Many years later there was a scene in Silicon Valley where their VC set a tequila bottle on the delete key and caused havoc.

That's when I figured out what happened in 1998.

I have had a website taken down by (pretty sure) a person setting something on their F5 key.

Let's hear it!

The symptom was the website wasn’t loading, just spinning forever.

Looking at the http logs, around 5pm an ip address started spamming a whole bunch of requests to the same url. The same ip was doing pretty normal stuff on the website about an hour earlier.

My theory is holding down F5 key would cause the page to reload about 30 times a second. The website was not able to handle that many requests per second and it effectively became a denial of service attack.

This was around 2007-2010 and I think by now browsers have stopped repeating a reload if the F5 key is held down.

Nice.

I worked briefly on a site that had this rankings page for users, and it was done by going player by player, and pulling the players table each loop to compare the current player to all the others. For things like "results against women"

Anyway you could DDoS the site by requesting that page. You could actually watch the page fill in as it computed, I want to say it was about a ten second load time.

Yeah, I think it's surprising how websites don't get DoS'd more often.

DoS has become more of an issue now that all of the GPTBots are generating a lot more traffic. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40865627

And what's the less opaque reference to 1998?

Me, up thread, I was the junior in 1998, trying to introduce CVS.