Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by zhte415 3304 days ago
firstname@firstnamelastname.com

In early 2000s was annoyed with having to switch between mail providers depending on fees introduced, so decided to go with something that was agnostic and as a domain name was rented at least on my terms.

1. Common TLD. Most annoying thing today is others want it. Not a very common first or last name in themselves, but in combination quite a common match.

2. Unusual TLDs. No idea, however having a name.co could well be mis-typed/remembered as a .com depending on your audience. Don't know. Don't assume other people are as savvy as you.

3. Friends with far more common names have done creative but also somewhat agnostic stuff, like '1'insertfirstnamehere.com. This is less likely to be mistyped, as the name is obvious as is the extension.

Just throwing some ideas outside of pure TLD.

3 comments

> Not a very common first or last name in themselves, but in combination quite a common match

I'm sort of confused. You state that your first name and last name are not common. That is, there is a low probability some random person has the same first name as you, and also a low probability some random person has the same last name as you. We can write that as follows:

    P(N_f = F, N_l = *) < X
    P(N_f = *, N_l = L) < X
Where X is a low probability, and F and L are your first and last names while N_f and N_l are the first and last names of some random person. So, how can the following hold:

    P(N_f = F, N_l = L) > X
That is, the probability some random person has both your first name and your last name is higher, or in your words the occurrence is 'quite common.'

It should be obvious this is not possible.

Not at all. You're assuming first names and last names are independent.

For example, meet a 'Jones'. There's a good probability that his first names is 'Thomas'.

Meet a 'Thomas'. There's a low probability his last name is 'Jones'.

That's because 'Jones' is predominantly Welsh in origin, and 'Thomas' is a pretty liked given name in Wales. This of course would be more true in Wales than people of Welsh ancestory living far from Wales. And perhaps despite and because of the great singer Tom Jones, this combination may have fallen over the past few decades.

However, my family name is pretty location-specific in the UK, and even the diaspora of the name that went to places like North America tended to keep up traditional, albeit 2-3 centuries later.

Another example of non-independence would be a name like 'Ahmed' as given name and 'Zhang' as family name. 'Zhang' is an extremely common family name on a global scale, as is 'Ahmed' as a given name. However the possibility of 'Ahmed' and 'Zhang' overlapping as a combination is slim. Perhaps it could happen in Singapore or Malaysia, but then even 'Zhang' is probably converted to a Hokkian/Hakka/Cantonese equivalent spelling, which is not 'Zhang'. Given the scale of these names, I'm sure there 'Ahmed Zhang's knocking around, but probably not that many.

The great thing about statistics is it is about discovery, not assumptions.

And assuming everything is nice easy math, independent, or stochastic, is one of the greatest mistakes we can all make when looking at numbers.

So, you're actually saying something like P(N_l = L | N_f = F) or P(N_f = F | N_l = L) is (for those sub-populations) high, while P(N_l = L, N_f = F) is still globally not common. That makes more sense, but is a different statement - the combined names are common within a local population but still uncommon globally.
I have the exact same combination (firstname@firstnamelastname.com) .

The one problem I've found it's that it's seriously long to type and my surname is very prone to typos from people used to the American spelling instead of German.

Nobody has tried to buy it from me yet.

I wanted lastname with my local TLD but my father beat me to it :P and my uncle shares my initial and has initial+lastname registered.

Can you ask your father to give you subdomain first.lastname.tld? and email first@lastname.tld?
Good idea, but it would be very confusing. Also my father has the same name as I do, and his e-mail is first@lastname.tld !!!.

Good thing I'm not a lawyer too, or it would be too confusing.

I have my firstnamelastname.com, and I like to use me@firstnamelastname.com ;)
Nice. I see that on your profile page too. It is pretty easy.

I also like to use wildcards. hn@firstnamelastname.com goes to my single mailbox, but with headers intact.

Can really where the spam and affiliate stuff comes from, especially over the years, not just a few weeks.