Ironic that polymarkets were being advertised as helping society make better predictions.

At the risk of oversimplifying things from a distance, this site -- especially the free, public-facing part of it -- seems like it would be an ideal candidate for a rewrite using static site generator/framework. That, coupled with a bot-aware CDN should keep them online at a reasonable cost for many years to come.

Otherwise, I'm very curious to know more about their old and new architecture and what sorts of mitigation/scaling strategies they've started using to keep the site online.

Its just too easy for a technically minded bored person to produce slop that hammers websites. There needs to be a penalty for this.

If the scrapers are going to get it anyway, put the data up as a zip somewhere.

I think people are missing one of the points of the article. It's not just that agents are hammering the site, it's that there might be lurking vulnerabilities that allow malicious usage, which is why it went down, then came back up with a fraction of the data and a reduced design.

The article says (speculates?) that malicious users are trying to get privileged access for an edge in prediction market betting. From the article:

> If you could see The Numbers data before everyone else, every single week, you would have a significant edge over all the other traders - learning the answers slightly ahead of publication would allow you to front-run the trades.

I always liked this site, but reading this and seeing the anger about expecting the site maintainer to do things for you is repulsive. Frankly, if he wanted to pull his site down with no notice that is perfectly within his right. It was/is his site. He doesn't owe anyone a .tar.gz either. His work.

This is an odd example to present this argument through.

I'm not defending AI bots overwhelming websites or hackers motivated by Polymarket, etc., but I don't really believe a 30 year old website with "approximately 160,000 source files serving around 2 million pages" is a good litmus test for the state of the online world. What's worse is the absurdity that this basic site offering niche data would be targeted because Polymarket depends on it for some of their bets, something that most websites don't have to deal with. Frankly, that seems like a much more interesting angle to explore than "this old website that should have been re-written multiple times over the last three decades now doesn't have a choice but to be re-written."

Oddly, it seems like the solution, at least in this specific case, is relatively simple (and ironic): pay for an LLM to re-write this site in a modern, scalable, secure way and have that LLM monitor the site to ensure it is behaving correctly. Put this thing in a modern platform behind a proper cache (i.e., throw the whole thing up in Cloudflare) and many of these problems just don't exist anymore. If this site is as basic as it seems, this could be a weekend project.

It's certainly an interesting story, and I don't blame the owner of The Numbers for handling his site the way he has, but framing this as "AI is destroying our beloved internet" just seems obtuse, at least through this lens.

What a throwback. Back in 2015 I have started Applaudience, which at the time was the only provider of real-time cinema ticket sales data. I still remember comparing our numbers against TheNumbers.com as part of calibration. I have since moved on to other businesses, but this remains one of my favorite pieces of technology that I have developed. Would love to bring it back one day.