

Porn's Lessons on Perl and PHP - chopsueyar
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/70236.html?wlc=1276880514&wlc=1301146737

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ashconnor
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.

~~~
throaway19823
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>

~~~
robotron
"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.

~~~
jasonlotito
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.

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chuhnk
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.

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bediger
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...](http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/porn-industry-struggles-free-content-
piracy/story?id=9795710)

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.

~~~
pluies
Advertising?

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

------
SkyMarshal
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.

------
sambeau
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.

------
chopsueyar
_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.

~~~
jasonlotito
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.

