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Comment by fbnlsr | Hacker News Reader

I think humans.txt (http://humanstxt.org/) fits more, and already exists.

> It's an initiative for knowing the people behind a website. It's a TXT file that contains information about the different people who have contributed to building the website.

Not sure why you linked that, it doesn't fit at all. They're solving completely different problems.

Neither are solving any actual problems.

I've never heard of this. I wonder how many websites implement this. I tried a bunch of sites, but the only one I could find that had a humans.txt file was google:

Google is built by a large team of engineers, designers, researchers, robots, and others in many different sites across the globe. It is updated continuously, and built with more tools and technologies than we can shake a stick at. If you'd like to help us out, see google.com/careers.

Here's two examples: https://medium.com/humans.txt, https://www.python.org/humans.txt.

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

We do: https://esharesinc.com/humans.txt

It's part of every new engineer's first day or two. It's their first shipped PR to add themselves as a human.

I do! https://redfern.me/humans.txt

It should really be human.txt...

A redirect to LinkedIn definitely isn't a proper implementation.

I agree. It was meant to be a bit... cheeky. Honest question though, is your issue with the fact that LinkedIn isn't plain-text, or the nature of the information that LinkedIn provides?

Neither. If any of us curl/wget/whatever that file, we gain no usable, plain text, human information. We then have to, manually, notice the redirect, take a manual action to follow up, and then those two further objections would apply. Why implement a text file spec that doesn't serve a text file? Even if all your text file contained was "Please see http://linkedin.com/example” it would be a correct implementation.

I found this as part of a user agent in logs for my webserver: https://disqus.com/humans.txt

And going over my logs for the past year, I only found 6 requests for 'humans.txt' on my server.

I was thinking the same thing. It seems the security team would be made up of humans :)

Huh, apparently GitHub redirects theirs to their (HTML) about page.

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