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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

#371

Post by mellavora »

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.

I respect both the legality and the morality of it.

First, he did comply with all applicable law. No laws were broken.

Second, he did not break the spirit of the law. The law clearly allows gambling from the Isle of Man.

Third, he did not conflate the law with morality. What is the morality of a 400,000 GBP 'licensing' fee? Laws around licensing are weird. Another poster mentioned that pouring wine than liquor into a glass is illegal, but liquor then wine is fine. Not much moral sense in that reg.

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

#372

Post by withinboredom »

ahoka wrote: post #370
withinboredom wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it’d hold up in court. This is the same as saying: “I bet you ten bucks when I mail my friend in Switzerland, he will mail back a ten.” The random part is being done in another country, but the betting is still being done wherever you and your friend are.

Isn't it like betting on games happening in a different country? I'm pretty sure that is still gambling, even if entropy is generated in a different place.

Maybe the laws are written that way in IoM just so you don’t have to be registered to bet on Kentucky horse races or sports or whatever? Could be that way on purpose. Interesting loop-hole.

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

#373

Post by noduerme »

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…

@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 need to move money around without a lot of questions. But they defined gambling in this specific way and if only the money moved but the dice roll didn't take place on their shores, then it wasn't gambling under their jurisdiction. What you bring up was the conversation I had before locating there.

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

#375

Post by [deleted] »

mvc wrote: post #368
j1elo wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

[deleted]

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

#377

Post by mschuster91 »

benhoyt wrote: post #165
danudey wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of that is due to absolutely lousy code. We had a system management backend at my last company. Loading the users list was unbearably slow; 10+ seconds on a warm cache. Not too terrible, except that most user management tasks required a page reload, so it was just wildly infuriating. Eventually I took a look at the code for the page, which queried LDAP for user data and the database for permissions data. It did…

Yeah, I see this a lot. I think it's especially easy to introduce this kind of "accidentally quadratic" behaviour using magical ORMs like Django's, where an innocent-looking attribute access like user.groups can trigger a database query ... access user.groups inside a loop and things get bad quickly. In the case of groups and permissions there's probably only a few of each, so fetching all of them is probably fine. B…

> For development, we had a ?queries=1 query parameter you could add to the URL to show the number of SQL queries and their total time at the bottom of the page. Very helpful when trying to optimize this stuff. "Why is this page doing 350 queries totalling 5 seconds? Oops, I must have an N+1 query issue!"

I'm so glad Symfony (PHP framework) has a built-in profiler and analysis tooling there...

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

#378

Post by noduerme »

mellavora wrote: post #371
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.

I respect both the legality and the morality of it. First, he did comply with all applicable law. No laws were broken. Second, he did not break the spirit of the law. The law clearly allows gambling from the Isle of Man. Third, he did not conflate the law with morality. What is the morality of a 400,000 GBP 'licensing' fee? Laws around licensing are weird. Another poster mentioned that pouring wine than liquor into a…

Thank you. And yes, it's incredible the morally bankrupt things you see under color of law if you try getting into that business. Side story, I was once invited to be a guest of the now deposed dictator of Ghana when I casually floated to his lawyer who I met in a casino in Prague the idea of making them the next offshore gambling capital of the world. I did a little research on the country and then respectfully declined. In my view, I never broke a law or did anything immoral (since I was extremely transparent about the odds of every game and I made sure to only take adults from countries where gaming online was legal... who wanted to play, and knew the rules). And not conflating morality with legality -- while respectfully considering both -- is just a precondition to being an individual in a complicated world.

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

#379

Post by mschuster91 »

andylynch wrote: post #347
localhost wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious if the binary protocol uses floating point or a fixed point representation? Or is floating point with its rounding issues sufficient for the protocol's needs?

No GP but familiar with these protocols. They use fixed point extensively; I can't even thing of an exchange protocol which would use floating point since the rounding issues would cause unnecessary and expensive problems. This is typical (from NASDAQ http://www.nasdaqtrader.com/content/technicalsupport/specifi... ): Prices are integer fields. When converted to a decimal format, prices are in fixed point format with…

> The maximum price in OUCH 4.2 is $199,999.9900

For NASDAQ it seems to have been something around 430k / share... Buffett's BRK shares threatened to hit that limit a couple months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27044044

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

#380

Post by madaxe_again »

mvc wrote: post #368
j1elo wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.
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