Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day

mark.mcnally.je

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 479 posts

Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day

#331

Post by noduerme »

skrebbel wrote: post #322
noduerme wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, excuse me, but this whole story demonstrates that I went to extreme lengths to never break any laws , no matter how large or small the jurisdiction. Had I been willing to bend laws, I'd surely be a lot richer today.

Come on, cURL'ing to a foreign server to get a random number and not just reading /dev/urandom is logically identical. It's a hack, just like calling into GPL'ed code over HTTP is a hack to avoid "linking" the GPL'ed code. It doesn't really suddenly turn a site from gambling site into a non-gambling site. I mean, I have mad respect for the hustle with the former MP etc. I agree with what you say in that you did not a…

What's so funny is - I was in a peer group of early btc founders who were starting random Bitcoin hustles and didn't care at all about laws. No one at that time had even approached the IoM about whether BTC was currency - nor would they have, because trying to find legal haven was the furthest thing from their minds. And so not surprisingly, the IoM didn't have a ready answer when I asked them whether gambling with Bitcoin was actually gambling. But the letter of the law was that gambling occurs _in the jurisdiction where_ the random chance takes place. So it really was different from hitting a local RNG, legally.

It added a nice little feature too, which was that every spin and deck could be stored on a separate server that would show them all at the end of the day. This was a little before "proven randomness" took off in btc casinos, but I made the RNG reports available daily for analysis (without explaining the whole infrastructure, obviously).

[edit] I just want to say that yes, you're obviously right, and yeah, I ran a casino from the IoM... without anyone knowing if that was okay or not... and it was just a moment in my life. of which I'm proud, I guess. I was living illegally in a small apartment in Alhama de Granada after violating my EU visa. hah. It was a great, great piece of software and I don't know if I'll ever write anything that good again. But it didn't really change my life or anything.

Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day

#332

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

mynameisash wrote: post #285
iaw wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate on other systems besides Ballista? (which looks great btw, thank you for sharing)

U-SQL on Azure Data Lake Analytics[0] and ECL from HPCC Systems[1] are two I have fairly extensive experience with. There may be other such platforms, but those and Ballista are the three on my radar. [0] https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/azure-docs/blob/master/arti... [1] https://wiki.hpccsystems.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=28...

ECL is the devil. There's so little documentation on it, that you basically need to work for LNRS to actually get any experience with the damn thing.

If it had an SQL layer, I'd spend time evangelising it, but it's not worth learning another query language for.

There exists a world where it got open-sourced before Hadoop was built, and in that world it's probably everywhere.

Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day

#333

Post by dna_polymerase »

elcomet wrote: post #303
Gepsens wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're a fricking genius.

He's a frickin genius because he found ways to break the law with impunity for his own profit ? I'm surprised by HN sometimes.

The breaking the law consists entirely of not acquiring a license. Otherwise everything they did was perfectly legal.

Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day

#335

Post by WanderPanda »

kragen wrote: post #306
WanderPanda wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not use an exponential filter that only uses a single variable?

The running-sum-difference approach suggested above is a box filter, which has the best possible noise suppression for a given step-function delay, although in the frequency domain it looks appalling. It uses more RAM, but not that much. The single-pole RC filter you're suggesting is much nicer in the frequency domain, but in the time domain it's far worse.

Is it „far worse in the time domain“ due to its infinite impulse response?

Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day

#336

Post by nickthemagicman »

elcomet wrote: post #303
Gepsens wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're a fricking genius.

He's a frickin genius because he found ways to break the law with impunity for his own profit ? I'm surprised by HN sometimes.

You mean like the people who smoked marijuana before it was legal?

Or the people who got same sex married before it was legal?

Or the slaves who escaped slavery before it was legal?

Should the slaves have just not try to free themselves because it was "illegal"?

The law does not equal morality.

Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day

#337

Post by noduerme »

dna_polymerase wrote: post #333
elcomet wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's a frickin genius because he found ways to break the law with impunity for his own profit ? I'm surprised by HN sometimes.

The breaking the law consists entirely of not acquiring a license. Otherwise everything they did was perfectly legal.

finally, someone understands :)

Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day

#338

Post by hnbad »

noduerme wrote: post #310
elcomet wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's a frickin genius because he found ways to break the law with impunity for his own profit ? I'm surprised by HN sometimes.

Uh, excuse me, but this whole story demonstrates that I went to extreme lengths to never break any laws , no matter how large or small the jurisdiction. Had I been willing to bend laws, I'd surely be a lot richer today.

Sure, you're not breaking any laws, just intentionally violating the spirit of the law for personal gain.

This isn't a court of law. I can understand trying to avoid language that makes it sound like you may have been in violation of the law to a judge or jury, but you literally described that what you did was intended to keep operating a service that had been banned by using an absurd technicality in the definition of the ban.

I'm honestly surprised it worked (though having a former MP of the tiny nation you were operating in as a lawyer might have helped) considering that your service still facilitated online gambling directly and was advertised as such, despite the randomness source being on a remote server rather than local.

In other words, using a non-local randomness source (like a remote server you cURL into or a webcam pointed at a bunch of lava lamps) is functionally indistinguishable from a local dice roll or other source of entropy. This "hack" is so flimsy it likely wouldn't hold up in court in a nation that is actually interested in pursuing such violations that has a population larger than a small city.

Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day

#340

Post by hnbad »

noir_lord wrote: post #309
elcomet wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's a frickin genius because he found ways to break the law with impunity for his own profit ? I'm surprised by HN sometimes.

You can respect the ingenunity if not the morality of it. His solution was a clever hack because he worked around the law without apparently breaking it directly - clever. That said gambling systems are specifically one class of software I refuse to work on.

I think the lawyer who convinced the gov't that the operation was legal being a former MP and this taking place in a nation of less than 100,000 people is a crucial element to the story.

Incidentally both gambling AND fintech (including crypto) are on the list of industries I refuse to do work with. So I guess BTC gambling would have been off the table for two reasons.

Post reply on HN