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Back in the day I did work at a group of one of the largest adult websites. Tech was PhP, MySQL, memcache and similar vanilla stuff running on many Linux serve

Back in the day I did work at a group of one of the largest adult websites. Tech was PhP, MySQL, memcache and similar vanilla stuff running on many Linux servers - pretty simple stuff. The trick was performance. Simple stupid mistakes that would not be detected in sites that have low traffic become enormous problems in a high traffic server. Pretty much nothing was dynamic and we wrote scripts to create static pages for almost everything except search and authentication. Things like logging just could not be done. It was easier to load a bunch of data in memory on a request and process it instead of running a slightly slower SQL query, since a ton of those could kill the database. And yes, there were no placeholder images or videos. After some time you just get used to it and code. But I have to say you get pretty desensitized to it and when I resigned from that job my life in that area improved quite a lot. Highlights were p*rn stars and random celebs visiting the office - but after some time that got kind of meh. The job itself was just a programming gig and very professional except for the images on the screen which we learned to ignore. On the whole, the guys who ran the thing were a pretty solid and great bunch of people and it was one of the best dev experiences in my long career.

suddenstutter 6y ago
What celebs would visit? There are unwritten rules and pr guidelines for celebs not to mix with the porn industry, strange that they would randomly show up at one of the biggest porn sites offices.
wdb 6y ago
Yes, I think the desensizing is the biggest problem and you get less interested about it all.
- mistrial9 6y ago
  long ago (before the Internet) I spoke with a woman who 'performed' in such videos. She said she was a user of pain killers (addict), and second she urged me sincerely not to watch the products; sad situation in the flesh.
twic 6y ago
I once worked on a site for a big underwear seller. It's not porn, but 90% of the media is extreme closeups of perfect ladies' bottoms and so on. The lead dev rapidly decided that the test product would be a very boring pair of men's boxer shorts. Which was fine until he revealed that he'd chosen them because that's what he always wore.
- dvtrn 6y ago
  This story could have ended so many different ways in the thread context here that I chuckled a bit of relief at the end. But now I gotta ask: you say it was fine until the reveal. Were they pictures of him in the boxers or just a brand he liked-or what did the reveal change for the team?
  - twic 6y ago
    They weren't pictures of him, but every time i looked at the test site, for a fraction of a second, i thought about my colleague's crotch.
    - ringshall 6y ago
      That’s a quote worthy of bash.org
- flywheel 6y ago
  I used to work at a porn company in early/mid 2000s, when IE was the dominant browser - the office breathed a sigh of relief when I coded a pixelation filter for IE using directshow effects or something, I forget it's been so long since I did anything for IE - but IE was fairly advanced for the time in what you could do with some CSS. The pixelation filter was for employee use only, of course. No longer did we have to actually watch clowns having sex to debug a problem with a specific movie depicting clown sex. Or any other porno, for that matter. It got kind of exhausting/distracting having to code when the data was porn.
commandlinefan 6y ago
> after some time that got kind of meh. When I was younger, I used to while away time by browsing exotic vacation destinations (that I couldn't nearly afford) on travel websites. One day, I got an offer to work at one of them. After about a month there, the last damned thing in the world I wanted to spend my free time doing was looking at travel website destinations. Made me re-evaluate what sort of jobs I'd want to do day in and day out.
- yetihehe 6y ago
  I had to make very tricky ad which required synchronization of flash "videos" in multiple browser windows, before js frameworks really started. To this day I hate "Hit the road jack" song.
- bryanlarsen 6y ago
  Work ruins everything. I helped a friend set up a dance studio and it ruined dancing for me for a little bit. Some career advisors say "If your hobby is your job you'll never work a day in your life". Bad advice IMO. Now if you could figure out how to do it without either customers or bosses...
  - citizenkeen 6y ago
    Best advice I ever got: Do what you like, not what you love. If you do what you love, what you love becomes work. Is you do what you like, then you like your work, go home, and have energy for the things you love.
    - rednua 6y ago
      This is great, thanks for sharing.
    - john4534243 6y ago
      I am a non native English speaker. Whats the difference b/w like and love ? Both seem synonymous to me. If i love a person or thing i definitely like them.
nitwit005 6y ago
> Things like logging just could not be done. Had that problem at an ad tech company before. We just did sampling so that 1 in 10 or 1 in 20 requests would get logging. It definitely made me wonder how many web servers out there have their performance determined by the rate at which logs can be written to disk.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  >It definitely made me wonder how many web servers out there have their performance determined by the rate at which logs can be written to disk. As someone in the HFT space I suspect a lot of traders are performance bound by this. Wouldn't surprise me at all if a couple darkpools were this way.
  - dmurray 6y ago
    As someone formerly in that space I don't think so, assuming by "traders" you mean the prop firms who actually need the speed advantage. You can always arrange for the logging to happen outside the critical path, which is a tiny minority of the code you run. And you will do that if its necessary to gain a fraction of a microsecond on a competitive trade. Even if it's just being able to run a build with logging off for special cases. For a looser definition of "traders" that includes dark pool operators and exchanges, then sure. Writing logs was definitely the bottleneck at one major European exchange for some years. They may not be able to turn off logging for regulatory reasons, but they also don't care so much about the microseconds. In this case they could definitely have improved performance with horizontal scaling (have each computer handle fewer stock symbols) but didn't consider that economically justified.
    - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
      By traders I mean "anyone who doesn't sit on the market side of my network card", so a wide variety of firms. My comment about darkpools was tangential but there's a couple of them who aren't exactly known for running a tight ship. >You can always arrange for the logging to happen outside the critical path, which is a tiny minority of the code you run. And you will do that if its necessary to gain a fraction of a microsecond on a competitive trade. Even if it's just being able to run a build with logging off for special cases. Yes you can do that. Yes you'd think that anyone for whom it would be beneficial would do that... but you'd be surprised how often people run with logs cranked to 11 in prod.
at-fates-hands 6y ago
I remember reading a developer's horror story about working for an aspiring porn actress. He ran her site, monetized it and worked with her to get her videos out to larger sites and generate traffic for those so she could "move up in the industry". The whole process sounded really seedy, and the parenting comments made by him the other guy who worked there were pretty distressing. Her kids (two boys, one girl all under 10) walking around while they were editing her porn scenes, all the marketing materials out in plain view of the kids as well. He the nail in the coffin was when she stopped paying him and offered him sex instead for payment. He said it was his first and last job in the industry. He said it also created a problem on what he should put on his resume for the time he worked for her. The suggestions on the site were pretty funny, but it was clear his experience was not like yours.
- techCEO4356 6y ago
  Well did he get to smash it? You are leaving out important details.
- hondo77 6y ago
  Yeah, what I learned during my brief time in the porn biz was that, while being a sleazy jerk isn't a requirement to work in porn, it seems to help.
outworlder 6y ago
> Things like logging just could not be done Good. There are legitimate reasons to log requests. But far too often, developers that are used to 'printf debugging' will abuse the system. In many cases, what they were actually looking for was either some form of APM, distributed tracing, or much more commonly, would be better done by collecting metrics - which tend to be much more lightweight. At work I've been fighting a battle to turn multiple dozens of terabytes of logs a day into something manageable, for years now. Sometimes I wonder if I could use the logging system itself in lieu of the application, as practically all data is dumped there! It's difficult battle to convince multiple groups to just use a counter instead of spitting out the same line of text every time the same kind of event happens. Anyway, back to the point: no matter how busy the system is, you can surely engineer a mechanism to collect error logs, even if you have to sample them. But while things are running smoothly, track metrics. And, if you have a reason to suspect things are wrong, selectively turn on some logging. I wish more people were aware of the costs of logging. Even more so nowadays, with the microservices craze.
- deeblering4 6y ago
  There are some tools out there that run on-box to transform log events into metrics. Not the ideal, but scales much better than dealing with a firehose of useless logs in a central log system.
- blitmap 6y ago
  Counters are something I've become more familiar when logging from GPU drivers.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- danudey 6y ago
  At my previous company, one of the devs added some debug output, but they added it to a hot loop and forgot to if it out in production. As a result, all of our frontend servers slowed to a crawl because the logging calls were thrashing our disk I/O - and keep in mind, this is an application which never hits the disk and lives entirely in memory, mostly just assembling data structures from other APIs and combining them into a response for the client. To see a server like that brought to its knees by disk I/O from three lines of debug logging was... impressive, to say the least.
dansnerd 6y ago
Oh man, is that the same Eric Smith that I think it is? Was this company located in a building on the corner with a flag flying? And did you maybe sit at a corner desk on the 3rd floor?! If so, how are you doing, its DanS :)
- jdhawk 6y ago
  ha, missed connections on HN.
- eric4smith 6y ago
  Dan!!!!!
- Papirola 6y ago
  I love this forum.
asddubs 6y ago
I suppose it didn't have anything in the way of user generated content, like comments?
dkdk8283 6y ago
Mojo?
MuffinFlavored 6y ago
I guess my biggest question is not really a technical one. Why do porn sites get so much traffic? Why do people enjoy consuming pornography as much as they do, at the volume/frequency that they do?
- notyourwork 6y ago
  Why do people like alcohol or any other vice that some group may frown upon? I don’t think you’ll find a satisfying answer here. Different people like different things.
- jetbooster 6y ago
  I suppose because sexual gratification is one of our species basest instincts, and due to the way our brain evolved to be social creatures, we have mirror neurons[1] which fire when we observe actions as well as when we perform them. For this reason, viewing sex can emulate (to an extent) our primal desire to mate. Everyone has different levels of libedo however, so it's likely that your lack of understanding is due to your own lower libedo not generating the same level of sexual desire. Or, you are the kind of person where the emotional connection involved in sexual relations is far more important, which obviously means watching people you have no connection to would not arouse you as much. Alternatively, it could be that you may have decent access to actual sex, which is obviously more gratifying as a general rule. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron
  - abiogenesis 6y ago
    This is the first time I've seen libido written as libedo. Could it be a typo?
  - sixQuarks 6y ago
    Very good answer I must say
- k__ 6y ago
  Keeping your prolactine levels high keeps your mind clear.
etxm 6y ago
> Pretty much nothing was dynamic and we wrote scripts to create static pages for almost everything except search and authentication. I believe you can put JAMStack on your resume!
doublerabbit 6y ago
Close experience. Apart from I was working for a shady porno dating website and where I was the sole sysadmin on-call 24/7. The "Oh wow, I get to look at genitalia at work" novelty wears off pretty quick. Especially to when you have to wake up at 4am to diagnose why some guy can't get off. The company scammed and logged and sold the data as much as possible. The models were barely legal and a few looked like they were held at gun point. Lasted eight months up until I started getting nightmares and then the company went bankrupt. After receiving the first ever lawsuit in the UK for fake dating.
- wolco 6y ago
  Reminds me of the Ashley Madison scam. Did anyone have a chance to work at the company that created Ashley Madison? I always wondered what really happened there.
morrbo 6y ago
< Pretty much nothing was dynamic and we wrote scripts to create static pages for almost everything except search and authentication. > Would you mind elaborating on this please? I'm just trying to work out if you mean things like a custom user's menu, etc. you'd somehow pre-generate and then cache the HTML, or do you mean things like certain categories, etc. were just HTML? Maybe i'm overthinking this, but would you generate a dynamic page once (ie. first time user logs into the site -> generate their "my account" page) and then cache it in memory, or as HTML on the disk, or set the cache control header and leave it to them locally? thanks!
antb123 6y ago
Basically the same setup as a large newspaper I consulted for but not php.

suddenstutter 6y ago

What celebs would visit? There are unwritten rules and pr guidelines for celebs not to mix with the porn industry, strange that they would randomly show up at one of the biggest porn sites offices.

wdb 6y ago

Yes, I think the desensizing is the biggest problem and you get less interested about it all.

mistrial9 6y ago
long ago (before the Internet) I spoke with a woman who 'performed' in such videos. She said she was a user of pain killers (addict), and second she urged me sincerely not to watch the products; sad situation in the flesh.

twic 6y ago

I once worked on a site for a big underwear seller. It's not porn, but 90% of the media is extreme closeups of perfect ladies' bottoms and so on. The lead dev rapidly decided that the test product would be a very boring pair of men's boxer shorts. Which was fine until he revealed that he'd chosen them because that's what he always wore.

dvtrn 6y ago
This story could have ended so many different ways in the thread context here that I chuckled a bit of relief at the end. But now I gotta ask: you say it was fine until the reveal. Were they pictures of him in the boxers or just a brand he liked-or what did the reveal change for the team?
- twic 6y ago
  They weren't pictures of him, but every time i looked at the test site, for a fraction of a second, i thought about my colleague's crotch.
  - ringshall 6y ago
    That’s a quote worthy of bash.org
flywheel 6y ago
I used to work at a porn company in early/mid 2000s, when IE was the dominant browser - the office breathed a sigh of relief when I coded a pixelation filter for IE using directshow effects or something, I forget it's been so long since I did anything for IE - but IE was fairly advanced for the time in what you could do with some CSS. The pixelation filter was for employee use only, of course. No longer did we have to actually watch clowns having sex to debug a problem with a specific movie depicting clown sex. Or any other porno, for that matter. It got kind of exhausting/distracting having to code when the data was porn.

commandlinefan 6y ago

> after some time that got kind of meh. When I was younger, I used to while away time by browsing exotic vacation destinations (that I couldn't nearly afford) on travel websites. One day, I got an offer to work at one of them. After about a month there, the last damned thing in the world I wanted to spend my free time doing was looking at travel website destinations. Made me re-evaluate what sort of jobs I'd want to do day in and day out.

yetihehe 6y ago
I had to make very tricky ad which required synchronization of flash "videos" in multiple browser windows, before js frameworks really started. To this day I hate "Hit the road jack" song.
bryanlarsen 6y ago
Work ruins everything. I helped a friend set up a dance studio and it ruined dancing for me for a little bit. Some career advisors say "If your hobby is your job you'll never work a day in your life". Bad advice IMO. Now if you could figure out how to do it without either customers or bosses...
- citizenkeen 6y ago
  Best advice I ever got: Do what you like, not what you love. If you do what you love, what you love becomes work. Is you do what you like, then you like your work, go home, and have energy for the things you love.
  - rednua 6y ago
    This is great, thanks for sharing.
  - john4534243 6y ago
    I am a non native English speaker. Whats the difference b/w like and love ? Both seem synonymous to me. If i love a person or thing i definitely like them.

nitwit005 6y ago

> Things like logging just could not be done. Had that problem at an ad tech company before. We just did sampling so that 1 in 10 or 1 in 20 requests would get logging. It definitely made me wonder how many web servers out there have their performance determined by the rate at which logs can be written to disk.

throwaway0a5e 6y ago
>It definitely made me wonder how many web servers out there have their performance determined by the rate at which logs can be written to disk. As someone in the HFT space I suspect a lot of traders are performance bound by this. Wouldn't surprise me at all if a couple darkpools were this way.
- dmurray 6y ago
  As someone formerly in that space I don't think so, assuming by "traders" you mean the prop firms who actually need the speed advantage. You can always arrange for the logging to happen outside the critical path, which is a tiny minority of the code you run. And you will do that if its necessary to gain a fraction of a microsecond on a competitive trade. Even if it's just being able to run a build with logging off for special cases. For a looser definition of "traders" that includes dark pool operators and exchanges, then sure. Writing logs was definitely the bottleneck at one major European exchange for some years. They may not be able to turn off logging for regulatory reasons, but they also don't care so much about the microseconds. In this case they could definitely have improved performance with horizontal scaling (have each computer handle fewer stock symbols) but didn't consider that economically justified.
  - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    By traders I mean "anyone who doesn't sit on the market side of my network card", so a wide variety of firms. My comment about darkpools was tangential but there's a couple of them who aren't exactly known for running a tight ship. >You can always arrange for the logging to happen outside the critical path, which is a tiny minority of the code you run. And you will do that if its necessary to gain a fraction of a microsecond on a competitive trade. Even if it's just being able to run a build with logging off for special cases. Yes you can do that. Yes you'd think that anyone for whom it would be beneficial would do that... but you'd be surprised how often people run with logs cranked to 11 in prod.

at-fates-hands 6y ago

I remember reading a developer's horror story about working for an aspiring porn actress. He ran her site, monetized it and worked with her to get her videos out to larger sites and generate traffic for those so she could "move up in the industry". The whole process sounded really seedy, and the parenting comments made by him the other guy who worked there were pretty distressing. Her kids (two boys, one girl all under 10) walking around while they were editing her porn scenes, all the marketing materials out in plain view of the kids as well. He the nail in the coffin was when she stopped paying him and offered him sex instead for payment. He said it was his first and last job in the industry. He said it also created a problem on what he should put on his resume for the time he worked for her. The suggestions on the site were pretty funny, but it was clear his experience was not like yours.

techCEO4356 6y ago
Well did he get to smash it? You are leaving out important details.
hondo77 6y ago
Yeah, what I learned during my brief time in the porn biz was that, while being a sleazy jerk isn't a requirement to work in porn, it seems to help.

outworlder 6y ago

> Things like logging just could not be done Good. There are legitimate reasons to log requests. But far too often, developers that are used to 'printf debugging' will abuse the system. In many cases, what they were actually looking for was either some form of APM, distributed tracing, or much more commonly, would be better done by collecting metrics - which tend to be much more lightweight. At work I've been fighting a battle to turn multiple dozens of terabytes of logs a day into something manageable, for years now. Sometimes I wonder if I could use the logging system itself in lieu of the application, as practically all data is dumped there! It's difficult battle to convince multiple groups to just use a counter instead of spitting out the same line of text every time the same kind of event happens. Anyway, back to the point: no matter how busy the system is, you can surely engineer a mechanism to collect error logs, even if you have to sample them. But while things are running smoothly, track metrics. And, if you have a reason to suspect things are wrong, selectively turn on some logging. I wish more people were aware of the costs of logging. Even more so nowadays, with the microservices craze.

deeblering4 6y ago
There are some tools out there that run on-box to transform log events into metrics. Not the ideal, but scales much better than dealing with a firehose of useless logs in a central log system.
blitmap 6y ago
Counters are something I've become more familiar when logging from GPU drivers.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
danudey 6y ago
At my previous company, one of the devs added some debug output, but they added it to a hot loop and forgot to if it out in production. As a result, all of our frontend servers slowed to a crawl because the logging calls were thrashing our disk I/O - and keep in mind, this is an application which never hits the disk and lives entirely in memory, mostly just assembling data structures from other APIs and combining them into a response for the client. To see a server like that brought to its knees by disk I/O from three lines of debug logging was... impressive, to say the least.

dansnerd 6y ago

Oh man, is that the same Eric Smith that I think it is? Was this company located in a building on the corner with a flag flying? And did you maybe sit at a corner desk on the 3rd floor?! If so, how are you doing, its DanS :)

jdhawk 6y ago
ha, missed connections on HN.
eric4smith 6y ago
Dan!!!!!
Papirola 6y ago
I love this forum.

asddubs 6y ago

I suppose it didn't have anything in the way of user generated content, like comments?

dkdk8283 6y ago

Mojo?

MuffinFlavored 6y ago

I guess my biggest question is not really a technical one. Why do porn sites get so much traffic? Why do people enjoy consuming pornography as much as they do, at the volume/frequency that they do?

notyourwork 6y ago
Why do people like alcohol or any other vice that some group may frown upon? I don’t think you’ll find a satisfying answer here. Different people like different things.
jetbooster 6y ago
I suppose because sexual gratification is one of our species basest instincts, and due to the way our brain evolved to be social creatures, we have mirror neurons[1] which fire when we observe actions as well as when we perform them. For this reason, viewing sex can emulate (to an extent) our primal desire to mate. Everyone has different levels of libedo however, so it's likely that your lack of understanding is due to your own lower libedo not generating the same level of sexual desire. Or, you are the kind of person where the emotional connection involved in sexual relations is far more important, which obviously means watching people you have no connection to would not arouse you as much. Alternatively, it could be that you may have decent access to actual sex, which is obviously more gratifying as a general rule. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron
- abiogenesis 6y ago
  This is the first time I've seen libido written as libedo. Could it be a typo?
- sixQuarks 6y ago
  Very good answer I must say
k__ 6y ago
Keeping your prolactine levels high keeps your mind clear.

etxm 6y ago

> Pretty much nothing was dynamic and we wrote scripts to create static pages for almost everything except search and authentication. I believe you can put JAMStack on your resume!

doublerabbit 6y ago

Close experience. Apart from I was working for a shady porno dating website and where I was the sole sysadmin on-call 24/7. The "Oh wow, I get to look at genitalia at work" novelty wears off pretty quick. Especially to when you have to wake up at 4am to diagnose why some guy can't get off. The company scammed and logged and sold the data as much as possible. The models were barely legal and a few looked like they were held at gun point. Lasted eight months up until I started getting nightmares and then the company went bankrupt. After receiving the first ever lawsuit in the UK for fake dating.

wolco 6y ago
Reminds me of the Ashley Madison scam. Did anyone have a chance to work at the company that created Ashley Madison? I always wondered what really happened there.

morrbo 6y ago

< Pretty much nothing was dynamic and we wrote scripts to create static pages for almost everything except search and authentication. > Would you mind elaborating on this please? I'm just trying to work out if you mean things like a custom user's menu, etc. you'd somehow pre-generate and then cache the HTML, or do you mean things like certain categories, etc. were just HTML? Maybe i'm overthinking this, but would you generate a dynamic page once (ie. first time user logs into the site -> generate their "my account" page) and then cache it in memory, or as HTML on the disk, or set the cache control header and leave it to them locally? thanks!

antb123 6y ago

Basically the same setup as a large newspaper I consulted for but not php.