troethom

I agree with everyone that this should be open-source, but at least this has one benefit over the other proprietary solutions out there: This is not just a secure messenger, but also a beautiful one. If you want to convince - and I do - those who use Facebook Messenger and iMessage and don't necessarily consider their privacy, it needs to have a great user experience on top of the technical foundation. On the other hand, if it gets that and ends up being open-sourced, it would be a great fit for Aral Balkan's Codename Prometheus: http://aralbalkan.com/notes/codename-prometheus/

I think it could work. The set of users who would pay is a completely different demographic than those who are following Justin Bieber. You're only devaluing the market for the adverts that would appeal to everyone.

It's a good point that we probably shouldn't seed the values just to avoid someone from accidentally using "deadbeefdeadbeef" in their production environment. I'll also investigate if we can reuse the transformation instances (and make the change if we can).

We didn't use the machine key as we'd have to pick one of two paths: 1) Using the [`System.Web.Security.MachineKey`](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.security....) class to perform the encryption would probably leave us with the same issue we wanted to resolve (the class only exposes methods for encryption, not the key itself). 2) Parsing the configuration file manually is error-prone and makes us rely on the current format (and while it's unlikely to change given Microsoft's dedication to backward compatibility, it's an unnecessary dependency for an independent solution).

Our code serves as an example and while some will probably copy the code right into their solution, I expect most people will adapt it to suit their needs*. [Poul-Henning Kamp](http://phk.freebsd.dk/sagas/md5crypt_eol.html) recently wrote "Please notice that there is _no_ advantage in everybody in the world using the exact same algorithm, quite the contrary in fact." (relating to the application of well-known encryption algorithms, not designing such algorithms). We believe it's beneficial to share a solution that people can build and improve on. If nothing else, using different solutions prevent a single attack from affecting us all.

You get more than just the instance. We take care of keeping the servers alive, patching them and such. We also load-balance your traffic, which is usually something you have to add if you're picking another provider. Finally, there's what people like most about AppHarbor, the ability to push code to Bitbucket or GitHub and have it build and deploy, but only if everything checks out. Rackspace is closer to the infrastructure layer. Some prefer that, but I bet most will prefer the convenience of a platform.

2 workers will always be on two different machines. We're probably going to reuse machines when you scale to more than that and increase process limits instead (this could yield better performance as you need to populate fewer local cache etc.)

You should probably set the example by avoid using "@farfaraway.uk" in your blog posts. It's invalid right now, but that could change too... ;-)

How wouldn't paying back authors be a recurring cost? It's quite simple actually; how do you divide your $20 between publishers? You can't (before you either die or stop reading that is). A monthly subscription on the other hand can be divided between the articles you've read that month.

It is: http://aws.amazon.com/security/

What would you pick: lose a dollar or lose the cost of a domain? (the cost of a domain is still more than dollar)

I'm thinking about proposing to buy it for an amount covering his cost except a dollar. He will still lose money (which should serve as a valuable lesson), but not as much as if I never buy it - and I really don't need it anyway...

On AppHarbor, you also get piggyback SSL by default, as well as you can add custom certificates for free. To be fair - we don't charge anyone yet, but saying nobody else does it is a stretch.

Who should bear the risk for your startup - DotCloud or yourself? If you're creating a product you believe in, $100 (or more for that matter) should by no mean be out of reach - no matter if you're bootstrapping or looking to raise funding. In case you compare it to a cheap VPS, well, you get what you pay for - and you'll need to do the ops yourself, which is time you should rather spend building your business.

I really enjoy using Rapportive. The only thing I feel it lacks is the ability to join my personal address book in Gmail and my contacts in Google Apps (without merging the libraries, but just searching in both for data and notes).

Just found NY strips for tonight via AnyLeaf! Thanks - and congratulations on your launch!

I don't think Heroku has ever had autoscaling, but https://www.heroscale.com/ provides it as a service.

One of the things we do to make it easier is our support for basic authentication when pushing. This removes any requirement for getting SSH to work on Windows, which is usually the issue you'll run into.