Author here. This is funny to wake up to. A version of this microsite was posted previously (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45434062) though it didn't have much of the content that exists here.
If anyone has any general questions (it seems like my little “startup lessons” page is as popular as the others) I’m be happy to answer them as long as they’re not too technical or related to my finances. However, the specifics of the technical side of my site are best found on TorrentFreak, and, in short: curl commands.
You wrote about "small, honest teams" - the older I get the more I get the hunch that small teams/companies are a great way to go for me. Basically, choose some field you enjoy working in, with people you like. Any thoughts on how to find something like this? I feel like its the kind of thing you have to start yourself, but I can't take much risk.
My experience in finding one (15 people at the company I’m currently at, and I’m one of 3.5 engineers) (.5 because founder still codes more than we’d like him to) was effectively reaching out to companies that I knew didn’t have job postings up, and was the size that I’d fit into. I learned quickly that not every vacancy is posted publicly.
I was just just interested in how your "say no" lesson came from the streaming site. I am sure they asked you for all sorts of channels, but from their perspective, I kind of understand it. I had really wondered what kind of crazy of stuff you were shooting down. I didn't expect anyone to go too crazy on expecting feature requests on a pirate site.
The typical ones were things like MMA/UFC/boxing, and those I'd say no to because their business model revolves around PPV; things like NCAA sports I said no to because I refused to profit off children (NIL didn't exist at the time) and that the implementation would have required me to "integrate" more than 5 different services just to attempt parity; I'd get the occasional EPL or UEFA requests, too.
I really didn't have any significant demand for these. One of my litmus tests, besides demand, was "okay, can this be as good as the other sports' implementations?" I was always concerned about feature parity—I could have provided radio feeds for MLB but not for NBA, and that would cause people to say "well they have radio feeds for x but not y" and create confusion as to what is what. Being consistent in this regard was important.
The run-of-the-mill IPTV requests came and went, and I just wasn't interested in that. Ultimately I made the site for me so I could watch sports, I just had some other people watching with me.
Thanks for asking. No, not yet, I'm working on introducing myself to their legal team with hopes that they might be able to take that as serious enough to believe I am me.
I purchased a cracked Adobe product DVD there (Disclaimer: I actually had a license at the time, but didn't have it installed on that particular laptop). I had trouble installing it, so I went back. I got my money back and help installing an alternative on my laptop. Best service!
PS: Also, Odessa is very beautiful, and I say that as someone who has lived in some beautiful places. -- https://youtu.be/G-BkuEOFGKI (Odessa Walking Tour - Ukraine's Most Beautiful City in 4K -- and this is still missing the many wonderful inner courtyards, and the entire long wonderful beach and park, which would be another equally long video)
> I actually had a license at the time, but didn't have it installed on that particular laptop
That reminds me of the time I had moved to another city. I still had my old apartment but had brought most of my things and was more or less officially moved and moved-in. Of the stuff that I did still have at the old place was a lot of food (non-perishables, oil, eggs) because it had been better to leave it there for the time being instead of moving it all (because food). When I was back in my old city to take care of some business there and showed up to my old apartment in the late morning one Sunday, I decided to make a big brunch to use up a lot of the consumables. I needed a measuring cup, though, and I no longer had one there. (It happens that the one I did have at my new apartment was also cracked (in the physical sense) from moving, so it actually wouldn't have been any help, because even though I was going to fix it, I hadn't gotten around to it.)
I went to the store and lifted one (same brand), since I knew I had once already paid for one once.
The illegal bushiness apparently has incentives to keep their customers, while the legal ones rest on their legal monopoly-laurels.
I'd imagine if we had a market where every service had access to every piece of content, so no exclusivity, this problem would go away. Then they'd compete on the quality of service rather than their selection of content they've held hostage. But as long as individual services can opt to not never share their content with anybody else, they can just hold their customers hostage, since they cannot get their good from anywhere else, so the only options are buy or don't buy.
Shouldn't music streaming services be an example for a market where each service offers pretty much the same products and they compete on price and product alone.
20 year long patents are a large factor for it, designed for a very different world where progress was extremely slow. It's borderline absurd to keep them going today, they can restrict the usage of a technology for more than the entire duration of its usefulness before it's superseded by something better, which is patented again, giving you a series of sequential monopolies instead of a competitive market. I'm glad that at least the Chinese dgaf about patents so there is still some competition in practice even if questionably legal.
I have often found that the illegal sites have much better UX for finding movies to watch. I can filter by review score, year of release, genre, country of origin, or half dozen other variables and in all combinations. And then they're presented in a big readable table rather than five options I have to scroll endlessly through one at a time.
Not true. My experience is the UX is okay to good, but often there's click-bait ad-serving friction and distraction.
You never know if your search is get you what you want, bring up a pop-up of HotLonelyBabes4U (when you're looking for kids cartoons), or take you to a scam site that wants you to download a "helper."
Aside from that, the experience is rarely terrible - like the trad video streaming sites that give you endless horizontal scrolling lists sorted very broadly by topic, kind of, with an entertaining randomness about the categories.
I've thought about this a lot. My takeaway is that it's incredibly hard to scale personality—which I have in spades—and even more difficult to give the freedoms for each customer support individual to operate equally as themselves.
You can't build a playbook for friendliness, and people have bad days which they certainly can drag into work. I am guilty of this, too. The proceeding week after my mom died I was rather terse, and have some uncomfortable memories of being short and not living up to my own standards. I went so far as to tell the person my situation and they told me that because I'm providing a service I have to do better. This user in particular was relatively new. If I recall correctly, he churned.
These kind of pirated IPTV services are very popular in middle eastern countries. You message some guy on whatsapp, pay him a couple bucks and receive a link to an APK file + login info. The app gives you access to basically any channel in every country. They have to do everything through word of mouth because its high risk, obviously, and even in developed countries you can get sent to jail pretty quickly for running something like this. I was expecting esoteric OPSEC lessons from this post, because if thats not the highest priority, its pretty stupid to even consider doing this.
in what we would consider "non-developed countries", the powers-that-be might not care about copyrights, but about getting their cut/bakshish. Particularly the "illegal" world doesn't take kind to outside "invaders" making money on someone else's turf.
it's the same thing in western Europe, piracy IPTV is a very popular thing since few years now, you get that through discord servers or really a simple query on aliexpress and you can buy a yearly account for 30$.
Good OPSEC is surprisingly simple and boring. Essentially, it just boils down to using tor and not accidentally exposing sensitive information, which is how Ross Ulbricht got caught. (okay, it is more than that but in essence it is true)
There are probably many people in prison right now because tor is awfully slow. If you don't have the patience for tor you probably also don't have the patience for prison.
The last quote in particular is rather timely: on Wednesday I "came out" to the entire company that I work for with a cheeky slideshow, which started as an "about me" during an all-hands ("look, we have a new employee!") and then was like, "oh yeah also..."
Being able to shape the narrative and tell my side of the story before someone sees some of the slanted reporting has continued to prove helpful. I even went so far as to say "I know people Google their colleagues sometimes and that's cool just be aware that the truth is usually in the middle of what the DOJ says and what actually happened."
Don't overestimate your success. I remember reading the original prison post and (a) seeing how thick the attempt to do that sort of "shaping" was, and (b) still coming away thinking, "Just... wow" (not in a good way).
Even if it seems like you're winning because all you're seeing is people falling over themselves to tell you how awesome your story is and how awesome you are, take a look around the room. If it's a room of 10 and the praise is really only coming from 6 people, don't neglect to account for the fact that there are 4 other people in the room who are also capable of thought, and they probably have thoughts (and the fact that they can see the other 6 people reacting the way they are can be a factor in whether to voice them).
> I used to think ethics were a set of rules to follow. Now I think they're more like tests—constant ones—that you run against your own motivations.
Is the big one. And interestingly, single guys doing stuff that is ethically defensible are at a larger risk of ending up in trouble with the law than big corporations doing far worse stuff. So the lesson at a personal level is a completely different one than at the corporate level, there it is 'what we can get away with' versus 'what we should do to be good citizens'.
If you want to take a broad view of the world, we may be entering into the post-age-of-enlightenment age where truth and ethics are malleable in service of the larger powers which build the things which comprise the world.
I found the whole site a very interesting (and fairly quick) read. I don't really have anything else to add, but I'm glad the owner manages to be honest and take good lessons from the whole thing.
It's interesting to me how from his account, everyone is fairly sympathetic to him regarding his charges (he mentions his employer showing up to his interview in a sports jersey in reference to his charges!), and how he mentions he knows several actual sports players used his site. It really goes to show the state of modern streaming.
Eh... I lean towards "no" on that point, unless you can do it well. I've received far too many reddit-tier fellow kids/omg so random/cringe emails, and I hate it. An example from Queal (a Soylent-style meal powder):
Winter is coming in Westeros and you must prepare by stocking up on food. Who knows if Drogon will fly by and burn your storage of snacks. Or the Night King will come to reign in the long winter. So prepare to receive a package from *REDACTED* with tracking ID: *REDACTED*
You can keep an eye on the progress of your package with this tracking link *REDACTED*.
People in the Seven Kingdoms still use carrier pigeons, so please note it could take up to a full workday for the link to become active.
Autumn will end soon enough, be prepared!
Please just fucking stop. I really like their product, but their emails make my blood boil. Don't be like Queal.
That is a perfectly valid point. Don't send fun emails if you can't write fun emails. Humor is an absolute minefield to trample through. You have to cater for your audience and if you don't have a set audience you're limited to the lowest common denominator.
This one was really important to me. Even the transactional emails were a bit fun to read. I kept them informal, as if I was talking to a friend of a friend. I certainly swore in them, too (at myself), when I was apologizing for things not working right.
Occasionally I'd get replies saying that the person looked forward to me automatically emailing them. That was a good litmus test.
I recently learned that, just like most other businesses, a lot of free pirate streaming sites are actually powered by a few big content aggregators[1][2][3]. They don't do much beyond providing a nice-looking frontend to an unauthenticated API that those aggregators expose.
One could probably spin one of these up in an afternoon (if making money was not the goal). The barriers of entry to this ecosystem are a lot lower than I ever imagined.
Those aggregators serve their own ads (what you get through the API is a link to a web player embed, not to the video directly). I suspect that bigger sites get some kind of kickback for bringing in traffic to those players.
I would call it a hero-site. That's what they are - they are heroes for unrestricting information.
Take ublock origin. Now, many say it is an ad-blocker; the ublock origin author says the extension is a generic content blocker. I agree with that but I go further: I call ublock origin a hero-blocker, or better, a heroic blocker. It blocks unwanted things in general. For similar reasons I think the term "piratebay" is old. It made more sense in the 2000s. Now I would call it herobay.
People may wonder about those terms, but I think it is important to use better terms than old terms. The old terms often were hijacked by the law system and mega-corporations with their own particular interests. It is time that the people re-define the law. Law should serve the people.
This is a monetized streaming site that spams reddit users. This is the hero in your mind? Is your philosophy that as long as the legal IP holders don't get paid it's great?
Readit News
If anyone has any general questions (it seems like my little “startup lessons” page is as popular as the others) I’m be happy to answer them as long as they’re not too technical or related to my finances. However, the specifics of the technical side of my site are best found on TorrentFreak, and, in short: curl commands.
I really didn't have any significant demand for these. One of my litmus tests, besides demand, was "okay, can this be as good as the other sports' implementations?" I was always concerned about feature parity—I could have provided radio feeds for MLB but not for NBA, and that would cause people to say "well they have radio feeds for x but not y" and create confusion as to what is what. Being consistent in this regard was important.
The run-of-the-mill IPTV requests came and went, and I just wasn't interested in that. Ultimately I made the site for me so I could watch sports, I just had some other people watching with me.
There must be safer ways to make good money?
I purchased a cracked Adobe product DVD there (Disclaimer: I actually had a license at the time, but didn't have it installed on that particular laptop). I had trouble installing it, so I went back. I got my money back and help installing an alternative on my laptop. Best service!
PS: Also, Odessa is very beautiful, and I say that as someone who has lived in some beautiful places. -- https://youtu.be/G-BkuEOFGKI (Odessa Walking Tour - Ukraine's Most Beautiful City in 4K -- and this is still missing the many wonderful inner courtyards, and the entire long wonderful beach and park, which would be another equally long video)
That reminds me of the time I had moved to another city. I still had my old apartment but had brought most of my things and was more or less officially moved and moved-in. Of the stuff that I did still have at the old place was a lot of food (non-perishables, oil, eggs) because it had been better to leave it there for the time being instead of moving it all (because food). When I was back in my old city to take care of some business there and showed up to my old apartment in the late morning one Sunday, I decided to make a big brunch to use up a lot of the consumables. I needed a measuring cup, though, and I no longer had one there. (It happens that the one I did have at my new apartment was also cracked (in the physical sense) from moving, so it actually wouldn't have been any help, because even though I was going to fix it, I hadn't gotten around to it.)
I went to the store and lifted one (same brand), since I knew I had once already paid for one once.
I'd imagine if we had a market where every service had access to every piece of content, so no exclusivity, this problem would go away. Then they'd compete on the quality of service rather than their selection of content they've held hostage. But as long as individual services can opt to not never share their content with anybody else, they can just hold their customers hostage, since they cannot get their good from anywhere else, so the only options are buy or don't buy.
What would stop much larger companies, with more resources, to just keep taking anything good from smaller companies/startup?
This idea would last in the short-term, and once money dried up, result in a nonexistent market.
Piracy sites are competing with other piracy sites and the only differing factor is support.
You never know if your search is get you what you want, bring up a pop-up of HotLonelyBabes4U (when you're looking for kids cartoons), or take you to a scam site that wants you to download a "helper."
Aside from that, the experience is rarely terrible - like the trad video streaming sites that give you endless horizontal scrolling lists sorted very broadly by topic, kind of, with an entertaining randomness about the categories.
You can't build a playbook for friendliness, and people have bad days which they certainly can drag into work. I am guilty of this, too. The proceeding week after my mom died I was rather terse, and have some uncomfortable memories of being short and not living up to my own standards. I went so far as to tell the person my situation and they told me that because I'm providing a service I have to do better. This user in particular was relatively new. If I recall correctly, he churned.
IMHO that's an asshole and not somebody you want as a customer anyway.
This would only happen in developed countries. Nowhere else in the world cares about foreign copyrights being infringed.
MS knows this fairly well, and why they don't go after the low hanging pirates.
I want one for my MIL who speaks a different language.
There are probably many people in prison right now because tor is awfully slow. If you don't have the patience for tor you probably also don't have the patience for prison.
Go to any local market place and you will see ads to buy these streaming sticks with everything setup for you, plug and play.
Dead Comment
> Contrast what society says rehabilitation is versus what it actually feels like. How much of it depends on luck, personality, or privilege?
> people want linear redemption stories, but real self-improvement is messy, nonlinear, and impossible to A/B test.
> There's a certain freedom in owning your story publicly. People can't weaponize what you've already made peace with.
The last quote in particular is rather timely: on Wednesday I "came out" to the entire company that I work for with a cheeky slideshow, which started as an "about me" during an all-hands ("look, we have a new employee!") and then was like, "oh yeah also..."
Being able to shape the narrative and tell my side of the story before someone sees some of the slanted reporting has continued to prove helpful. I even went so far as to say "I know people Google their colleagues sometimes and that's cool just be aware that the truth is usually in the middle of what the DOJ says and what actually happened."
Don't overestimate your success. I remember reading the original prison post and (a) seeing how thick the attempt to do that sort of "shaping" was, and (b) still coming away thinking, "Just... wow" (not in a good way).
Even if it seems like you're winning because all you're seeing is people falling over themselves to tell you how awesome your story is and how awesome you are, take a look around the room. If it's a room of 10 and the praise is really only coming from 6 people, don't neglect to account for the fact that there are 4 other people in the room who are also capable of thought, and they probably have thoughts (and the fact that they can see the other 6 people reacting the way they are can be a factor in whether to voice them).
8be5229b62d4a6631d6e4571845ffb0ca5e554dee569e04dbc299f2d72d42211
Is the big one. And interestingly, single guys doing stuff that is ethically defensible are at a larger risk of ending up in trouble with the law than big corporations doing far worse stuff. So the lesson at a personal level is a completely different one than at the corporate level, there it is 'what we can get away with' versus 'what we should do to be good citizens'.
It's interesting to me how from his account, everyone is fairly sympathetic to him regarding his charges (he mentions his employer showing up to his interview in a sports jersey in reference to his charges!), and how he mentions he knows several actual sports players used his site. It really goes to show the state of modern streaming.
Yes, do that. Also a tangent: remind me why you're sending me an email if you haven't sent one in many months.
Sometimes I see an interesting project that hasn't launched. They just have an "sign up for news updates".
Then 12 months later I get a standard news email and I have no clue what it is and ignore it.
At least start your email with something like "Hey, 12 months ago you signed up for the mega cool electron thunder splitter. We've launched!"
Eh... I lean towards "no" on that point, unless you can do it well. I've received far too many reddit-tier fellow kids/omg so random/cringe emails, and I hate it. An example from Queal (a Soylent-style meal powder):
Please just fucking stop. I really like their product, but their emails make my blood boil. Don't be like Queal.The closest to that was the quarterly newsletter: I'd highlight the awful and frustrating bugs that nobody saw, and some of the funny emails I got.
Occasionally I'd get replies saying that the person looked forward to me automatically emailing them. That was a good litmus test.
One could probably spin one of these up in an afternoon (if making money was not the goal). The barriers of entry to this ecosystem are a lot lower than I ever imagined.
Those aggregators serve their own ads (what you get through the API is a link to a web player embed, not to the video directly). I suspect that bigger sites get some kind of kickback for bringing in traffic to those players.
[1] https://torrentfreak.com/mpa-highlights-rapidly-expanding-hy... [2] http://vidsrcme.ru/ [3] https://streamed.pk/docs
I would call it a hero-site. That's what they are - they are heroes for unrestricting information.
Take ublock origin. Now, many say it is an ad-blocker; the ublock origin author says the extension is a generic content blocker. I agree with that but I go further: I call ublock origin a hero-blocker, or better, a heroic blocker. It blocks unwanted things in general. For similar reasons I think the term "piratebay" is old. It made more sense in the 2000s. Now I would call it herobay.
People may wonder about those terms, but I think it is important to use better terms than old terms. The old terms often were hijacked by the law system and mega-corporations with their own particular interests. It is time that the people re-define the law. Law should serve the people.
This is a monetized streaming site that spams reddit users. This is the hero in your mind? Is your philosophy that as long as the legal IP holders don't get paid it's great?