My first year as employee #1 of a YC company | Hacker News Reader

My first year as employee #1 of a YC company

nop.xxx

83 pointsmayop10040 comments

Kinda interesting using a xxx domain for a personal, non porn blog.

I can't bring myself to click it right now while I'm at work, just in case.

I'm in the same boat. I'm not sure it's the best choice for a technical blog, especially when many people visit them at work.

I picked it kind of on a whim and as a hack (are they still allowing porn under .com?). I like the aesthetic symmetry of the domain and TLD, in general. There was a funny potential bug in our code several months ago which almost led to the comment

    // XXX TODO FIXME nop is doing too much

Perhaps that link back to development/tech might have been too much of a stretch :)

Yeah ideally we all work for understanding, cool tech companies, but unfortunately that's not the truth. I recommend you buy another similar, safer domain and have this one forward to it.

^Agreed. The .xxx domain is a bit unprofessional IMO. \

Depending on the profession.

To quote a wise man:

    It's not porn. xxx does not always mean porn. Sometimes it means Vin Diesel.

Or it's written on the liquor jug held by a cartoon hobo.

Or it's a homage to this year's XXX Olympics.

The sequel was Ice Cube, I believe. :)

Highly amusing to be honest.

Yes, quite.

    ಠ_ರೃ

I trust HN, clicked it and got the first and only "Blocked" message. Saw the ".xxx" domain and freaked out.

Last I heard, you could only register a .xxx name if you were in the porn industry or wanted to reserve the name (but not put up any webpage). I wonder how he got the domain.

That's not correct, anyone can register a .xxx domain, there are no actual restrictions.

That was just in Fall 2011 before domains became available to the public. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-20092596-501465.html

  Sep 7 2011-Oct 28 2011: Trademark holders only
  Oct 2011-Dec 2011: Porn sites too
  Dec 2011-present: everyone

Blocked by work PC, expecting a call from IT manager any min now XD

Wish I would have checked the domain before clicking on it at work. While the content was interesting, content doesn't transfer well to access logs.

You need a new job. If you think you can get in trouble by that, you probably are working on the wrong place.

If they actually get in trouble, sure that would be an issue. But I'm pretty sure if I ran a company and it was brought to my attention that there was some traffic to *.xxx domains, I'd at least want to know why.

Worked at a bank, had content filtering. All branches had 'net access through HQ. I worked at HQ in IT. Out at a reasonably remote branch to upgrade software, walk into loan manager's office, he announces "if you see Playboy in the access logs, it wasn't me."

We didn't get notifications about that stuff. Maybe the VP of IT did, but I think it was just statistics. But we just had to check the logs when we got back to HQ. Of course he tried accessing Playboy.

I highly doubt anything would come of it. If it did, it would be pretty easy to explain. Nonetheless, having .xxx traffic originating from you on a work computer is not a situation i'd care to have to explain.

My work blocks the .xxx domain as well -- wish I'd looked at the domain before I clicked the link. What do you actually gain from the .xxx? Seems like it's just getting in the way of the discussion here.

The argument could be made that it's generating discussion here. I might buy one myself...

Exciting to see your perspective, Vikram, including the evolution of an incredible product like Firebase.

In some ways joining a startup in the middle of YC is the best time - as employee #1, you're almost a founder yourself, with tremendous input over the direction of the company. Is that how it felt to you?

Thanks, Anand!

Yeah, absolutely: James and Andrew did everything they could to make the experience as an early employee as inclusive as possible. I was kept in the loop at every step of the way. One of our company values is that we are all entrepreneurs, and it's great to have a culture that all early employees have a founder's mentality.

Thanks Anand for moving this away from the .xxx discussion (interesting as it may be). I am fascinated by early employees, since I'm also in the same boat. Although I must admit that my experience hasn't been as positive. While I acknowledge there are many contributing factors to my "less positive" experience, I do consider the lack of proper incentives a key issue.

So were financial incentives structured to increase your commitment? If so, how? I know this question could be a bit sensitive, so I don't expect comments on the details. I am just interested in the general structure or design of incentives, and how that affects the way you work.

Thanks for the shout-out, Vikrum. Watching your company grow has been a fascinating experience and you're onto something huge, keep kicking ass.

No problem, David! The success of the launch wouldn't have been a reality without everyone's help during the event.

My work blocks the .xxx, so I can't even see if this is legit.

My bad. Try this http://198.101.225.92/ or http://3328565596/ It's backed by my roflscale http-to-gopher cloud cluster blogging platform, so it's legit.

http://198.101.225.92/ruminations/first-year.html for the actual post

Despite the domain name issue, the post itself was nice to read. I could easily sense the enthusiasm and pride when you mentioned your success in the launch of FireBase and the gimmicks prior to it. Thanks.

How did you do this: http://3328565596/ ? I've never seen "domains names" like this before..

String together the 4 octets of the IP addy as if they were one binary number.

Or for the procedurally-minded: take the first number of the dotted-quad times 256^3 plus second times 256^2 etc etc etc.

My employer blocks it as well. That's interesting, though understandable I suppose.

It is amazing how many comments this HN post gets because of the .xxx domain name. Thumbs up in my book for having a title people will talk about. That's the reason I jumped into the comments section.

I too am intrigued by this. It almost seems predictable that this would be the thing the folks would fixate on. HN commenters would be a great sample set to do social experiments on. :)

Interesting read, I didn't even noticed the .xxx domain.

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