

My first year as employee #1 of a YC company - mayop100
http://nop.xxx/ruminations/first-year.html

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

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

~~~
jack57
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.

~~~
vikrum
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 :)

~~~
jack57
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.

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

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bira
Depending on the profession.

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vikrum
To quote a wise man:

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

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

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

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LouLang
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.

~~~
ardit33
You need a new job. If you think you can get in trouble by that, you probably
are working on the wrong place.

~~~
zheng
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.

~~~
delinka
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.

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bigfrakkinghero
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.

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

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anandkulkarni
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?

~~~
vikrum
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.

~~~
jcnotchrist
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.

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

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

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

~~~
vikrum
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.

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

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ojiikun
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.

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ececconi
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.

~~~
vikrum
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. :)

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

