I've recently come to appreciate true veterans of technology hang around mailing lists and IRC channels.<p>What are some of your favorite programming/security/sysadmin mailing lists and IRC chaneels?
The liberation-tech list is interesting sometimes: <a href="https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech" rel="nofollow">https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech</a><p>The rest of the mailing lists/IRC channels I read are all related to specific software projects, though.<p>I feel like I should add something here about how spending a lot of time on IRC can be inversely correlated with being someone who's doing a lot of work, in some cases. The veterans you're seeing might be people who now spend more time talking about technology than creating it, unless they're using IRC to coordinate their contributions to a project with its other members.
#python on Freenode. If you can live with being asked questions when you're asking something funny long enough to convince regulars you <i>usually</i> know what you're doing, it's an excellent congregation of some hella smart people.<p>(Disclaimer: I'm a regular of the channel myself. I also run the official Python channels on Freenode.)
This is my list of favs. <a href="http://suhairhassan.com/2013/04/17/newsletters-for-hackers.html" rel="nofollow">http://suhairhassan.com/2013/04/17/newsletters-for-hackers.h...</a>
Shameless plug, I've written a small piece of software which will send you daily aggregates of github activity via email. There are also weekly / monthly options as well.<p><a href="http://gitstreams.com/" rel="nofollow">http://gitstreams.com/</a>
I really like the Ruby Rogues Parley <a href="http://rubyrogues.com/parley/" rel="nofollow">http://rubyrogues.com/parley/</a> and ruby weekly <a href="http://rubyweekly.com" rel="nofollow">http://rubyweekly.com</a>
One is great just to get up to date and the other has really great discussions with all kind of people involved with Ruby in one or the other way.
#Techendo (<a href="http://techendo.co" rel="nofollow">http://techendo.co</a>) on freenode -- a lot of good people there from the SF tech scene, but I'm biased because I started the channel.
IRC: Freenode: #security, ##freebsd, ##hardware, #debian - all good
Rizon: #baot
As for mailing lists, Full Disclosure for sure, Bugtraq, all the big name security ones have really interesting posts.
#slicehost on freenode. I know the company doesn't exist anymore, but I learned so much about setting up my first debain box from these guys/gals. It is still going strong 6 years later.
I'm a fan of digital currencies so I frequently visit Freenode channels:
#bitcoin
#litecoin
#bitcoin-dev
#mtgox<p>Its interesting to observe the growth of the channels during bitcoin's hype cycles.
aside from all the obvious #<language>, #scikit-learn is really good for general ML and obviously good for more specific questions about scikits.learn machine learning libs