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Comment by jetti | Hacker News Reader

This and the article about YouPorn's stack make me really want to go work for these places. I'm sure that the day to day challenges would be fascinating and it would be a thrilling technical experience.

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I worked in porn running sites like these (Not in that scale, but hundreds of thousands of daily visitors) for about 10 years... Sure traffic is easy to come by, but making money is a lot harder. You have to sell memberships to porn sites that have premium memberships and you get either revenue sharing or a flat fee.

Also you're fighting to sell a membership at sitea.com when some torrent or pirating site offers full rips of sitea.com within the top 10 results on Google for that search.

So basically you're trying to sell a $5 cup of coffee to a guy while someone next to you is giving away that same coffee for free + a bagel.

Which is why I would want to work for one and not run one. I just focus on technical, they just give me my money and everybody is happy!

Unless you're targetting working for a major company (Brazzers who owns PornHub, Tube8, KeezMovies, Extremetube, etc) you've gotta have some serious skills, otherwise you have to create your own site... Not many in the realm of porn actually have full companies behind them, most of them are just your average joe running a site by himself.

Not to mention most porn website owners are cheap... Doing any type of work in that realm is a pain.

Interesting. I guess the other factors come in and make the technical aspect less...appealing.

Believe me... The idea of being paid to watch porn wears off after the first 3 months... After that it screws with you...

One of the big things is, normally you see a hot girl and you're wondering how she's in bed... After working in porn for a year plus, you're wondering how much you could make off selling her on your site.

I honestly wouldn't want to watch it. I just want the technical challenge.

There really is no challenge...

head on over to www.gfy.com, a forum for adult web masters.

That place is a joke and cesspool of everything that is wrong with the industry.

Ya, it really lacks the integrity that is the underpinnings of the porn industry.

Like companies in every industry, some porn companies are sleazy and some are not. On average, it probably compares favorably to investment banking and the domain name industry.

Kink.com is almost always looking for talented developers. Message me (my username @ infohazard.org) and I'll put you in contact with the right people.

It runs on a JBoss/Hibernate stack.

Masochism and Hibernate go together like peanut butter and jelly

Thanks to Hibernate's second level caching, Kink.com's entire user-facing website traffic could be served by a single appserver and single MySQL instance.* Try that with Ruby.

* Not including NATS, which is an abomination.

Have done, thanks, varnish is the answer.

Unless you serve personalized pages. Which Kink does.

A small bit of javascript tends to help with that.

That doesn't solve the problem at all, it just moves it from the generate-HTML request to a followon get-the-content-appropriate-to-this-user ajax request. Generating the information for each page is complicated, especially at Kink where your ability to interact with each "shoot" is determined by subscription rights, admin rights, microcurrency purchases, and who knows what else these days (I haven't seen the codebase in over four years).

Hibernate's clustered 2nd-level cache is still pretty magical. It means that the vast majority of web page requests are serviced out of RAM with zero database hits - without writing any special caching code. And it's transactional. For a certain set of scaling problems, this feature is golden.

I've worked for a gaming site under the same constraints (probably stricter because real money was involved with nearly every transaction, no caching allowed).

Hibernate caching can surely be helpful, but you make it sound like a silver bullet and like there's no other approaches. There are plenty without tying yourself to J2EE hell. A little bloom filtering with memcached or redis can work wonders and might be more predictable than an opaque caching layer that can make you very unhappy once your working set exceeds a "magical" threshold (been there, with hibernate).

Oh, I don't claim it is a silver bullet. It can be frustrating as hell at times. And of course you can build your own distributed, transactional caching layer.

My point is that once you end up with a certain level of sophistication and scaling, you create your own hell. Hibernate is fairly refined technology for dealing with this exact situation. Homebrewing your solution is like wandering around in the desert - if you're smart, you'll make it out, if not, you'll be the next Friendster.

And FWIW, Java EE is not hell if you avoid the overengineered pieces like JSF.

Yep! I wish it was more socially acceptable :)

Seriously! I think it wouldn't be hard getting a job after wards, but the real challenge would be explaining it to the missus! :)

Pron doesn't have that much of a negative stigma attached to it when it comes to the tech industry. At least none that I've experienced. I do admit that I use the holding company's name on my resume/linked in profile but I always disclose pretty early on what it was just to make sure. If they have a problem with it I don't want work for them anyways.

Also, you try to stop saying the word hard after working in the adult business....everyone snickers when they know where you've worked. ;-)

It isn't the tech industry's view I'd be worried about. It would just get tiresome having to explain that while I work at a porn site doesn't mean I watch porn all day when telling others what I do.

I'd be worried about being the next Saeed Malekpour.

Haters gonna hate. Ignore the people who tell you you're stupid. Us geeks have been picked on for years.

I know some companies build a separate IT entity to have a more socially acceptable front for their employees.

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