HN user
Hi, I'm Garry Tan, Cofounder of posterous.com. I moved my account to 'garry' here on Hacker News.
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.
We're tracking this bug down now -- mind letting me know repro steps? We'll fix it asap -- garry@posterous.com
Thanks Emmett!
A few weeks ago we had some bugs in new batch processing code that caused some major errors there. These bugs have since been fixed. We are definitely not as far off as 9316 vs 14 in normal operation.
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.
Our focus is on building the best product. It so happens to be that we are aware of the issue and recommend that you use Google Analytics for deeper insight into visitors and views.
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.
If anything, our focus on email and creation tools spurs far more original content than other traditional blogging methods.
We do honor DMCA takedown requests -- they're fairly easy to do and we are very mindful of taking down infringing content.
This is an anonymous article on Quora -- if I could provide more attribution, I would. In fact, I have now added a ton more attribution and links back to the main quora page. I love Quora.
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.
Fixed
We use Bitpusher as our vendor for sysadmin/ops at Posterous. They're a great group of people to work with, and they get to see a lot of different environments since they specifically specialize in working with startup ops.
http://bitpusher.com/careers.php
On the engineering/development side we're hiring for dev-ops / infrastructure engineers who love to scale.
At Posterous we use MySQL as a main data store but MongoDB for simple analytics and Redis for set operations around contacts and subscriptions.
Redis is also great as a backing store for the Rails queuing system Resque.
If you're willing to hire a full time person, Google's AdWords team has hundreds of very talented optimizers and account specialists who are in general fairly unhappy with their jobs. They have very deep knowledge of PPC/Adwords from the inside, and have seen a variety of client accounts.
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.
Forced obsolescence.
Things like Airbnb don't exist without the Internet -- fundamentally they connect people who wouldn't have met any other way.
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.
For a hacker I cannot imagine a more amazing gift to oneself than the gift of ever-present Internet access via Sprint/Verizon/Whatever via USB dongle or expresscard.
It's ~$50/month -- but I would definitely give up lattes and buy black coffee for it.
San Francisco
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.
I'm curious to hear what early users we got that may have helped us. OK, Arrington was a good one. =) Others?
That's why startup scenes are a bit of a mixed bag. You can meet really awesome people who can help you a lot. But you can't let it get in the way of building product.
Awesome, we will be in touch!
Posterous is hiring, and we love Ruby on Rails. Let me know if you'd like to talk. Perhaps we can make lemonade from these lemons. http://posterous.com/jobs
Software is the highest leverage profession in the world right now. Perhaps in the early 1900's it was wildcatting for oil in Southern California. It minted billionaires like Getty, but it was tough work that required guile and cunning. Anytime there is a societal and technological dislocation, there are times of high leverage for individuals to create a lot of value.
It just so happens software creates wealth right now. I think that's a great thing.
In addition, Delayed Job is also a battle-hardened/tested queue system too, with better retry / error rescuing (ironically enough). It is slower due to MySQL locking though -- Resque is built on top of Redis and is lightning fast.
We use DJ for jobs that MUST succeed (e.g. autopost) whereas we use Resque for more frequent but less essential jobs.
Ideally invalidation happens on an offline queue with retry support. Server down? Reschedule job and retry later.
We use Delayed Job at Posterous for things like this. Resque works too.
There are three kinds of lies -- lies, damn lies, and statistics.
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.
We're definitely working on it. =) But this feedback is super helpful. Thanks Max.
1) Angels and YC can't really even be mentioned in the same sentence as VC's. Totally different goals and alignments.
4) Not true, many counterexamples, most notably Wufoo.
Sounds like you're doing just fine on your own, though.
Posterous is hiring Rails Engineers and Infrastructure Engineers - San Francisco
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.
Usually it means using a hardware solution like Intruguard or going through a third party vendor that resells Intruguard and/or other proprietary anti-DDOS technology.
We've opted to use Gigenet, and they're holding the line right now quite well.
They better. So far so good.
It's tough -- if someone is hitting you at > 1gbps, that exceeds a gigabit ethernet port -- typically on shared services you only pay for that much. Any more than that and it affects all the other customers on the shared network. So yes, Rackspace has the bandwidth for it, but at the same time if you were Rackspace, would you let our DDoS take down the other hosts in the datacenter?
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.
Custom domains are unaffected, no action needed.
We're getting about 500k packets per second, 500mbps to 1.5gbps peak, it's a synflood from a botnet. Typically we can IP hop and null-route the old IP's. That usually buys us about a day until the botnet phones home to get the new IP's, at which point we just hop again. Since our DNS TTL is only 5 minutes at most we are down 5 minutes.
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.