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

mark.mcnally.je

351–360 of 479 posts

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

#351
post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I suspect your anger derives from the fact that this would not be possible to get away with now, in any way shape or form, only ten years later. And truly the world is way more locked down now than it was then when people were like, "Bitcoin? What's that? you want to pay me to write a legal brief?" so, yeah. I feel sorry for kids ten years younger than me. When I did it, the only thing I was really afraid of was gett…

I'm not angry, I'm hostile. That you think the only possible position from which to take issue with what you did is FOMO speaks volumes.

I'm not arguing that you violated any laws. You made it very clear that you went to great lengths to avoid doing anything that could have resulted in consequences to yourself.

EDIT: Since HN's rate limiting won't let me reply for a few hours, I'll just address the replies inline:

I'm not jealous. I'm sure noduerme made a sizable chunk of money with the whole operation at the time but their profile says they're now working as a taxi driver and sold all their bitcoin before the peak. They probably have a lot of other interesting stories to tell and that's nice. But dismissing any hostility or criticism as jealousy is thought terminating and frankly below even HN's standards.

Based on their backstory in the replies, I can see where their attitude comes from, but they severely underestimate how big of a problem gambling addiction is and how much of the profit of the gambling industry relies on it.

It's nice if the casino their parents worked at turned away obvious addicts but the word "obvious" is doing a lot of work here and there are also clear business reasons you don't want obvious addicts in your establishment the same way bars will be happy to have repeat customers buying drinks for five hours every day but will turn them away if they get blackout drunk or unsightly. "Not doing it for the money" may give you a clean conscience but it doesn't change the consequences of your actions.

It's also important to point out that online gambling is by its nature functionally anonymous for the gambler (even if you record IDs for legal reasons). The online casino isn't going to turn away the addict until they can no longer pay or have to resort to fraud to keep up the habit. And even if the casino implements limits, the proliferation of online casinos makes it considerably easier to go hopping than if you have to physically drive somewhere.

Gambling addiction not only ruins the lives of the addict but also impacts their friends and family, not just financially. It's true that not every person who gambles is an addict but the line between an expensive hobby and a managed addiction is hard to draw until you undeniably cross it.

But if you need a comment on HN to explain to you why gambling and especially online gambling is bad, a comment on HN isn't going to be enough to convince you.

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

#352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No laws were broken, else they'd be in jail. It's how the big companies that HN worships get away with not paying taxes. Morally dubious? For sure.

> No laws were broken, else they'd be in jail. Just because OP isn't in jail doesn't mean they didn't break the law. Laws are broken all the time.

No. I'm not in jail because I did everything by the book. Everyone else thought it was the wild west.

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

#353

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.

>He's a frickin genius because he found ways to break the law with impunity for his own profit ?

Obviously he did not break the law, finding holes like that is the number one job of a tax-lawyer.

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

#354
post #338

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.

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…

Corporations do not so dissimilar things with teams of accountants and lawyers. Via tax planning, international subsidiaries and all other sorts of loopholes.

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

#355
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've read your few posts a few times and I'm still not sure why you made your post. You're telling the person that you handle more data than them and thus need more resources than them. Was your goal to smugly belittle them? It's not like they said any problem can be solved on their specific resources.

Nope, I want to say, that even much more data could be processed on very limited hardware, and that it is additional confirmation that current hardware is immensely powerful and very under-estimated.

And that go-to solutions / golden hammers like REST / JSON are very much suboptimal.

I mean I'm still going to use it for client/server communication and the like because I don't have serious performance constraints enough to warrant something that will be more difficult to develop for etc, but still.

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

#356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crypto markets are very small :-) I'm working and company which process "real" exchanges, like NASDAQ, LSE, and, especially, OPRA feed. We've added 20+ crypto exchanges in our portfolio this year, and all of them are processed on one old server which is unable to process NASDAQ Total View in real-time anymore. On the other hand, whole OPRA feed (more than 5Gbit/s or 65B/day, yes, it is billions, messages of very opti…

Could you share some more about that very optimized binary protocol? I know there are ways to be more efficient than JSON but since you call it crappy, your solution must be much much better. Honestly interested to readup more.

Have a look at NASDAQ ITCH, OUCH, and RASH (these are the real names, the story I heard is the original author of didn't like the usual corporate style brand names and wanted certain people to squirm when talking about them).

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

#357

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…

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?

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

#358

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 really pass the reasoning of a human judge, who in their duty of interpreting the law and its intended spirit, would probably consider this an invalid trick and thus that the RNG of the system still resided in IoM, even if technically it didn't.

But of course, none of this matters if the casino never had any legal battle to fight where this idea could be tested in court, which is the equivalent of not being "caught".

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

#359
post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I suspect your anger derives from the fact that this would not be possible to get away with now, in any way shape or form, only ten years later. And truly the world is way more locked down now than it was then when people were like, "Bitcoin? What's that? you want to pay me to write a legal brief?" so, yeah. I feel sorry for kids ten years younger than me. When I did it, the only thing I was really afraid of was gett…

>>> I'm not angry, I'm hostile.

Hah! This made me laugh. Ok so not FOMO..(trust me, wasn't worth it except for the thrills).. why hostile? I was born in a Vegas family. My uncles all worked as blackjack dealers and pit bosses. When I was 7 they used to leave me in a corner of the casino for hours and tell me to stand there while my parents went and gambled. I taught myself to code there on a TRS-80 Model 100 in basic and practically the first thing I wrote was a slot machine. My view is that adults want to go gamble and that's their decision. I never took a dime from anyone I saw with a gambling problem... I would ban them from my site if they seemed addicted. I like to gamble myself. I count cards. Like everyone on my site... because my decks were single shuffle. So don't be so judgmental. I didn't do it for the money. I did it because I love the games.

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

#360
post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I suspect your anger derives from the fact that this would not be possible to get away with now, in any way shape or form, only ten years later. And truly the world is way more locked down now than it was then when people were like, "Bitcoin? What's that? you want to pay me to write a legal brief?" so, yeah. I feel sorry for kids ten years younger than me. When I did it, the only thing I was really afraid of was gett…

It's not anger. It's jealousy.

The same jealousy that's called "opinionated" in software development, but really means "Doing things differently than how I do them threatens me, because my sense of superiority is rooted in how I do things."

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