 30% misconfiguration rate (inappropriately high challenge value), and it does begin to bear out. If you are looking for obscure or poorly managed data, it unfortunately does become an issue.

In the daily, if you spend time researching with plenty of dead ends, ot does bear out in lost time. Not by dollars, but nickles and dimes.

Again though “do it 20 times in the search for one article” seems unrealistic. I’m not sure I ever followed 20 links to search for anything.

I understand, but "I haven't done that" isn't the same as "that isn't done". I like to do digital archaeology for my interests, and obscure topics frequently lead me up and down link chains.

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