As a kid I helped a friend’s dad start a porn site (on the technical end) and I’ll tell you two things about it.

1. As someone with a decent reputation I get asked to a lot of meetings with people to discuss the "big ideas" of non-programmer types. In those meetings big numbers are always thrown around as to how much money can be made. The one porn project I’ve ever done is THE ONLY time I actually ended up with the big number that had been thrown around ($200,000 for 6 months work in case you were wondering)

2. Working on that site was one of the most fun projects I’ve ever had (and not because of the pornography). From a technical perspective porn pushes the boundaries more than any other area (except maybe pure research). It involves everything from telecommuting (allowing performers to do their jobs from home) to content delivery networks (my first experience with delivering a high number of quality video feeds) to social interaction (porn is more about an emotional reaction than anything else which requires studying how to create an immersive experience). It really does push all your skills.

I mean, in honesty, I wouldn’t do it now that I have some money behind me. But I don’t think there was anything wrong with it and I don’t feel bad about the experience.

As far as hiding your identity, it’s called a shell corporation and it’s not that hard. That said, you aren’t going to be able to completely hide your identity. Some people are going to have to know (you deal with a lot of vendors in that business). If you are going to the trouble of creating a new HN account it probably isn’t for you.

eBaum has a reputation for plagiarism and copyright infringement-- what goes around comes around I guess.

What you're feeling is the reason even people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs needed cofounders. I'd recommend finding one. It will also greatly improve your chances of succeeding.

Does this have to get posted every week?

Funny story: when I first decided that I wanted to work for an "internet company" in 1996, nearly all of my interviews were with porn companies. I was a young kid with very little formal experience, so it follows that folks closer to the fringe would be more willing to take a chance hiring me.

One of my most memorable interviews was when a company took me through the cubicle farm in a SOMA warehouse where the "live on webcam" girls and guys were performing. (To tell the truth, the setup was a bit depressing.)

I ended up taking a job at an ISP, not because I had any moral objection to working on porn, but because it seemed like I'd be working on a lot more interesting stuff and had a lot more potential for future advancement.

On my first day, my boss gives me a project to work on: get the streaming porn working for his side business.

Unless you have a green card, if you say that at the border (that you are coming to the US to look for work), you'll be deemed inadmissible.

It will also be illegal for you to be self-employed, work without authorization, "trade work for board", or start a startup, once you are here.

Basically, you'll probably need to find a company that can sponsor H1B (but I'm not sure if that can happen for people who didn't finish college)

I'd add a slight caveat to that. This is why it's a good idea to either have a cofounder or have a guru like pg tell you that you won't succeed with a cofounder.

For me, the desire to prove pg wrong supplied all the motivation which is normally supplied by a cofounder. :-)

pg, please re-visit the decision to have the post's text in gray-on-gray. It's awful for long initial posts like this one. No doubt I'm not the only one that selects the text to get it the slightly better yellow-on-black. It makes me less likely to bother reading the text through no fault of the writer.

I picked this niche because: 1) I am a Nigerian. 2) Most potential competitors won't touch Nigeria. 3) I run a Nigerian forum that gets a lot of unsolicited ads.

The business model is: Adsense when the website becomes popular. It's boring, but really makes sense here.

The problem he's describing is certainly real. There are characteristic traps young founders fall into when thinking of startup ideas.

I don't think he's gotten to the root of the problem, though. The root of the problem is not certain categories of ideas. It's a half-baked way of looking at the world.

As long as you avoid that, there are good ideas to be had in several of the categories he describes. For example, I'm sure there will be huge new businesses that depend mainly on advertising. Is Google going to be the last, ever? And if “Flickr + ___” is a recipe for failure, it wasn't always. YouTube's goal was to be the Flickr of video, and that worked out well for them.

So Eric Bauman makes a site that profits from stealing other people's content. A song is written insulting him. An entire website blames their mayhem on him in revenge. He is caught altering watermarks and removing citations. He gets enough money to buy an apartment building and sponsor a boxer. His father writes insulting emails. Then suddenly another shady company buys him out and ruins his company, and it's proof that capitalism is bad? On the contrary. This is excellent evidence that the system regulates itself.

Except, I'd think, for the bit where Eric Bauman makes even more money in the sale and faces no charges for a decade of illegal business that funneled capital away from the creators who deserved it.

Dear lord, I think I just gave myself enough cognitive dissonance to stop using Bittorrent for hours.

But my point is that Bauman hasn't really repaid his debt to society. He's been shamed, and a lot of us are glad for that, but only by yet another corporate raider who will likely not redeem Ebaum's World the way College Humor redeemed itself after the IAC purchase.