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From painful experience this is true, especially the parts Rachit wrote to personally call me out.


i have never personally called out anyone anywhere ever


I'm one of the authors of this article -- happy to answer questions if anyone has any.


This is great! If you're not a Delta Chat user and someone tries to message you, can you receive and respond to it as an email?



Gandi has been my registrar for years -- they're solid, high-integrity folks. Hope they manage to resolve this without too much damage.


I used to think that. But from my experiences, their customer service is crap, and I had a bunch of downtime on their VPS offering with no compensation offered.

I've stayed away from them since then. Not a very impressive company, and I'm not too surprised they're failing to deal effectively with this DDoS.


Gandi is a domain registrar first and in that respect they're lightyears ahead of the competition. They don't do shady stuff of squatting on your domain searches etc.

If you choose to use a value added service like VPS, you should expect subpar experience. You can go to any cloud provider and find a service for which you're going to have a worse experience than you had with Gandi VPS.


No I shouldn't expect a subpar experience, and that's why I no longer use Gandi.

Claiming not to do shady things with user data is the minimum I expect from a domain registrar. Fortunately, Gandi aren't unique in that respect.

Gandi came highly recommended to me, so I was quite disappointed by the reality.


So who in your opinion is _clearly_ better than Gandi?


OVH, DigitalOcean, Hetzner, AWS... everyone else is much better performance and stability wise.


AWS uses Gandi for domains


Gandi is not awful for managing domains (although they had issues with DNS management for years) but Gandi is a no-no-everything-constantly-on-fire for everything else, notably VPS and networking stacks


Try njalla, a privacy focused domain provider. It was founded by Peter Sunde, one of the original creators of The Pirate Bay. You can pay with crypto currencies and they even have a .onion domain of their website, so you can reach them over Tor.


Njalla is not a domain registrar.

They buy the domain themselves, and let you pay with Dogecoins -- possibly a good deal for the next Pirate Bay, but not what I would use for general domain registration. There is a good chance one day they will go down and take your (their!) domain with them.

From their website:

---

We're not actually a domain name registration service, we're a customer to these.

[...]

When you buy a domain in our system, we're actually purchasing it for ourselves. We will be the actual owners of the domain.


Yep, this is like going to IKEA to buy kitchen knives.


If I bought what turned out to be blunt or broken kitchen knives from IKEA, and they refused to accept a return and offer a refund, I wouldn't shop there again either.


> They don't do shady stuff of squatting on your domain searches etc.

According to other HN users, they do: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22002534


I would add that their dreadful customer service extends to domains as well.

In my experience having to engage after a technical issue on their side, they were rude, argumentative, and totally unhelpful.

If you value your domains I would register them literally anywhere else.


We used them for years too but their admin panels and tooling had too many issues. We lost access to stuff more than once and we moved to name.com at some point. Haven’t had any issues on name.com so I would not really recommeng Gandi.


I would not call Gandi high integrity folks after having seen that story of them losing customers' paid emails and telling them to restore from their own backups https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22001822


A few friends of mine work there, so I'm biased obviously. But I think they're overall pretty awesome


Pashi (YC W20) | REMOTE / US / India | Full-time | Compiler engineer | https://pashi.com

Pashi is building the operating system for manufacturing. We already work with some of the largest manufacturers in the world, and our software is being brought to bear against some of the thorniest problems that plague the most mission-critical high-volume production processes ever constructed.

We're currently a very small, very technical team spread across India, Europe, and the US, and we're looking for folks with strong backgrounds in programming languages and compilers to help us build better programming abstractions for physical processes.

Email soham@pashi.com with a paragraph-length description of any relevant experience if you're interested.


This has been obvious for months -- Romer has been yelling from the rooftops about it -- and yet no major western govt save the Brits have attempted to even try this strategy. Madness.


> and yet no major western govt save the Brits have attempted to even try this strategy.

The per-capita death rate in the UK is one of the worst in the world for this pandemic, and it's higher than the USA's. And they are now into a second lockdown. Whatever their strategy is, it's not working well at all.


Because the more effective and proven strategy is to simply pay businesses and people to lockdown.

It has been effectively eliminated in both Australia and NZ this way. And the impact to the economy is significant but it's turning out to be far less severe than the rest of the world and their on/off again strategy.


> simply pay businesses and people to lockdown

This is anything but simple. Vast majority of businesses and people will not be supported if indefinite lockdown continues. The hidden costs of bankrolling an entire country for an indefinite period is much greater than the cost to deploy a persistent, scalable testing framework. The latter is also an investment into the future as this will not be the last pandemic.


No. It's very simple. You just keep paying people until the lockdown is over.

Again this isn't some hypothetical exercise. Australia and NZ have just done this and now have basically eliminated COVID-19.

As opposed to manufacturing and distributing 100s of millions of tests each week which is very much an unproven exercise.


Australia and NZ are not America. This is the same mistake Elon made when he suggested the US would have 0 new cases by this past April; the US is not China. The differences are actually so big that comparisons are dangerously misleading.

The problem in the US is that you cant pay people enough to change their minds about the politics. They would be, and many in fact are, millionaires and they would still refuse the test. Even if it meant jail time.

These solutions simply don't work in America.


I'll believe it is simple when you specify how much money is needed and where it comes from to do that.


In the US you just need to look at the COVID-19 bills that are tied up in Congress for an idea of the money needed i.e. ~ 2-5 trillion.

And you can fund it exactly the same way you did for the GFC (print money) or WW2 (war bonds).

But compare it to the cost of the US bouncing in/out of lockdowns for the next 9-12 months.


Sounds like a terrible idea.


> entire country for an indefinite period

it's not indefinite - it's just long enough to cut down unknown transmission to a managable number for contact tracing to kick in. Then public health measures like masking up and distancing is effective enough afterwards.

Businesses cannot stand uncertainty - a on-off lockdown that they cannot predict is the worst, because they cannot make investment decisions with this sort of huge uncertainty.


You can't really compare two sparsely populated islands at the "end" of the Earth to the US or Europe.


The density of cities in australia and NZ are somewhat similar to european cities. The sparseness of Aus and NS are because their population is concentrated in cities, and there are large land masses.

If the US or UK wants to, they can certainly make the same sort of lockdown. There are costs to it, but the leadership being incompetent at actually leading, is a bigger roadblock over the cost.


The US could never do it because the federal government does not have that authority. They have lacked leadership, but they were also uniquely positioned for a world of hurt going into this.

The UK is doing about as well as similarly populous countries nearby. Which is to say, not well at all.


UK has a population of 60 million. Australia is 25 million. Both are a set of islands.

Not exactly an order of magnitude difference in population but yet there is a massive difference in the strategies and polices they've deployed. And now UK is a complete mess heading into winter and Australia has effective elimination.


> And now UK is a complete mess heading into winter and Australia has effective elimination.

Of course it might help that Australia is actually heading into summer.


And it has been eliminated before the summer months.

Also in many places in Australia it was eliminated well before winter.


I am in the part of Australia that didn't eliminate it well before winter. But with 112 days of lock-down _during_ winter we certainly had the numbers come down dramatically and have had twenty-three days so far of no new infections or deaths.

From tomorrow we no longer have to wear masks outside unless it gets crowded such that you cannot maintain physical distancing!


The UK is also next to Europe and a travel and business hub for the world. Australia is next to nothing important and has far less travel to and from the rest of the world.


China moved on from lockdowns over 6 months ago. They switched to citywide testing with 5:1 and then 10:1 pooled PCR tests in May and then recently switched to pooled rapid antigen testing. With the current testing methodology, they place one sample on a test strip, wait to see if there's a color change, and if not, they'll put a subsequent sample on. You can use a single antigen test for up to 10 people and patients get their results while at the testing site.


As it turns out, you can build most distributed protocols on top of an API which only allows you to append to and read from a shared log -- for example, if you want to do consensus across a number of actors, you can just have each one write their proposed value and the current epoch to the log, and the value that is written into the earliest log slot wins. In general, shared total orderings are equivalent to consensus -- this is clear when you consider that State Machine Replication (Paxos, Raft) is all about ensuring that all actors perform the same set of commands in the same order. If you're looking for a more detailed exposition of the shared log abstraction and its uses, you might benefit from reading the Corfu (https://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/mahesh/papers/corfumain-final....), Tango (http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~taozou/sosp13/tangososp.pdf), and FuzzyLog (https://www.usenix.org/system/files/osdi18-lockerman.pdf) papers from the lead author that precede this one.


Netflix gained ground in original television by funding bold new stuff that nobody else would (Orange Is The New Black, BoJack). They've now becomes slaves to their data despite the fact that the signals they rely on are hopelessly confounded. It's possible that they've hit upon the right strategy, but I both suspect and hope that isn't true.


Reference? AFAIK this was proposed by Wipro in a white paper but was never implemented.


Starting an independent project or two in an area you haven't played in before might be both fun and useful. I have a somewhat long list of ideas I don't have the time to do if you're looking for inspiration -- feel free to email me if you want 'em (soham at soh dot am).


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