Author lost total credibility at that point. Rails is quite elegant, and yes, it is just another tool. Totally unsubstantiated bashing. Surprised to see this on the homepage.
5,248 karma · joined March 14, 2008
Thanks Emmett!
These numbers are far from meaningless. At the end of the day the numbers reflect what our servers see -- they track something different from Google Analytics but they are useful as a simple ballpark for how interesting or visited your blog post was. Also, they're realtime, which GA does not provide.
Here is a bit of how-the-sausage is made, but you wouldn't believe how much of a negative response we got from existing users once we went to a fully JavaScript analytics system. So by sheer volume of user input we made the decision to return to the original http request method of counting views.
We are continuing to look at ways to improve this system, possibly with Mixpanel.
We do honor DMCA takedown requests -- they're fairly easy to do and we are very mindful of taking down infringing content.
That blog is just my interesting snippets blog. It just so happened that this snippet was so interesting that the entirety made sense. I usually try to break it down into the smallest most interesting bit.
Imagine my surprise as to the reaction to this article. The blog is mainly for myself and my friends / twitter followers. There was no malice here, and I've altered the post to more prominently link to the source content.
The nature of the Internet is such: My blog drives some amount of attention. I don't monetize it and have no intention to. If Quora can make more money by the traffic I direct to it, all the better.
I did not post this to Hacker News. I had no intention of it receiving the attention that it did. All in all, I'm happy that some people got value out of the story. Whoever linked to my post should have linked to the original quora post. That's that.
http://bitpusher.com/careers.php
On the engineering/development side we're hiring for dev-ops / infrastructure engineers who love to scale.
Redis is also great as a backing store for the Rails queuing system Resque.
Google doesn't do a good job of nurturing since they tend to hire highly intelligent nontechnical people, train them all about Adwords, but then give them no real way to move up in the organization or challenge themselves.
It's about building communities that didn't exist before. That's significant. The modality is the difference. People didn't have a reliable and simple and cheap and instant way to connect. Now they do.
It's ~$50/month -- but I would definitely give up lattes and buy black coffee for it.
Posterous is hiring Backend and Rails engineers! We're a team of just 10 engineers -- 100% focused on being totally driven by great hackers who love building for consumer web.
It just so happens software creates wealth right now. I think that's a great thing.
We use DJ for jobs that MUST succeed (e.g. autopost) whereas we use Resque for more frequent but less essential jobs.
We use Delayed Job at Posterous for things like this. Resque works too.
Daily pageviews here is probably the least useful metric to evaluate our site, given that Posterous doesn't chase pageviews and send daily subscription emails (full text bodies) to users directly. Users can also reply to comments via email without ever going back to the site. The monthly numbers are much more in line and reflect the way our users use the site.
4) Not true, many counterexamples, most notably Wufoo.
Sounds like you're doing just fine on your own, though.
We're a YC-funded startup that's working on posting the world's information. We're just 7 engineers and looking to hire people who love the consumer web, believe in simplicity, and want to work on a website that can be used by billions of people.
On the infrastructure side, we're growing to one of the largest Rails sites in the world. There's a ton we do every day to keep a complex environment humming since Posterous does so much (media transcode of video, audio, photos, autoposting to millions of sites, and more, geo, importing, embed expansion, etc). Every day is a new challenge.
We're open to telecommute but haven't done it before.
We've opted to use Gigenet, and they're holding the line right now quite well.
Gigenet / Black Lotus / Prolexic comes in and says -- we have excess bandwidth, we'll take care of it. Then they proxy clean traffic to you. Unfortunately as we are learning, it's also very expensive.
TODAY, the attackers hopped IP's to our new IP immediately. So they appear to be learning. But then again, so are we.
Gigenet's anti-DDoS service has helped us a ton here and is now serving as our front door IP to block the synflood. They've been really responsive.