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.

One of the things we'd like with AppHarbor is to endorse best practices. This means that you'll probably not be able to run your Azure application in AppHarbor without modifications. This is not due to special requirements for AppHarbor, but because Azure requires special code. On the other hand, you are able to create a template ASP.NET MVC application and push it directly.

Another thing is that we will never provide the full range of Microsoft solutions. Microsoft already does that. Our edge is that we can offer more than just Microsoft products, and as we're running in EC2, there's a whole range of providers offering additional value as well. For instance, we're going to support memcached, because it's industry standard. Microsoft will support Velocity, because that's what they make. I think this is a substantial and important difference.

To sum it up, we're going to support file storage, message queues and what you need to build a scalable web application. Some may be the Microsoft flavor, and other may not.

I agree with the demand. Personally, however, I do think that most companies should seriously consider cloud hosting rather than running a private cloud...

We are currently evaluating whether or not to allow writes to the file system... The thing is that while you could use it for temporary storage, we may transfer your application to another server or run it on multiple, so you can't really rely on it. So for indexing I would just recommend that you try out http://websolr.com/

It's good for twenty more sign-ups, so please try again.

There are alternatives to all these services.

People have used S3 even before hosting at EC2, and if you like, you can use Blob Storage without hosting at Azure too.

Table Storage, message queues and distributed caching exists in various flavors - and your point about not everybody needing these things are indeed true.

A common interface to avoid vender lock-in will be the next big step...

Perhaps I should mention that we really need a good designer. If anyone is or knows somebody, feel free to write me (my email address is my username at Gmail).

Looking into Unbounce right away. We've been so busy calibrating the engine, that we hadn't had time to do a proper paint job...