danielha

Congrats Instabug!

Let me borrow your valuation calculator for a sec...

Oh it says here that my dream to solve world hunger is worth north of a gazillion dollars.

Why is so hard to believe that some people would be excited to continue what they love doing, but potentially supercharged at Facebook? Clearly it's not for you, but it doesn't seem far-fetched. And like everything else in life, I'm sure there were multiple dimensions to this -- including a good dollar offer.

Oh right, they should be tacky and talk about money instead.

Disqus (http://www.disqus.com) is hiring a Site Reliability Engineer (full time) - San Francisco (SOMA), CA or New York, NY

APPLY HERE: http://grnh.se/xd5jkt

We're looking for an experienced Site Reliability Engineer to play an integral role on our DevOps team at Disqus. The ideal person is obsessed with uptime and site speed and has years of experience with server hardware and Linux systems. At the same time, you are passionate about working with development engineers to get more done faster with less trouble. You'll be working at our office in San Francisco. Disqus reaches over 1 billion unique visitors a month. You'll be working on large scale challenges immediately as well as make a huge, lasting impact on all technical decisions.

What You'll Do

- Work with our server-side infrastructure, including configuring Linux systems (e.g. packaging) and dealing with hardware - Participate in 24/7 on-call rotation (be available by phone or email in case something goes wrong) Troubleshoot issues with hardware, software, applications and network - Work with engineers on product decisions and troubleshooting, but primarily work independently - Help improve the development organization’s ability to rapidly and safely deploy code - Architect and build our systems for maximum productivity and scalability

What We're Looking For

- Proven ability to build large, reliable, scalable infrastructure (you've directly contributed to scaling a highly-trafficked website or web application) - Extensive knowledge of Linux (we use Ubuntu and Debian) and 5+ years of system administrator experience PostgreSQL, Slony, pgbouncer; also non-relational such as Cassandra - Nginx, HAProxy, Varnish, Memcached - Knowledge of shell scripting and Python (familiarity with Django is a plus) - Able to join the team onsite at San Francisco HQ or NY office

Nice-to-Haves

- A relevant university degree is great, but we care more about industry experience and knowledge - Programming experience (Python, Django, JavaScript). You'll work directly with engineers and assist in debugging/optimizing on the application-side - Previous work experience in a startup environment - Previous experience with a development focused operations team

Work Perks

- Competitive salaries and stock options - Daily catered lunch and fully stocked snacks, drinks, and beer - Weekly in-office yoga and massage - Apple computers and a bountiful equipment policy - Flexible hours, so you can be at your most productive - Generous out-of-office time for holidays, vacation, sick leave, and personal or family needs - Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision plan options - Team celebrations: company anniversaries, birthdays, weddings, babies - you name it, we celebrate it! - 401(k) plan, pre-tax commuter benefits, employee assistance program and flex spending accounts - Convenient office location in SOMA near public transit (blocks from BART, Muni, Caltrain) and parking - Friendly, casual office environment with plenty of toys (foosball, ping pong, video games, and more)

Disqus is hiring: * Dev Ops Engineer / Site Reliability Engineer * Data Engineer * Algorithm Engineer * Backend Engineer * Frontend Engineer * Product/UX Designer

Apply here: http://grnh.se/7po6vh

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About Disqus

What is Disqus? Disqus is a free service that enables great online communities. As the web’s most popular discussion system, Disqus is used by 3 million websites that cover pretty much any topic imaginable. Our magic is in connecting people to stuff worth talking about.

Who are we? Disqus is a fast-growing team making a big impact. We’re a group of hackers and tech geeks who love the web and believe that better communities will make an even better web. We believe in amazing user experiences, well-designed code, and fast, iterative development.

We go above and beyond when it comes to thinking outside of the box to solve problems creatively. We're driven to learn and implement new technologies, and figure how to scale them to accommodate our massive scale. Are you up for the challenge of building an application that supports 50,000+ requests per second, and 4MM active concurrent connections to our realtime stream? Then join us.

We love what we do, and we love the team we’ve built: http://disqus.com/about.

---

Work Perks

We're a small team that gets a lot done and has a lot of fun along the way. All full-time employees of Disqus receive the same great benefits:

* Competitive salaries and stock options * Daily catered lunch and fully stocked snacks, drinks, and beer * Weekly in-office yoga and massage * Apple computers and a bountiful equipment policy * Flexible hours, so you can be at your most productive * Generous out-of-office time for holidays, vacation, sick leave, and personal or family needs * Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision plan options * Team celebrations: company anniversaries, birthdays, weddings, babies - you name it, we celebrate it! * 401(k) plan, pre-tax commuter benefits, employee assistance program and flex spending accounts * Convenient office location in SOMA near public transit (blocks from BART, Muni, Caltrain) and parking * Friendly, casual office environment with plenty of toys (foosball, ping pong, video games, and more)

Disqus - http://disqus.com - San Francisco, CA

We're actively hiring for Frontend, Backend, DevOps, Data Infrastructure, Data Mining, and Data Analyst.

APPLY HERE: http://grnh.se/0vy62q

---

WHAT IS DISQUS?

Disqus is a free service that enables great online communities. As the web’s most popular discussion system, Disqus is used by 3 million websites that cover pretty much any topic imaginable. Our magic is in connecting people to stuff worth talking about.

WHO WE ARE

Disqus is a fast-growing team making a big impact. We’re a group of hackers and tech geeks who love the web and believe that better communities will make an even better web. We believe in amazing user experiences, well-designed code, and fast, iterative development.

We go above and beyond when it comes to thinking outside of the box to solve problems creatively. We're driven to learn and implement new technologies, and figure out how to build them to accommodate our massive scale.

Are you up for the challenge of building an application that supports over 1 billion unique visits per month, 50,000+ requests per second, and 4MM active concurrent connections to our realtime stream? Then join us.

We love what we do, and we love the team we’ve built: http://disqus.com/about.

They'd be raising $250mm in the IPO. That wouldn't be the valuation of the company. Presumably, it'd be >$2B which was the value of their last private round.

Your point stands in that 4% of that isn't too bad either.

Got it, so because committing suicide is easier to do at home, you must be silly to do it in this matter. Crazy, even.

Replace "female" with "European founders." Would it still make sense? Is it ok to hold a conference for a demographic with common challenges and opportunities -- rooted in the fact they're from Europe?

You're sad.

This is even not close to true nor is it witty. You should stop making jokes on the internet.

I don't see how this is sad.

Huh, survival bias? Why would he look at companies that didn't survive when writing about success?

Totally. I get it. All I'm saying is that it's not out of the question that there are people out there that would be absolutely happy to treat their work just like family.

And that there's an organization/group out there that treats it just like that.

It's sort of like jaded lovers. Certainly there are people that poo-poo the notion of "soul mates" or "love at first sight." Fair enough. But it's always a little bit sad when that dampens the mood for people who are caught up within potential romance, no?

Your outlook on the world makes me sad. There's such a defensive attitude in this community — for some good reasons, I can understand — but it paints the world in black and white.

How do you know that's how it is? For most companies, "work is family" may be hyperbole, but how do you know it's that way at PA? I don't profess to know, but I don't find it unreasonable that there are companies out there that are different than the ones that I'm accustomed to. Just like I accept that there are people out there that have lives very different than how I've lived mine.

Sorry about that. We made some mistakes when rolling out from scratch and did some things that I'd be more careful about now. There was no malice intended and hope that you'll take another look in the future.

Occurred to us too. We're experimenting a bit with how we're communicating to our intended audience.

We've been testing signup rates and nothing alarming to note yet!

I didn't have much interaction with Malcolm when he helping us at Disqus, but I just remembered that he was incredibly smart and very kind. I'm very saddened by this news.

Daniel from Disqus here. We have a list of common restricted "obscenities" used on Disqus-powered sites. That list is provided there for convenience.

It may be tempting to attach a single "HN voice" to this community, but this is a place of many people with different opinions.

Got it. If the question is about how clear it is to users, then yes that's important and something that we've adjusted along the way. We're going to continue making changes as we learn from feedback.

What marketing speak? This is how I talk and I'm an awful marketer.

Do you mean the name? We refer to it as advertising pretty openly. That's what it is.

Hi Jacques, I’m Daniel from Disqus. Hopefully I can clear some stuff up.

As others in this thread have pointed out, we haven’t really been shy about what we’re doing here. You can see a progress update of how things are going on blog.disqus.com (it’s the second post down as I write this).

We’ve put a lot of effort into being communicative around what we’re doing with discovery and advertising (we call it Promoted Discovery). I don’t think “bait and switch” is accurate in describing how we approached this. It was about a year ago that we started talking publicly about the idea of a revenue-share ad product within Disqus.

As our ideas matured, we started sharing those details with our userbase. This was about 6 months ago. As with many of the things we do, Promoted Discovery was rolled out gradually so that we could learn and get better. Along the way, we blogged, sent out emails, and surveyed users. We’ve done half a year of messaging and we’re still not done with the full roll-out. It sucks that our messaging didn’t reach you, but you should know that you can configure how everything works, or opt out completely, on disqus.com/admin/settings. When new users sign up, they also are introduced to what Promoted Discovery is and have the choice to configure it.

As always, we’re learning through feedback. Especially with the product. Are we finished with the advertising product? Not yet — the product has plenty of room to grow and get a lot better. But it’s performing well for many publishers and they’re happy with the revenue that’s coming in. We care about that because our core discussion product is going to get even better because of it.

Overly confident, generalizing headlines are pretty good for capturing attention. But it does poorly at making your point.

Your reader's mindset is contentious from the get-go, and they're going to want to prove you wrong if statement is controversial. It doesn't bode well for your point if you can't convincingly back it up.

The true point in this article is that visual cues within UIs are great and nice. It's a huge victory when you can educate your user naturally (see: the popular Super Mario Bros example), but it just doesn't apply to everything. Not everything is innate; some new things need to be taught. How do we learn most things? We observe someone doing the same thing.

Well, it changes many things. American jobs, for one. Pride in American innovation. Money into a troubled industry that was once one of the banner industries of this country.

$2k in monthly cupcakes... I gotta step up my cupcake game.

Yeah, this is actually one of the biggest things we wanted to address with the new version: the inconsistency for end-users. Disqus is quite configurable, but it caused a number of barriers that was detrimental for the websites themselves.

We're trying to go with guided, designed experiences that makes it attractive to participate — not punishing.

It's an old page — this was used for Summer 2011. It may be inheriting some base styles that are now changed for a more current page. Are people now scouring through unused pages to drum up some shit?

Sorry, we put up the image first but haven't gotten a blog post up yet. We'll write about this and put up our thoughts soon.

I admit that I'm relieved that this open letter was not another public bashing. I love stories like this and, most importantly, I really love balsamiq. I didn't know anything about its creator/founder, but I'm glad he's as upstanding as the product he produces.