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

mark.mcnally.je

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

#401

Post by gnfargbl »

madaxe_again wrote: post #380
mvc wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He got an MP on his side which seems to be all it takes these days in the UK.

You’d be amazed at how cheap it is. You can usually get an MP to do your bidding or say your piece in Parliament for a donation of £10k or less. I’ve never heard of anyone paying more.

It would be a contempt of Parliament to either request or agree to such an arrangement [1]. If you have definitive evidence of this having happened in the recent past, you really should pass it on to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards.

[1] https://erskinemay.parliament.uk/section/5023/corruption-or-...

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

#402

Post by BatteryMountain »

idworks1 wrote: post #128

One of my proudest moment in my career is when I lowered our app processing time from ~8hrs to 17 minutes. When I deployed my first update, it reduced it to 2 hours. The sysadmin immediately contacted me that there was something unusual. I confirmed the results but he was skeptical. Then with my second update, he told me that the app must be broken or that the script must be dying. There is no way it could complete t…

Mine was when I rewrote some application code to be processed within postgres to send a few thousand sms's (the logic to decide who should get them was the slow part + amount of data involved). It went from about 45 minutes to less than 1 minute. Was an amazing feeling to see the sms table filled up with the correct data - I also thought something was broken since we just accepted that those runs were normally supposed to be slow.

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

#403

Post by Grustaf »

madaxe_again wrote: post #380
mvc wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He got an MP on his side which seems to be all it takes these days in the UK.

You’d be amazed at how cheap it is. You can usually get an MP to do your bidding or say your piece in Parliament for a donation of £10k or less. I’ve never heard of anyone paying more.

Does that include the lobbyist's cut, or would you go directly to the MP? But how much do you really gain from buying a single MP?

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

#404

Post by Grustaf »

Waterluvian wrote: post #191
mynameisash wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away.[0] I'm more than a little annoyed that so much data engineering is still done in Scala Spark or PySpark. Both suffer from pretty high memory overhead, which leads to suboptimal resource utilization. I've worked with a few different systems that compile their queries into C/C++ (which is transparent to the developer). Those tend to be significantly faster or can use fewer nodes to p…

What reminded me of this the other day is how MacOS will grow your cursor if you “shake” it to help you find it on a big screen. I was thinking about how they must have a routine that’s constantly taking mouse input, buffering history, and running some algorithm to determine when user input is a mouse “shake”. And how many features like this add up to eat up a nontrivial amount of resources.

That seems like an incredibly cheap feature. The mouse pointer png probably costs a lot more than the shake detector.

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

#405

Post by amelius »

j1elo wrote: post #358
noduerme wrote: post #268

When I launched my former bitcoin casino in 2011 (it's gone, but it was a casino where all games, even roulette tables were multiplayer, on a platform built from scratch starting in '08), I handled all web requests through a server in Costa Rica that cost about $6/mo. Where I had a shell corporation for $250/year. Once the front end -- the bullet containing the entire casino code, about 250kb -- loaded, from Costa Ri…

Focusing on a small but important detail that some have already mentioned but with a more aggressive tone... was your "loophole" system tested in an actual litigation at any point? What I mean is that this: > The IoM server would call the Swiss server every time a hand was dealt might seem like a clever loophole around the laws in IoM, but in reality it sounds to me like the kind of technicalities that wouldn't reall…

> in reality it sounds to me like the kind of technicalities that wouldn't really pass the reasoning of a human judge

Yes, only big companies can successfully "hack" the law based on its letter, see e.g. tax evasion.

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

#406

Post by toyg »

Grustaf wrote: post #403
madaxe_again wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’d be amazed at how cheap it is. You can usually get an MP to do your bidding or say your piece in Parliament for a donation of £10k or less. I’ve never heard of anyone paying more.

Does that include the lobbyist's cut, or would you go directly to the MP? But how much do you really gain from buying a single MP?

MPs typically move in packs ("areas" or "currents", that may or may not be officially organized around a thinktank or club), so buying the right MP you can actually move several of them. And then your representative goes and trades favors with the colleagues in government - "I'll vote for your controversial legislation if you pull that other lever over there". Representative democracy is a big sausage factory: in go blood and guts, out comes "edible" rules that society will live on.

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

#408

Post by skrebbel »

noduerme wrote: post #331
skrebbel wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 B…

Fwiw I think this is a great response and I'm happy you did not feel attacked by my comment because that was not my intent. Thanks for sharing & all the best!

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

#409

Post by skrebbel »

noduerme wrote: post #373
noduerme wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 B…

@kapep don't know why I can't respond directly.. >>> where the random number is _used_ This was my main concern, and it was exactly what I needed a lawyer to sign off on before I set up a rig there. I was told that the gambling laws applied to where the chance took place, not where the money is distributed... after all, the whole thing with the IoM and the reason it's allowed to be a tax haven is that lots of people…

> @kapep don't know why I can't respond directly..

HN has a silly but effective piece of anti-flamewar UX which is that it hides the reply link in certain cases (some function of thread depth + amount of comments by you i think). However you can still reply by opening the comment on question (click on the timestamp, ie the "1 hour ago" link). Maybe you hit that.

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

#410

Post by Spooky23 »

KptMarchewa wrote: post #357
Spooky23 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get a kick out of stuff like this - I’m mostly an exec these days, but I recently prototyped a small database system to feed a business process in SQLite on my laptop. To my amusement, my little SQLite prototype smoked the “enterprise” database. Turns out that a MacBook Pro SSD performs better than the SAN, and the query planner needs more tlc. We ended up running the queries off my laptop for a few days while the…

Who the fuck thinks it's a good idea to run database on networked storage?

You might have heard of this little company in Seattle called “Amazon”.
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