My experience of that was that Google asked me to interview, I did, my recruiter congratulated me on passing the interviews and told me to expect a job offer by the end of the hiring cycle, and then at the end of the hiring cycle she informed me that, although I'd passed the interview, my interview performance was too poor to be considered for hiring.

Bro, saying stuff like this is why everyone hates us.

Seems non-trivial given that the database server is likely to be in the same datacenter/rack/physical machine. If you have this much access you might as well plant a backdoor in the server and tamper with the database however you want.

>3. wait for the query to get the winning numbers from the database

Are lottery winners determined immediately after they close? I thought they did a number picking ceremony by picking out literal number balls from a tumbler?

If you have this capability then why not just insert all number combinations into the db well before draw time?

Makes me wonder how money flows from lottery terminals back to the lottery itself. I imagine there's some rigorous bookkeeping involved.

I don't know whether it still applies after the transition to proof-of-stake.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Breeders%27_Cup_betting...

If the terminal is not a dumb gateway to the central service, that would be a massive risk. I'd be extremely surprised if that was possible.

I mean, you could probably still print something, but any validity check would fail.

Matt publishes his newsletter Monday-Thursday, and a podcast on Fridays. It is a roundup of stories with high quality commentary on 2-4 stories, and a list of additional interesting articles at the bottom. He used to be an attorney with Goldman Sachs, giving him a good background for adding context to market corner cases people exploit, incentives of different parties involved in deals, legal perspective, etc.

Two of his main lines is "everything is securities fraud" and "everything might be insider trading", with probably 100+ examples of each over the years.

HN moderation policy is to replace useful or informative user-submitted titles with the title of the page itself in most cases.

My take is that: the syndicate wins because the odds were swung in their favour. The tote wins because even with the discounted percentage the increased pool size offset the rebate and made them more money. The rest of the mug punters lost since the syndicate was winning a portion of the pool they would have otherwise won. The rebates are a mechanism to reliably transfer additional money from mug punters to the tote via an enabling middleman (the syndicate).

[1] https://www.perthturftalk.com.au/discussion/discussion/11724...

I know that its not something new, because 30 years ago when I was in law school one of the cases studied in my class on transnational taxation was that of an Australian group (if I'm remembering the right country...) that tried to buy every possible ticket in a US lottery.

My recollection is that they only ended up getting something like 90% of the possible numbers but that was enough to get the top prizes and questions arose on how that should be taxed and whether the cost of the tickets was deductible.

It's basically a workaround for restrictions on online lottery sales. I'm not sure how states should handle online lottery gambling—there are a lot of considerations around addiction, potential fraud, money laundering, and erosion of retailer lottery revenue and shopper base—but I don't think this is it.

That must have been tense knowing they didn't purchase that last fraction of a percent.

https://www.texastribune.org/2025/02/27/texas-senate-lottery...

What am I missing here?

It's not surprising that a corporation specialised in producing B2B products for lottery and gambling corporations sussed out this opportunity, it's kind of their core competency to figure out such things and make them obvious to their customers in their offerings.

[1] http://investpost.org/mutual-funds/group-invests-5-million-t...

I myself have never understood the thrill payoff that must exist for lottery ticket buyers, but I cannot call it a tax.

Maybe it's just fun and exciting. Do people who bet in casinos or on sports have poor judgement skills or is it just exciting?

I’ve not seen it applied to the lottery specifically but you might even be able to use the Kelly Criterion to determine how much you can lose.

Well, that's the rub and ultimate downfall of our current implementation of capitalism.

Even if you have a good idea that almost nobody else has yet thought of, you've got to have enough resources to be able to comfortably execute it such that if you fail, your life won't be over. Most of the time, the only people who can do that already have a lot of money. So most innovators and innovation naturally have to come from people that already have money and connections; HOWEVER, there's very little reason to believe only good ideas come from people with money or power.

So little Timmy from Kansas might have even thought this was a nifty idea, but Timmy's dad is going to roll his eyes and get back to work. Nobody on the ground is ever going to be able to execute what is a relatively obvious play. Instead, they lose their time-advantage and big Timoteo from Malta comes in for the prize.

Worse still, big Timoteo has now accumulated more resources that puts him even further ahead of the pack for future such endeavours that should really need have success tied to starting resources.

That's... not the logic stated in the article. In both cases you get the expiration date in the contract.†

If you make a false representation to someone, and they rely on that, which is exactly what happened here, you can be liable for the damage to them, which is also exactly what happened here.

If you make a false representation to someone, and nothing bad happens, and they find proof that you made a mistake, then... you adjust what you're saying, and there are no other consequences.

† Kummeth contended that, had he been aware of the options' actual expiration date, he would have exercised them, and this was obviously true. He was awarded an amount based on their value around the time of expiration specified in the contract, not their value at the time he tried to exercise them.

Contracts are messy in the real world. Sorting it out can be tricky. The various doctrines of estoppel are relevant for sorting things out.

Of particular pertinence to this case, “conventional estoppel” means that if both parties consistently behave in a certain way that can become an expectation to be relied upon (over-simplified!)

In this case, if the guy reasonable relied on the convention that he would be notified when they expired, and wasn’t, then he may have an estoppel claim.

There is a large framework around contract law that takes a semester in law school just for the introduction.

This is the court essentially saying "you both errored in executing the contract as written" and then trying to figure out what would have happened in the hypothetical where each executed it faithfully. Looking at the ticker, and august average sale price was lower than the September transaction date.