Disqus's engineering and company blog on scaling Django, adopting Go, HTTPS, and security incidents like a user data breach.
HN links it as evidence that Django monoliths can scale to billions of page views, and for its data breach alert.
Python scales quite fine actually (Disqus and YouTube use it for a majority of core development). It's all about the tech behind the scenes (uWSGI, Tornado, Ngnix, memcache/redis, etc), not the language itself (just as it is with PHP). Try scaling PHP if only using Apache Prefork instead of mod worker + php-fpm or Ngnix + php-fpm and you'll see what I mean.
I have no problem with using either PHP or Python on a particular project, depending on what is involved. I wish PHP threads would show a bit more maturity/pragmatism on both sides of the aisle sometimes.
http://yougov.github.io/pycon/slides/
http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/3/26/7-years-of-youtube-scalability-lessons-in-30-minutes.html
http://www.slideshare.net/jinaljhaveri/scaling-python-webapps-from-0-to-50-million-users-a-topdown-approach
http://blog.disqus.com/post/62187806135/scaling-django-to-8-billion-page-views
According to their statement[0], they have 17.5 million emails to get out. Unless they routinely send several times that volume daily, they'll have to batch the notifications over the next few days or the entire thing will get blackholed.
[0] https://blog.disqus.com/security-alert-user-info-breach
> We are currently in process of emailing all of the impacted users directly. Getting all 17.5 million emails out will take us a few days, but we wanted to get this disclosure post out as soon as possible. Additionally we've posted links to this disclosure in our publisher admin panel, user homepages, and on disqus.com.
I think the author gets closest to the mark in the Conclusion, but still falls short. Go is very attractive as an "upgrade" from Ruby/Python or Java. It's a good replacement for the interpreted languages when speed/performance matters and it makes the async paradigm feel much more accessible. And compared to Java, the fact that Go compiles to a native binary is a huge benefit. It's not a replacement for C or a good "teaching" language, nor would anyone call it "mature" at this point, but it does fill a niche and fills it pretty well.
http://blog.disqus.com/post/51155103801/trying-out-this-go-thing
Disqus uses this technique to inherit the font color of the embedding page,
To accommodate this wide range of design scenarios, we decided to use our own
custom web font via @font-face instead of traditional raster-based icons. This
provides us with the flexibility of inheriting font color and size from a site’s
existing aesthetic at an incredibly small file size (5kb). Since font-faces are
vector-based, we are able to serve these icons at any size without consequence.
http://blog.disqus.com/post/2944356158/introducing-houdini-the-new-look-of-disqus
So this has been going on earlier than December, at least as early as October, according to this Disqus blog post (which says they started it in August):
http://blog.disqus.com/post/32684337804/expanding-promoted-discovery
So how sure is the OP that he didn't just miss the emails/announcements about it? That said, yes, those links are kind of annoying (especially when unstyled) and can clash with the content.
As much as I want to switch my blog to Octopress, at least I can have a commenting system through Wordpress.
Interesting, Domains like connect.facebook.net or rc.rlcdn.com don't show up in the Chromium network connection list, even in an anonymous session (so that all extensions are disabled).
Found this: https://blog.disqus.com/protecting-users-privacy-on-disqus My browser didn't send a DNT header with the request though. The blogpost seems to be a bit of a joke when comparing it to the list of trackers reported by pingdom.
I'll definitely look for a Disqus replacement :)