Porn's Lessons on Perl and PHP | Hacker News Reader

Porn's Lessons on Perl and PHP

technewsworld.com

31 pointschopsueyar21 comments

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I keep reading how porn is at the forefront of technology, driving innovation and being a real game changer.

Yet HTTP authentication is still the norm, tubes appeared several months after YouTube and porn hasn't migrated to make good use of HTML5.

I think the industry made one good choice with VHS decades ago and has been rewarded with such unjust acclaim ever since.

You're totally right. I was a freelancer in the adult biz for ~2 years and the level of technological incompetence in the industry is hard to believe. For example, no one is using version control systems, most people hardly know the difference between a CMS and a framework, most still update their websites with FTP, virtual hosting is still a scary beast, cPanel is the norm, they still refer to web apps as "scripts", etc.

Innovation in the porn industry is a complete myth in 2011.

PS: If anyone doubts my claim, I suggest you take a peek here and see the level of discussion (the world's largest adult industry board): http://gfy.com/forumdisplay.php?f=26

they still refer to web apps as "scripts"

I did some work for a local bank a few years ago where they used the same terminology. It was quite the culture shock. It reminded of me going to see movies with my grandparents, who still called them 'pictureshows'.

"no one is using version control systems, most people hardly know the difference between a CMS and a framework, most still update their websites with FTP, virtual hosting is still a scary beast, cPanel is the norm, they still refer to web apps as "scripts""

Wrong. At least where I work. But I do still call web apps "scripts" because 1) I'm old and 2) that's what they are.

From the comments here, most of the developers commenting on the adult industry are being fairly liberal with the term "industry". Sort of like equating the slot machines at the local bar with the casino industry as a whole. Ignore the fact that Apple is adopting business models pioneered in the online adult industry, or that PayPal was years behind what was offered in the adult industry regarding credit card security.

One thing the adult industry can't push on right now is iOS Apps, where most of the action is taking place. But companies like GroupOn, Foursquare, and others are using technology and business models that adult has been using for a long time.

I work at Gamma Entertainment here in Montreal. You're essentially looking at the bottom of the barrel there if you are using GFY as your source. The people that are innovating in the adult industry aren't hanging out on GFY. The programmers are going to and sponsoring local tech conferences, hanging out here on HN, and actually doing really cool stuff. GFY is where you start, when you wannabe part of the adult industry. It's Digg.

If you're dealing with people FTP'ing up their website, using virtual hosts, and cpanel, you aren't dealing with the industry. You're dealing with Joe Blow Local just like in the rest of the main stream world.

What about online payments? I thought the porn industry was (one of) the first to start accepting credit cards online.

I think no one is arguing against the adult industry being innovative at some point in history. It just isn't true in 2011.

Considering Apple is adopting business practices perfected by the adult industry, I don't see how it's not.

What ~2011 business practice did Apple adopt from the adult industry?

The new 30% subscription services that Apple deployed this year? Basically, Apple handles delivery, technology, etc. Producers just produce the content and essentially hand off deployment to Apple. The discussion surrounding this new deal from Apple seems to suggest that this is somehow some new thing that Apple is doing. It's not. In the online world, adult has been doing this for some time.

I've seen Middle Men and yes there was no options at the time and banks should be have take more notice. But it does read like adult is the driving force for all online commerce and technology.

> Yet HTTP authentication is still the norm

No it's not.

> tubes appeared several months after YouTube

The model of YouTube was unique, yes. YouTube, however, wasn't doing anything new from a technology standpoint, however.

> and porn hasn't migrated to make good use of HTML5.

Yes, it has.

Porn, and the industry, and deployed new technologies that were eventually deployed or adapted my main steam companies. PayPal and Apple are two of my favorites.

These seem to be standard guidelines most tech companies have followed for the past 10 years. What I would like to add to this is metrics collection through something ganglia will give you an overall view of performance and usage across your servers, not just at that point in time but summarized over an hour, day, week, month. I cant tell you how helpful that kind of thing can be. And you can add your own stats to it as well very easily to track any number of things. I've added mail, apache and release graphing to my stats. John Allspaw of Etsy, formerly of Flickr is huge on metrics collection, so is John Adams of Twitter. It plays a key role in assessing where you've been and where you are going.

1. "12% of the websites in the world contain adult content". 2. "The online adult industry pulls in nearly US$5 billion a year worldwide." 3. "Most of the world's adult entertainment sites, a.k.a. porn sites, operate on a relatively thin budget"

Let's combine this with two things:

A. Moaning from porn industry about "intellectual property" piracy: http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/216765 B. The paid online pron industry getting blindsided by the free/amateur sites: http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/porn-industry-struggles-free...

You can find a lot of article detailing the porn industry's problems with both.

So where's the $5 billion a year coming from and going to? Something smells really fishy here.

Advertising?

Well, maybe, but I was thinking more like rake offs by organized crime, or maybe industrial strength money-laundering.

This is one of the poorer articles I've read on HN.

The author writes like a Star Wars screenwriter - lots of meatless platitudes and tautologies jumbled together in the hopes that some meaning worth more than the sum of its parts may spontaneously emerge from the soup.

And its references to porn could just as well have been to Facebook, Youtube, or any other highly scalable site. The porn angle is clearly just to drive hits and upvotes, but otherwise useless. C'mon guys, HN is for thinking with your real head, don't get let yourselves get taken so easily by charlatans selling sex.

This article misses an important point. The online porn industry pays for high-performance web software. When I worked for Zeus (maker of the world's fastest webserver) I was surprised to see how many porn sites paid for it. For some reason I had assumed that they would do everything on the cheap. No so. They are paying out where it makes sense to: webservers, load balancers and traffic managers.

You're not going to find a bunch of Ruby on Rails or Django sites because it's harder to find Python and Ruby developers on the cheap.

The article is a bit old, but should still make for an intersting discussion.

I see the reasoning. Especially considering not all development takes place in California. And don't assume top adult companies don't pay well for developers doing PHP. It's hard finding good programmers regardless of the language.

PHP and Perl have a large foothold around the world, and being located in a nation other than the USA doesn't make a programmer less skilled.

So, with PHP, you have a higher chance of finding good programmers, though you'll have to sift through a lot more people who claim to know PHP. You'll be able to look in a lot more areas, and those areas can offer cheaper rates. And finding a Ruby programmer with ample experience is going to be difficult. I don't know many Ruby programmers who've been programming in the language for at least 5 years.

This is especially true where cost of living is lower. Put all of this together, and using Rails or Django makes little sense.

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