google.com/humans.txt | Hacker News Reader

google.com/humans.txt

google.com

205 pointsnetgusto87 comments

humans.txt:

  everyone:
  don't poke around /admin
  don't look in /cgi-bin
  don't put javascript into the form fields
  don't make your username look like valid SQL

  users:
  don't try to access IDs that you don't own
  always trust emails that appear to be from us
  don't look at /pricing#fine_print

  hackers and security researchers:
  please stay away

  lawyers:
  don't look too closely at /eula

  employees:
  don't look at other companies' job postings
  don't talk about your salary

  competitors:
  don't copy us
  don't undercut the prices listed at /pricing

  potential investors:
  don't look in /forum or /complaints
  don't look at /user_stats
  look at /pricing#most_expensive_plan

dogs,cats: don't pretend to be human

robots: don't pretend to be human

google(self): do pretend to be human

google.txt: don't be evil.

Funny, that was deleted years ago, now returns:

"404: File not found."

I'd love to see more companies with an evil canary cartoon image file. Perhaps when violated, canary.png could direct to a cartoon unicorn sheepishly grinning with one stuffed cheek.

In case it's not obvious: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary

Example:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11400112

Try: https://www.google.com/killer-robots.txt

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7988924 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7979909

haha awesome :]

i was cofounder at a startup a long time ago, and wrote most of the backend code.

i put a humans.txt in there, and updated it every time we had a new employee.

then the CEO fired all the best engineers, and I decided to leave shortly after because sometimes in life you gotta let go.

the company is still (miraculously) around these days, although all of the original engineers are long gone.

the humans.txt is still accessible on their domain as it was on my last day, with all the names of the founding team for the first ~2 years inscribed in there - looks like their newer engineers never stumbled upon it.

sometimes when i get nostalgic i like to hit that URL and look at it

At a previous job, the equivalent to this was `make babies` which would output the names of all the kids that were born to engineers. The unwritten rule was that you'd text someone the good news, and then, that person was to add the name to the list and create the commit. That would serve as the birth announcement to engineering.

"Legacy Code"

Right in the feels.

Is it really that easy to miss an errant text file in the site directory? I'm so meticulous when it comes to code that you couldn't possibly get that past me.

Could be they found it but just never changed it. Maybe they thought it was amusing, or just didn't want to deal with it in code review.

I suppose it depends on what all they do. Maybe their website is not their main product. Maybe they have thousands of sites. Who knows.

From my own experience: probably no one cared to touch that server because no one knows what apache foo is running on it and they had better things to do than to worry about what the long time ago guys left there as long as no one complains.

http://www.gm.com/humans.txt I never would have guessed it.

Disclaimer: I work at GM. It's probably not as terrible as you imagine. Any opinions are my own.

I work with the team that made that site! That is so funny that they put that in.

Hey! I'm the dev leader of Team Blackbird. I never knew this actually got deployed.

AMA!

Not bad! Don't let the marketing team find it.

Another interesting one is: https://www.tumblr.com/humans.txt

Seems they forgot to fill out this page: https://www.tumblr.com/txtventure/song.txt

Just saw this too. It's a text-based adventure game!

Human after all. http://www.ycombinator.com/humans.txt

Doesn't this implementation actually undermine the whole point of humans.txt? This is the equivalent of a robots.txt file consisting only of comments.

The whole point is to list who is behind the website. A LinkedIn list of people currently working for Google might suffice.

This is the best example of humans.txt: http://nest.com/humans.txt

We list out our product team: https://esharesinc.com/humans.txt

It's the first pull request new product people submit: adding themselves to humans.txt – works really well.

http, no auto redirect to https? On chrome. I thought Google preloads key pins which force https loading, but apparently the www subdomain isn't included [0]. Are there legacy reasons why?

[0] https://code.google.com/p/chromium/codesearch#chromium/src/n...

(psst - try https://www.google.com/killer-robots.txt)

http://humanstxt.org/

http://humanstxt.org/humans.txt

404. That’s an error.

The requested URL /cats.txt was not found on this server.

That’s all we know.

I am so disappointed :(

Would love to help them out, if I can get an interview...

The best meritocratic way (i.e. not dependent on your CV too much) to get invited to an interview with Google is to be top 1000 in Google Code Jam.

Study algorithms a lot, practice on CodeForces and TopCoder. If you work hard on it, in some year you will be on top of Google Code Jam.

Recommendations is good to have but it won't help you to be successful on the interview.

Practice algorithms a lot, ... I mean literally A LOT.

P.S. I had recommendations from Google employees. I screw up Google interview. Now, I'm preparing with algorithms and participate on coding contests including Google Code Jam (right now).

I've actually interviewed with them, before when I was in college. In all honesty, I used to be on the defensive side of things against technical interviews only because I got really nervous and my mind would go completely blank, especially this one time when a BigTechCo hiring manager asked me to sort a LinkedList without using additional space.

So after many rejections and rushed algorithms textbooks regurgitations, I decided to start somewhere my well-roundedness counted more than my algorithm implementation skills( a big awesome Fortune 20 company too) , and actually REALLY take my time to study the ins and outs of being a real World software engineer and ENJOY IT.

A year and a half later after graduation, I don't regret my decision at all. My problem-solving and implementation skills have improved tremendously, especially after I discovered Firecode.io, which takes a more pedagogical approach to interview prep than TopCoder or google CodeJam.

I live in Seattle and have a few acquaintances who are in tech at various companies(Google, FB, Amazon, MSFT..) . My interactions with Googlers have been very pleasant; they just seem to be very down to earth compared to other engineers I have encountered, in general. I am not in a rush, though. I am gainfully employed and like my job, so that also drive my job search to be largely serendipitous.

Do you have any suggestions how to practice algorithms?

After many failed approaches, I came with conclusion that the best way to practice algorithms (and math) is to trying to solve some problem which you can not solve and getting stuck, after you tired and failed to solve a problem, you can read answer how to solve a problem.

This will help your brain to remember particular method/algorithm/concept because your brain will think that this is very important problem, a sort of missing puzzle for your brain.

If you just passively read book about algorithms, you will have false feeling that you learn quickly but you will forget everything very soon and not being able to reconstruct any of algorithms you learned so far.

If you participate in algorithm contests, you will struggle a lot and after contest you will read editorials and may be redirected to CLRS or Knuth books.

Your learning curve will grow very slowly but believe me you will get very solid knowledge which won't be forgotten for a long time.

P.S. I practised a lot of passive learning by reading algorithms books. I forgot almost everything. Now, I'm switched to learning though competitions. It's hard way but very solid.

If you want to do well on GCJ, practice GCJ. All the past contests are online.

http://code.google.com/codejam/contests.html

Where does the "top 1000" come from?

My logic is simple.

There is qualification round, round 1a/1b/1c, round 2, round 3, onsite finals.

Advancing to round 1 won't impress anyone because qualification round is easy.

In order to advance to round 2 you have to be top 1000 which is pretty difficult but achievable.

Advancing to round 3 is very difficult, I think it's way beyond interview level.

Actually, in order to advance to round 2 you have to be top 1000 in one of the first rounds, so you make it to the top 3000.

The reason I asked is because I placed in the top 1000 (top 1000 of round 2) back in 2011 but was only contacted by a google recruiter in late 2012 (in the 2012 edition I had been just outside of the top 1000 in round 2).

To be very honest: don't waste your time

It is certainly a common desire of a lot of people to work there. And it certainly can be achieved if you have the technical skills

But the advantages of a position are overrated, and the disadvantages, underrated.

Certainly, not everywhere you can work on Google sized problems, but other place have interesting problems as well, and you'll feel your work to be more valued

That. As an ex-Google engineer, I'm often asked why I quit. I usually reply with a soccer analogy. If you're a decent player, and somehow you're bought by Real Madrid, you won't see much real action. There are enough superstars (technical and political) who get to do exciting stuff to keep you relegated to tedious, menial tasks.

Good Analogy

Real Madrid salaries for "average talent" are probably more competitive as well

Google is known for paying way above market average, but there's also the question of levels. I'd venture to say that most Google engineers I know work two levels below their capability. The concentration of talent is one thing, but the promotion process is so tedious that folks just tend not to go for it. As a result, what you call "average talent" will more than likely get less compensation at Google than they otherwise would. Certainly that was my case, even though money played no part in my decision.

Speaking as a former Google engineer? I know a few disillusioned Google engineers :) Just understand from the outside looking in the company is still very much tantalizing. Most companies worth working for these days have a similarly stringent interview process so I can't see what the disadvantage would be of upping your technical skills.

> Speaking as a former Google engineer? I know a few disillusioned Google engineers :)

Not former nor current. Me too!

And yes, the Google interview process made me aware of some (important) blanks in my knowledge

At the same time they ignore the "incidental" talents and knowledge of people in their process (a lot of times, technical knowledge).

I also compare what they're doing with what people that got turned down are doing

Going to work at Google doesn't mean you'll work on Google sized problems, either. I certainly didn't; it was not a fun experience.

have someone that works or has worked there vouch for you. I've had a google recruiter contact me on that alone.

It's probably the easiest way to get an interview for most companies.

But the question is, are you going to pass the interview? Getting an interview is the easy part - I've gotten two Google interviews so far just from recruiters and a friend recommending me.

Send me an email(to my username @ gmail.com ) with your resume, and we can have a chat, and I can provide you with something akin to a reference if you like.

https://www.facebook.com/humans.txt

i knew Zuck was a robot!

Oh, this is FOR humans? Years ago I made a "human.txt captcha project" to prevent wasting precious CPU cycles on non-robots http://www.mrspeaker.net/2010/07/15/humans-txt/

It looks kind of interesting. Do you have anything explaining how it's supposed to work? Are you determining if people are humans by their attempt to answer the math questions?

When it says "you are one of them?" does that mean I'm a human or a robot? I'll answer an addition, but then it will ask something like "43 >> 86 = " or " ~ 76 = " and it's like "wtf is going on here?" as the counter ticks down.

I made a list of some interesting humans.txt files a while back: http://www.andjosh.com/2015/12/17/cool-humanstxt-files/

The Tumblr choose your own adventure is amazing.

what is the point of this?

You usually put a robots.txt file for search engines. A search engine putting a humans.txt is funny.

I hope this becomes a thing though -- a text file you can reliably find that gives you the barebones explanation of what the sites is for ... though I guess /about already functions that way.

It's two weeks late though, would have been a great "April Fools but we're serious" thing.

It's already a thing (http://humanstxt.org/), and Google's has had the file for quite a while now.

It's currently used mostly as a "painting's signature", a point of pride for the team behind the site. Looking through all the comments in this thread you will see many other examples.

It's just a thing that some people do.

http://humanstxt.org/

Two reasons:

1. You'll come across it and apply for a job at Google.

2. You'll have a positive interaction with the Google brand.

A big part of this: it's something people want to share. Without that element, it would only ever be seen by a few dozen people.

Without a single name listed, Google is doing it wrong.

So for me this is a negative reflection of the Google brand.

It's like robots.txt but for humans. This Firefox add-on shows you if the site you're browsing has one and lets you read it https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/humanstxt/

It's meant to be a counterpart to robots.txt - a plaintext file that indicates who worked on a site.

the nest one has always been great http://www.nest.com/humans.txt

http://booking.com/humans.txt

(Disclaimer: I work at Booking; opinions my own)

If they were really smart they'd have knocked up some AI to keep Reader going.

Google Reader: Never forgive, never forget.

robots.txt, humans.txt, where are the cyborgs.txt files!!?

Might as well add the only humans.txt I've survived in. Maybe I'll see this in 5 years again too. https://mycloud.rackspace.com/humans.txt

https://github.com/humans.txt

Looks like they currently have 550 employees...

https://bitbucket.org/humans.txt

https://disqus.com/humans.txt ...

Tried hackers.txt. Was disappointed.

Try twtxt.txt

To help others before they try it, it's a 404

Thanks and sorry, just thought it might fit, twtxt being ...

Decentralised, minimalist microblogging service for hackers. http://twtxt.readthedocs.org/en/stable/

We are Google ! So nice you stopped by. Would you like to be assimilated ?

humblebrag

old

Cute

to me this reads as "Google is built by a large team of engineers, designers, researchers, robots, and others..." but frankly we don't really care enough about them to bother naming them. Come, join the great "team" of faceless cogs.

Why? Do you have so much spare time to waste on things like this?

Why are people so malicious to people who have spare time?

Jealousy

Spare time wasted on what? Me reading the three sentences or someone else writing three sentences?

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