8 ms·

Personalized Porn [SFW]

238 points by blackswan 17y ago

Paton 17y ago
You got to do, what you gotta do. Unethical, nonetheless.
wmf 17y ago
IMO the cleverest part is that "for privacy reasons" he couldn't show any of his work. It reminds me of the woman who conned the Ivy League saying that she changed her name due to domestic abuse. Maybe somewhere there's a guy calling himself the greatest programmer in the world, but he can't answer any interview questions because it's all classified.
- blhack 17y ago
  Maybe somewhere there's a guy calling himself the greatest programmer in the world, but he can't answer any interview questions because it's all classified. The government seems to hire a LOT of these people; I meet them all the time.
bmalicoat 17y ago
I guess the software analogy would be to say that all your code is covered under NDA, but that doesn't have nearly the power of this tale.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
acangiano 17y ago
Contrary to what this story is trying to teach us, I think the real lesson here is that it's all about who you know. The key phrase was: "I liked the story so much I pitched the idea to a jour na list friend of mine". Yes, he needed a good story or something remarkable to pitch to his journalist friend, but it was his network of connections that ultimately helped his young, film maker friend.
- wmf 17y ago
  I disagree; I suspect you could pitch such a crazy story to pretty much any journalist.
prodigal_erik 17y ago
> "Man, you’re a good bullshitter," I say. "You knew that about me already," he says. This guy deliberately lies to "friends" simply because it might benefit him someday. At best he's a drinking buddy; the author would be out of his mind to actually trust him.
- Retric 17y ago
  People can be trustworthy in all sorts of ways. Some people will lie all the time because the truth is boring, but they will also drive 2 hours into the middle of nowhere to pick your ass up when you break down at 2 am.
  - randallsquared 17y ago
    Or maybe they won't, but you'll never really know unless you need them to do that. That's not "trustworthy"; it's just helpful.
    - SapphireSun 17y ago
      That's not necessarily true. Some people compartmentalize things on a need to know basis. They'll lie about stuff that isn't on the list for fun or profit, but will absolutely do the right thing if it concerns you.
MikeCapone 17y ago
I'm not sure how to feel about this or if there's much of an applicable lesson for me to be learned from it, but it was an entertaining read.
- brk 17y ago
  There is a lesson there. Another story along these lines I heard a few years ago is about a guy who wants to put on a trade show in some industry. This is going to be the first of a (hopefully) annual occurrence. A great event to pull customers and businesses together, yadda yadda. Nobody wants to be the first vendor to sign up for his show. So, he starts calling some 2nd tier companies and telling them there is "limited space" and "many of their competitors are already on-board", but of course he can't name specific names. Once people started thinking it was actually filling up and was going to be a good event they started to sign up. He managed to fill the whole expo space at the last minute and everyone lived happily ever after. Had he not sold on the "lie" it would of never happened... Sometimes you have to get creative with your marketing and take a chance when you believe in yourself.
  - jamesbritt 17y ago
    'Had he not sold on the "lie" it would of never happened... Sometimes you have to get creative with your marketing and take a chance when you believe in yourself.' So it's OK to lie, because you can put it in scare quotes and talk about it all worked out in the end?
    - deleted 17y ago
      [deleted]
    - brk 17y ago
      So it's OK to lie Perhaps. That's for you to decide.
      - jamesbritt 17y ago
        "That's for you to decide." That's a given. I'm asking what you think, and if that was the point of your post.
mgunes 17y ago
Reading this right after reading Clay Shirky's recent "rant about women" was an interesting experience.
- nixme 17y ago
  In case others missed it like I did: http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/01/a-rant-about-women/ http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/01/a-rant-about-women/ And the discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1056689 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1056689
pingswept 17y ago
That level of lying would be too painful for me, even given the success that might come from it. As an engineer whose job it is to make reliable systems, I have strong feelings about the truth. I don't want to behave like that, and I don't want to be around people who do.
- tungstenfurnace 17y ago
  I know what you mean; I couldn't do it either. However, he confessed his lie, and now he works making movies. They're lies too! They're fictional. Yet good things -- including important truths -- come out of them. Richard Branson confesses in his autobiography how he started his business career with lies. He would phone up a bank and try to sell advertising space in his student magazine by claiming that a rival bank had already bought space and that they should get in on the action.
  - iamwil 17y ago
    I remember my dad telling me about different kinds of businesses one can start. He told me about a family friend that's running a pawn shop, and is rather successful at it. I asked him why he never went into the pawn shop business. My dad told me that wasn't a business he'd be able to do by his nature. I realized a while later that what he meant was that there's lots of ways to make money, but not all of them will sit well with you. Each industry has its cultural values and accepted norms. Everyone's different with the ethical decisions that crop up in business's edge cases. You'll want to pick one that suits your nature so you can sleep at night. Of course, business is all one gray area. While we may all bend the rules a bit for an advantage, beware those that do it too much. What you do attracts those you run with. I remember reading in Tao of Warren Buffet saying something to the extent of (not exact quote) "Pick those that are smart, hardworking, and ethical to work with. Especially the last one, because if that isn't there, the first two are going to kill you."
- olliesaunders 17y ago
  It may have been a lie but I enjoyed that lie. When a girl asks you if she looks pretty (and she doesn't), do you tell the truth? The morality of lies is a matter of individual perception. That subjectivity is making me less and less concerned about whether it is right or wrong to lie. These days I think in cost/benefit trade-offs. The trade-off in this story was a good one, his reputation doesn't seem to have taken any damage.
dabent 17y ago
Did I ever tell you about my first startup? We did top secret project for the US government and sold to a branch of the government for about $100 million. The name? Oh, I can't tell you the name. That's top secret!
- nostrademons 17y ago
  True story, I think: One of the senior engineers at a past employer once worked for a government contractor. Their product didn't work. At all. And everyone at the company new it. However, their customers were all government agencies, and the work was classified. Which meant that none of them could tell other government agencies that the product didn't work. At all. So they went on merrily selling the same non-working product to multiple agencies, one by one, until they ran out of agencies working on classified products that didn't already know they were full of shit. At which point I assume the company went bankrupt and the engineers took their saved-up salaries and found other jobs.
spoonboy 17y ago
I have a sneaking suspicion that this entire story is made up.
- philwelch 17y ago
  I would have that suspicion even if he posted about how he made up the whole story for a blog post and it got him traffic. Or at any level in this recursive tell-a-tall-tale-but-it-was-all-a-lie process.
- chanux 17y ago
  And also it's possible that Andrew is lying to bury his past.
- ryanwaggoner 17y ago
  Why? Just because you think it's clever to imagine that the next level is also a lie? Hell, I can top that...maybe all of reality is a lie!
- Retric 17y ago
  I have heard this story (about personalized porn ) before reading the blog post. At the time I wondered how many people would be comfortable doing so, but in all of NY I figured it was remotely possible. Now, I realize it would be the perfect lie because it was "obvious" that he would not have any material left over, and as a rumor it could easily spread.
jasonlbaptiste 17y ago
Reminds me of how we got money for our first servers for Publictivity. We were in between brainstorms and went down to Publix to get beer since we knew it was going to be a late night of mockups/product specs/ brainstorms,etc. It was a couple of weeks before the superbowl and Publix had a "win tickets to the superbowl contest" going on where you had to show that you were a passionate NFL fan for your favorite team. No one else competed, so they asked us two days before the superbowl to go compete in front of a few hundred people + NFL stars to win those tickets. We were pretty excited, because we knew those tickets were worth a few grand. We could use that to pay our server bills+other costs. So, we went. I had the routine of eating a cake in under a minute and getting everybody hyped up. I didn't win. Frank had the routine of shaving the Dolphins logo into his chest and being the number one Dolfan: Video: http://www.youtube.com/user/publictivity#p/u/2/DP3WtwwoarE http://www.youtube.com/user/publictivity#p/u/2/DP3WtwwoarE Frank won. We hawked the tickets on the day of the superbowl for about $3,400 or so. It paid for our original servers + development servers for the next year. The money was minimal though helpful, but moreso the story is one worth a whole lot more.
vaksel 17y ago
so if he spent all his money on equipment, had no name, and didn't do the porn thing to make money...how did he make his living?
- gvb 17y ago
  a) The "spent all my money on equipment" was probably part of the lie. b) Bar tending.
- billswift 17y ago
  Once he had the equipment and his story he was able to get a real film job. That was the point of his story - to get him the job.
dotBen 17y ago
Further proof that many of Hugh's friends are full of shit. (there, I said it. It was waiting to be said by someone ffs)
milestinsley 17y ago
Whether this is entirely true or not, surely the underlying message worth noting is that you can give the impression you are more successful than you are. This, of course, translates to the business/startup world where perception matters. Regardless of the truthfulness of the story, I think there's something worth taking away here. (And it's pretty funny!)
olliesaunders 17y ago
I'd like more of these social engineering stories on HN.
- tpyo 17y ago
  The number of points you get is how many people also want more social engineering stories.
  - olliesaunders 17y ago
    Taking into account the number of people who actually see my comment.
lsemel 17y ago
Anyone creative and determined enough to come up with a lie like that to get around barriers and break into a business, would have creative enough to come up with an alternate route that doesn't involve lying.

238 points by blackswan 17y ago

Paton 17y ago

You got to do, what you gotta do. Unethical, nonetheless.

wmf 17y ago

IMO the cleverest part is that "for privacy reasons" he couldn't show any of his work. It reminds me of the woman who conned the Ivy League saying that she changed her name due to domestic abuse. Maybe somewhere there's a guy calling himself the greatest programmer in the world, but he can't answer any interview questions because it's all classified.

blhack 17y ago
Maybe somewhere there's a guy calling himself the greatest programmer in the world, but he can't answer any interview questions because it's all classified. The government seems to hire a LOT of these people; I meet them all the time.

bmalicoat 17y ago

I guess the software analogy would be to say that all your code is covered under NDA, but that doesn't have nearly the power of this tale.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

acangiano 17y ago

Contrary to what this story is trying to teach us, I think the real lesson here is that it's all about who you know. The key phrase was: "I liked the story so much I pitched the idea to a jour na list friend of mine". Yes, he needed a good story or something remarkable to pitch to his journalist friend, but it was his network of connections that ultimately helped his young, film maker friend.

wmf 17y ago
I disagree; I suspect you could pitch such a crazy story to pretty much any journalist.

prodigal_erik 17y ago

> "Man, you’re a good bullshitter," I say. "You knew that about me already," he says. This guy deliberately lies to "friends" simply because it might benefit him someday. At best he's a drinking buddy; the author would be out of his mind to actually trust him.

Retric 17y ago
People can be trustworthy in all sorts of ways. Some people will lie all the time because the truth is boring, but they will also drive 2 hours into the middle of nowhere to pick your ass up when you break down at 2 am.
- randallsquared 17y ago
  Or maybe they won't, but you'll never really know unless you need them to do that. That's not "trustworthy"; it's just helpful.
  - SapphireSun 17y ago
    That's not necessarily true. Some people compartmentalize things on a need to know basis. They'll lie about stuff that isn't on the list for fun or profit, but will absolutely do the right thing if it concerns you.

MikeCapone 17y ago

I'm not sure how to feel about this or if there's much of an applicable lesson for me to be learned from it, but it was an entertaining read.

brk 17y ago
There is a lesson there. Another story along these lines I heard a few years ago is about a guy who wants to put on a trade show in some industry. This is going to be the first of a (hopefully) annual occurrence. A great event to pull customers and businesses together, yadda yadda. Nobody wants to be the first vendor to sign up for his show. So, he starts calling some 2nd tier companies and telling them there is "limited space" and "many of their competitors are already on-board", but of course he can't name specific names. Once people started thinking it was actually filling up and was going to be a good event they started to sign up. He managed to fill the whole expo space at the last minute and everyone lived happily ever after. Had he not sold on the "lie" it would of never happened... Sometimes you have to get creative with your marketing and take a chance when you believe in yourself.
- jamesbritt 17y ago
  'Had he not sold on the "lie" it would of never happened... Sometimes you have to get creative with your marketing and take a chance when you believe in yourself.' So it's OK to lie, because you can put it in scare quotes and talk about it all worked out in the end?
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - brk 17y ago
    So it's OK to lie Perhaps. That's for you to decide.
    - jamesbritt 17y ago
      "That's for you to decide." That's a given. I'm asking what you think, and if that was the point of your post.

mgunes 17y ago

Reading this right after reading Clay Shirky's recent "rant about women" was an interesting experience.

nixme 17y ago
In case others missed it like I did: http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/01/a-rant-about-women/ http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/01/a-rant-about-women/ And the discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1056689 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1056689

pingswept 17y ago

That level of lying would be too painful for me, even given the success that might come from it. As an engineer whose job it is to make reliable systems, I have strong feelings about the truth. I don't want to behave like that, and I don't want to be around people who do.

tungstenfurnace 17y ago
I know what you mean; I couldn't do it either. However, he confessed his lie, and now he works making movies. They're lies too! They're fictional. Yet good things -- including important truths -- come out of them. Richard Branson confesses in his autobiography how he started his business career with lies. He would phone up a bank and try to sell advertising space in his student magazine by claiming that a rival bank had already bought space and that they should get in on the action.
- iamwil 17y ago
  I remember my dad telling me about different kinds of businesses one can start. He told me about a family friend that's running a pawn shop, and is rather successful at it. I asked him why he never went into the pawn shop business. My dad told me that wasn't a business he'd be able to do by his nature. I realized a while later that what he meant was that there's lots of ways to make money, but not all of them will sit well with you. Each industry has its cultural values and accepted norms. Everyone's different with the ethical decisions that crop up in business's edge cases. You'll want to pick one that suits your nature so you can sleep at night. Of course, business is all one gray area. While we may all bend the rules a bit for an advantage, beware those that do it too much. What you do attracts those you run with. I remember reading in Tao of Warren Buffet saying something to the extent of (not exact quote) "Pick those that are smart, hardworking, and ethical to work with. Especially the last one, because if that isn't there, the first two are going to kill you."
olliesaunders 17y ago
It may have been a lie but I enjoyed that lie. When a girl asks you if she looks pretty (and she doesn't), do you tell the truth? The morality of lies is a matter of individual perception. That subjectivity is making me less and less concerned about whether it is right or wrong to lie. These days I think in cost/benefit trade-offs. The trade-off in this story was a good one, his reputation doesn't seem to have taken any damage.

dabent 17y ago

Did I ever tell you about my first startup? We did top secret project for the US government and sold to a branch of the government for about $100 million. The name? Oh, I can't tell you the name. That's top secret!

nostrademons 17y ago
True story, I think: One of the senior engineers at a past employer once worked for a government contractor. Their product didn't work. At all. And everyone at the company new it. However, their customers were all government agencies, and the work was classified. Which meant that none of them could tell other government agencies that the product didn't work. At all. So they went on merrily selling the same non-working product to multiple agencies, one by one, until they ran out of agencies working on classified products that didn't already know they were full of shit. At which point I assume the company went bankrupt and the engineers took their saved-up salaries and found other jobs.

spoonboy 17y ago

I have a sneaking suspicion that this entire story is made up.

philwelch 17y ago
I would have that suspicion even if he posted about how he made up the whole story for a blog post and it got him traffic. Or at any level in this recursive tell-a-tall-tale-but-it-was-all-a-lie process.
chanux 17y ago
And also it's possible that Andrew is lying to bury his past.
ryanwaggoner 17y ago
Why? Just because you think it's clever to imagine that the next level is also a lie? Hell, I can top that...maybe all of reality is a lie!
Retric 17y ago
I have heard this story (about personalized porn ) before reading the blog post. At the time I wondered how many people would be comfortable doing so, but in all of NY I figured it was remotely possible. Now, I realize it would be the perfect lie because it was "obvious" that he would not have any material left over, and as a rumor it could easily spread.

jasonlbaptiste 17y ago

Reminds me of how we got money for our first servers for Publictivity. We were in between brainstorms and went down to Publix to get beer since we knew it was going to be a late night of mockups/product specs/ brainstorms,etc. It was a couple of weeks before the superbowl and Publix had a "win tickets to the superbowl contest" going on where you had to show that you were a passionate NFL fan for your favorite team. No one else competed, so they asked us two days before the superbowl to go compete in front of a few hundred people + NFL stars to win those tickets. We were pretty excited, because we knew those tickets were worth a few grand. We could use that to pay our server bills+other costs. So, we went. I had the routine of eating a cake in under a minute and getting everybody hyped up. I didn't win. Frank had the routine of shaving the Dolphins logo into his chest and being the number one Dolfan: Video: http://www.youtube.com/user/publictivity#p/u/2/DP3WtwwoarE http://www.youtube.com/user/publictivity#p/u/2/DP3WtwwoarE Frank won. We hawked the tickets on the day of the superbowl for about $3,400 or so. It paid for our original servers + development servers for the next year. The money was minimal though helpful, but moreso the story is one worth a whole lot more.

vaksel 17y ago

so if he spent all his money on equipment, had no name, and didn't do the porn thing to make money...how did he make his living?

gvb 17y ago
a) The "spent all my money on equipment" was probably part of the lie. b) Bar tending.
billswift 17y ago
Once he had the equipment and his story he was able to get a real film job. That was the point of his story - to get him the job.

dotBen 17y ago

Further proof that many of Hugh's friends are full of shit. (there, I said it. It was waiting to be said by someone ffs)

milestinsley 17y ago

Whether this is entirely true or not, surely the underlying message worth noting is that you can give the impression you are more successful than you are. This, of course, translates to the business/startup world where perception matters. Regardless of the truthfulness of the story, I think there's something worth taking away here. (And it's pretty funny!)

olliesaunders 17y ago

I'd like more of these social engineering stories on HN.

tpyo 17y ago
The number of points you get is how many people also want more social engineering stories.
- olliesaunders 17y ago
  Taking into account the number of people who actually see my comment.

lsemel 17y ago

Anyone creative and determined enough to come up with a lie like that to get around barriers and break into a business, would have creative enough to come up with an alternate route that doesn't involve lying.