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How I Made Porn Video Streaming More Efficient with Python and C

toptal.com

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Re: How I Made Porn Video Streaming More Efficient with Python and C

#111

Post by latchkey »

iso8859-1 wrote: post #108
latchkey wrote: post #104

As someone who built the infrastructure for serving porn for Kink.com, I'd say that this was a total waste of time. Spend the money on a third party CDN and serve from there.

With these amounts of bandwidth, does that still make sense? Sounds like this was a one-man job that worked.

I'm not really sure what you mean, but absolutely using a CDN product is the way to go when you want to sell your content on a global scale. Otherwise, you are going to deal with having to build / maintain your own and the cost of doing that is far higher than just letting other experts deal with the issues that surround it.

Re: How I Made Porn Video Streaming More Efficient with Python and C

#112

Post by latchkey »

swalsh wrote: post #107
latchkey wrote: post #104

As someone who built the infrastructure for serving porn for Kink.com, I'd say that this was a total waste of time. Spend the money on a third party CDN and serve from there.

I've always been curious, how is working for a porn company affected your social life? does it at all?

I worked behind the camera, not in front of it. Sorry, I'm not interested in satisfying your curiosities.

Re: How I Made Porn Video Streaming More Efficient with Python and C

#113

Post by analog »

elbear wrote: post #75
jeremyx wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. This is the only article on the blog? I was actually intrigued by the site and was wondering if anyone on HN has used this service as a dev or a client....

I was in talks with them as a dev. Their requirements were a bit weird, so that's why I didn't sign a contract in the end. I think there was one requirements which asked that the developer answer the employer's message within a pretty short time frame, not matter the timezone difference.

Wow, you're not wrong.

"For example, if the in-house engineers start their workday at 11am PST, our Eastern European toptal engineers will start working at 7pm EET and work through the night."

"During work hours, they are expected to respond to any client communication within 10 minutes; during non-work hours, they are expected to respond within 3 hours."

http://www.toptal.com/developer/requirements

Re: How I Made Porn Video Streaming More Efficient with Python and C

#114

Post by analog »

toptal wrote: post #98
elbear wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in talks with them as a dev. Their requirements were a bit weird, so that's why I didn't sign a contract in the end. I think there was one requirements which asked that the developer answer the employer's message within a pretty short time frame, not matter the timezone difference.

Hey Elbear, that's not in our contracts, at all. We do make sure our developers communicate within 10 hours regardless of the timezone. We feel that is more than reasonable and it's worked extremely well for Toptal. However, that's not in our contract, it's actually something we simply stay on top of as a company. Our requirements are not "weird" at all, they enforce high integrity, and in most places in the world, t…

You're lying. Your website says within 10 minutes during work hours and within 3 hours outside work hours.

http://www.toptal.com/developer/requirements

Re: How I Made Porn Video Streaming More Efficient with Python and C

#115

Post by elbear »

toptal wrote: post #98
elbear wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in talks with them as a dev. Their requirements were a bit weird, so that's why I didn't sign a contract in the end. I think there was one requirements which asked that the developer answer the employer's message within a pretty short time frame, not matter the timezone difference.

Hey Elbear, that's not in our contracts, at all. We do make sure our developers communicate within 10 hours regardless of the timezone. We feel that is more than reasonable and it's worked extremely well for Toptal. However, that's not in our contract, it's actually something we simply stay on top of as a company. Our requirements are not "weird" at all, they enforce high integrity, and in most places in the world, t…

You're right that it wasn't in the contracts. It was in an internal rulebook for developers. Too bad I didn't keep it, so I could quote from it exactly.

Anyway, my final experience with TopTal was that I asked some questions about the contract that I was about to sign and never heard back.

Re: How I Made Porn Video Streaming More Efficient with Python and C

#117

Post by kibibu »

latchkey wrote: post #110
kibibu wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article suggests that this is for live streaming shows. Would a CDN based approach work in this use case?

Take a look at KinkLive.com. We were the first porn company to do live streaming in HD using a CDN (Bitgravity), all paid for, by the minute, with a micro currency system (kinks) that we built.

Very interesting! Thanks for your reply. Have you ever posted or discussed your infrastructure before?

Re: How I Made Porn Video Streaming More Efficient with Python and C

#118

Post by latchkey »

kibibu wrote: post #117
latchkey wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take a look at KinkLive.com. We were the first porn company to do live streaming in HD using a CDN (Bitgravity), all paid for, by the minute, with a micro currency system (kinks) that we built.

Very interesting! Thanks for your reply. Have you ever posted or discussed your infrastructure before?

I've posted about small parts of it in various places, but not the whole experience. I no longer work there (since April 2010), so while I know they still use quite a bit of the serving infrastructure that I built, my knowledge is now quite a bit out of date.

One fun bit that I built is called the cockblocker (as you can imagine, we used all sorts of fun names for internal projects). People who repeatedly attempt to hack the system (usually through various forms of abuse like failed login attempts) would automatically get their IP address routed to /dev/null.

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