I've been a Virtual Post Mail (https://www.virtualpostmail.com/) customer for 10 years so far and they've been great. Reliable and very quick to respond to support emails on the rare occasion it was needed.
Conversely, check out Yoyogi park on the Monday after a hanami weekend. The ground is covered in garbage, broken bottles, cans, etc. Or check out the square at Shinbashi station after the salarymen finish their impromptu outdoor happy hour. All flat surfaces are littered with convenience store wrappers, empty beer cans and cigarette butts.
keys (https://github.com/wg/keys) is the password manager I've always wanted. It's a client/server application with a command line UI, and the server can run on a mobile device so your credentials are available wherever needed.
keys is open source (GPLv3) and includes a basic Android app that runs the server. The code should run on iOS as well, but the lack of background networking is an issue.
keys provides strong protection for credentials. For details please read SECURITY, but to summarize everything is encrypted with AES in GCM mode using a randomly generated key, which in turn is encrypted with with a key derived from a password via the scrypt KDF. Network communication occurs over mutually authenticated TLS 1.2 connections.
I'd never seen Threema before yesterday, but they just released an Android app and it's really well done! Great UIs on both platforms, nice security model, and very granular message status including "acknowledged" which is a great idea.
"For Evernote's consumer product, the current encryption algorithms are chosen more for exportability under the Commerce Department rather than strength, since our software permits the encryption of arbitrary user data with no escrow."
I guess Evernote's been around for a while, but wasn't it way back in 2010 that the BIS allowed simple self service registration and annual self classification of almost all "mass market" use of crypto?
Is anyone running ZFS on Linux (http://zfsonlinux.org/) on their servers? Appears to be very bleeding edge, but the ZFS codebase itself ought to be pretty stable. I'm running a FreeBSD 9.0 system with ZFS and it's flawless.
I've been using Configgy which is now deprecated in favor of this, but am not a fan of executable configuration files.
Fortunately Typesafe has released a nice plain Java, with no dependencies, config library supporting similar syntax: https://github.com/typesafehub/config
Does anyone know of a good alternative to ab or httperf for load testing high-performance HTTP servers? With httperf I can't see to coax more than ~25,000 requests/sec out of my framework built on Jetty, but ab can easily do > 45,000 req/s. Both seem to be limited by the load generator, not the server.
The majority of real hackers here on HN have almost certainly contributed to an open source project and many have released their own work as open source.
The startup ecosystem exists, in large part, because a huge number of hackers created and freely gave away things like GCC, *BSD, Linux, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, Apache, Nginx, Ruby, Python, etc. Without free, open source, software large amounts of funding would be necessary just to acquire the tools needed to build software systems.
People admire Louis CK's position because it strikes a good balance between the need to make money and the desire to share.
"2. Don't ever use scala.collection.mutable. Replacing a scala.collection.mutable.HashMap with a java.util.HashMap in a wrapper produced an order-of-magnitude performance benefit for one of these loops. Again, this led to some heinous code as any of its methods which took a Builder or CanBuildFrom would immediately land us with a mutable.HashMap. (We ended up using explicit external iterators and a while-loop, too.)"
Overall Scala<->Java interop is pretty seamless, and aside from some annoying things (for loop becomes foreach with a closure, break & continue are done with exceptions, etc) it's quite easy to treat Scala as a more concise Java with very similar performance.
Rather than using a Scala collections wrapper for the java.util.HashMap he should have simply used the Java HashMap as-is. Yes you must do hashMap.get("key") instead of Scala's shortcut hashMap("key"), but so what? You're talking performance-critical code already, wouldn't you want to avoid the wrapper?
I've found Scala to be a fabulous language for writing > 90% of my app(s). The overhead of Scala's built-in collections, for loops, property accessors/mutators, closures, etc is simply unimportant outside of critical hotspots and provides so much in terms of brevity and expressiveness.
Yes, Scala's lack of looping constructs (break, continue, a real indexed for loop) means that you're better off writing performance-critical things like crypto or protocol parsing code in Java (or if it really matters, C called via JNI). But once you're concerned about performance at that level, every language requires you to carefully consider what your code is really generating, what your allocation patterns are, etc.
Scala is a much more expressive language compared to Java, and the Scala standard library is excellent. Completely dropping Scala for Java when you're building large, complex systems seems like chopping your foot off because your small toe hurts. Use Java or C for the % of code that needs it and Scala for the rest!