Mark Zuckerberg was good at programming, but he was a psychology major, not a CS major.
"For Zuckerberg, the school’s major selling point was its Latin program. The current computer science concentrator originally intended to study classics at Harvard."[0]
There's a book called Founders at Work by one J. Livingston. I'd suggest replacing Zuckerberg with an incredible founder who was interviewed in that book, Steve Perlman.
Livingston: Were you an engineering major ?
Perlman: No, I have a liberal arts background. My engineering background is as a hobbyist. ... I designed a software-based modem when I was in college and I got an F for it because the professor said it would never work. But I got it working at my first company. I sent him an email later on and said, "This email is being sent to you on the modem that I designed at Columbia."
Drew Harwell, Douglas MacMillan, and Aaron Schaffer from the Washington Post also wrote a shameful article on this topic on August 4th (the title changed, along with an image of a woman who was harassed to something else). No counterpoint. Total submarine article.
I heard some advice recently, I think in an article here on HN, to just use a big company registry where it's not their profit center, indeed may even be netural to loss making, to drive other business.
This makes total sense to me. I'm not saying it solves all problems but it eliminates so many of them, including a meta problem: the risk of new classes of problems being unexpectedly introduced (by say a private equity acquisition or similar).
If domains themselves are the profit center, you are likely in trouble if there's really any incentive for them to make incremental revenue in such a competitive market. Doing 'the right thing' just of course will not factor in if there's really no reputation at stake.
The only problem with this is that having such a complex function as a non-core business unit makes it ripe to get rid of, or try to find a way to make it a profit center.
Cloudflare, for example, removed the ability to change the nameservers for all domains registered with them.
Google got tired of being in the business and sold it to Squarespace.
Being a domain registrar is a total PITA and is not for the faint of heart, so it's the sort of thing that any business that takes it on as a non-core function will eventually tire of.
> Cloudflare, for example, removed the ability to change the nameservers for all domains registered with them.
Cloudflare never offered that ability. From the time they started offering domain registrations, it was always with the caveat that the nameservers would be fixed to Cloudflare's.
Correct, I guess I should have clarified that I mean they removed the ability that most registrars have, in an attempt to make domains into a revenue driver for their primary product.
I think a middle ground could be to use a great "domain registrar" and be prepared to move to another one when the last one stopped being great or sold to someone not so very great. And so on. Luckily this doesn't happen every month, or every year.
The problem with that is, there's not necessarily a signal for "stopped being great or sold to someone not so very great" besides "they gave my domain away to a scammer because they asked."
There ares some. Their reaction to events, their ownership structure change, support culture change etc etc. There isn't a perfect way to find that out, but there are indications.
Most of us don’t interact with our registrars often enough to notice changes in support culture, and who has time to be constantly checking for changes in their ownership, if that information is even available? If you’re spending that much energy on your registrar and your work isn’t as a domain trader, something’s wrong.
The problem is that they also need to be big enough not to be rolled by aggressive behaviour such as lawsuits, pressure from politicians, etc. I mean, some of my domains are at a tiny company run by geeks, but I wouldn't really blame them for caving if someone really put the heat on them.
There's a certain threshold above which you want to use the "law firm with in-house domain registry" type. I think the threshold is pretty high though, definitely "call us for a quote" territory. But you will notice that big companies like Amazon and Google that have their own registry, don't use it for their critical domains - such as Google.com or Amazon.com.
The day Namecheap started terminating services for existing customers from Russia was the day I realised that service can't be relied upon at all and had initiated my domain transfer the very next day to another registrar I was using.
There should be a law that says whenever a private equity firm buys a business, the business must notify all the customers. The PE skinwalking of old company reputations is something customers need to be aware of in a well functioning market.
I've been with VentraIP in Australia for a decade now.
They're not necessarily better or worse than any other provider (I'm assuming support is good and local but I've never needed it), but they're based in Melbourne - so if push comes to shove I can physically go over there and speak with them directly.
Same thing with my payment provider, after a Stripe snafu.
> Namecheap has been owned by a private equity firm for several months now.
Namecheap's cavalier attitude long predate private equity, let's stop blaming the evil financiers for everything. I'm sure it's going even further downhill from here because of it, but what happened to OP happened to others before as well and is par for the course when being a namecheap customer.
So am I. But I have already told myself that one day I WILL have to move to a "new Porkbun". Because such services are small, privacy focused services, until someone starts pouring dollar buckets at them. Until then porkbun it is. But I am mentally prepared.
Given Cloudflare's reputation for shakedowns once you pass their undisclosed thresholds I wouldn't trust them with my domains.
I'm not expecting something for nothing, we all need to eat. I'm happy to stay within any limits or even have no free tier at all.
I just don't want the fear of waking up to a sales email one morning demanding I suddenly fork out more then I earn in a year off the project for an enterprise plan because I've exceeded their undisclosed thresholds.
Can you expand more on cloudflare's shakedowns? I have some domains on Cloudflare and thought they were a trustworthy service. Is there there anything particular you can point to?
I think they're referring to the Enterprise sales where people have felt pressured to sign six- or seven- figure contracts after usage goes above a certain point. However, all the articles I've read on it are from companies using Cloudflare to do suspicious things with rotating domains through IP addresses, or doing things to try and get around service costs. It also seems like they give you months of warning and will try to convince you to sign up for Enterprise, they don't just shut things off. But their sales team seems to portray themselves as legal, support, or compliance teams sometimes so not exactly forthcoming in their approach either.
I'm a happy user of Cloudflare, but if you're using it for domain registration and hosting infrastructure, you need to see it as a single point of failure. Any account issues and you won't be able to point your domain to an alternate host while you work things out. Any service outage in CF systems will similarly lock you out of routing around the failure. It's better to have DNS off of cloudflare if they're handling your hosting services also. Or host elsewhere and only handle domains on cloudflare. Their domain pricing doesn't add any costs over the base registrar cost, so the latter is a reasonable option.
You could argue in that case it was a gambling site and it will never happen to you because you're not in a high risk category.
The scary thing for me is nowhere in their initial communications did they explain the issue they just demanded $120k upfront (refusing monthly billing).
The CEO who is usually active on HN didn't show up to give their side either, there's no way they couldn't have been aware of a 1044 upvoted post which also went viral elsewhere https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40481979
It's just traffic based: sales try to get you on a paid plan, or a higher tier. For some accounts they've given ultimatums ("pay for the higher tier by x date or we have to stop providing service"). But I believe those cases were e.g. online casinos doing specific things with the platform (say, evading national blocks on gambling websites) IIRC.
It would be worth recommending a non-US-based registrar, since the Texas government just demonstrated that they can unilaterally suspend any domain managed by any US registrar.
Are you referring to what happened with motherless? If so, using a non-US-based registrar probably wouldn't have made a difference in that case. The court order that took the domain offline targeted the .com registry operated by Verisign, not any individual registrar.
Two more are NearlyFreeSpeech and UnstoppableDomains.
The latter also supports crypto domains which have no chance of a takeover except by government order, although crypto domains require the client to install a browser extension or other software to resolve. The good thing about crypto domains is that there should be no renewal fee, although there will be a fee to update the record.
Seconding the NFSN recommendation, they are great if you are technically competent. They even have optional security settings that can permanently lock you out of your account if you lose your recovery credentials, in case you want to be super strict about it. They are very clear that recovery will be impossible if you use those settings. I really like this and wish more services would offer this kind of “hard” commitment.
Enshittification and PE sellouts are great for DNS providers because migrating it can be a real pain sometimes and carry a high risk if something goes wrong. It's why so many of them are chains of "Buy through Company N! We used to work for Company N-1 before they sold out!"
Could you ask the VC if you could name them in the story?
It's unfortunate that some VCs I respected turned out to repeatedly have their reputation tarnished by such negative stories. I'm not sure what compels founders and VCs to be polarizing and not diplomatic like the old days.
I had to navigate around Troy when visiting Vermont because of these cameras. It wasn't trivial due to the river crossing.
There's a very small number of people committing crimes worthy of these cameras, and there's also a small number of people not willing to do business with clients of camera purveyors.
When Apple transitioned from skeuomorphic to flat design this was a huge issue. It was difficult to determine what was a button on iOS and whether you tapped it (and the removal of loading gifs across platforms further aggravated problems like double submits).
Another absurdity with iOS is the number of ways you can gesture. It started simply, now it is complex to the point where the OS can confuse one gesture for another.
I have a lot of gripes with Apple's various design decisions over the years, but they're at least consistent across their apps, which is the point of TFA.
Mystery gesture navigation is also now on by default and terrible on Android, too. It's awful with children or older folks (or even me!) who trigger it by accident all the time. Some of it I was able to disable on my children's iPads. It's still frustrating that easy to accidentally trigger but impossible to discover gestures are the default and also frustrating that we have the very last iPad generation with a button.
I think that the best UI design language is somewhere between "flat" and "skeuomorphic". I want neither a UI with notes apps that have Moleskine leather and vellum paper textures, nor the Android 12-like vague shapes of current-day macOS. The Windows 9x, and even more so, its predecessor NEXTSTEP, look and feel was perfect. Widgets had depth and definition, were still abstract but readily identifiable to the eye.
PWA dudes that all want to use some variant of shadcn or whatever same but different flavor of what is effectively the same design language are the more critically dangerous influences on design in my eyes than say apple. apple is highly opinionated on their design frameworks and that, at least, brings consistency. even if it's a dumb change, at least you can expect it everywhere
There's no leadership to curtail asinine behavior. Instead of forces of nature to strengthen the status quo of freedom, we get lowly politicians. Judges end up having to do all the work.
One idea behind the PoC Right to Privacy Act is having tests. A recurring theme with conservative Justices is clarity of legal text.
Testing may not exhaust all scenarios but it is useful to see where loopholes may exist or whether a bill that sneaks in while you aren't paying attention is unfavorable to your values.
This is incredibly software engineer-brained. The law doesn't work like software. The only thing that matters is how the judiciary interprets the text, and if you try to use LLM "test" output to argue for a specific interpretation, you'll be laughed out of court.
Laws are there to inform the land how the dominant class expect to be served. At least in theory the dominant class could be the working class or the majority, mind you. In practice you generally get a better idea looking at what small network core founded the country, generally through bloody wars or genocides.
"For Zuckerberg, the school’s major selling point was its Latin program. The current computer science concentrator originally intended to study classics at Harvard."[0]
There's a book called Founders at Work by one J. Livingston. I'd suggest replacing Zuckerberg with an incredible founder who was interviewed in that book, Steve Perlman.
[0] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2004/6/10/mark-e-zuckerbe...