Foobar | Hacker News Reader

Foobar

google.com

355 pointsfranze169 comments

I think this is very clever. Assuming this is something to do with recruitment (as the other comments suggest), then of course I find it intensely irritating and it confirms my pre-existing notion that I would never want to work for a company like Google. But, on the other hand, the people who devised this puzzle are clearly people who would be enticed by a puzzle like it, and would therefore think it was a good way to find like-minded people - and they are probably correct in that assumption.

Why do you find it intensely irritating? Google's a massive company that employees all sorts of different professions and types of people. This puzzle isn't targeting you, seems successful to me.

Well, that's rather my point - the kind of people who would find it irritating are almost certainly not the kind of people they would be targeting with such a puzzle anyway.

Why do I find it irritating? Because it seems both elitist and adolescent, in a child-like "secret society" sort of way.

I would agree, if this was the only method of getting job offers from Google. But since the "traditional" methods via the Careers page, recruiters, etc, are all still perfectly available, this doesn't bother me at all.

"elitist, adolescent, and "secret society""

That pretty much sums up the people I have met that work in Google engineering. I have only met a few at conferences, but thanks for putting words to the initial feelings I got from them all.

No puzzle here. You can only log in if Google has flagged your search topics.

On google search, you have the variable window.location.search = "?gfe_rd=cr&ei=XXXGyZiVNHoFcuF8Qe7wYHACw&gws_rd=ssl"

That string is appended to the url of the iframe: src="https://foobar.withgoogle.com/"+window.location.search

I don't see any mechanism that appends it from any search topics when you load https://www.google.com/foobar/

The code snippet will only load the URL with appended values if there are present in the parent URL: e.g. https://www.google.com/foobar/?some_query_string

That's why the link to foobar turns up in people's search results.

Ah! Do you mean the 'chosen ones' will get search results linking to https://www.google.com/foobar/ with a special query string?

I took a look at the site for 5 minutes. If I had the day off, I wouldn't mind spending some time attempting to solve it.

Why is this irritating? Google won't hire you iff you solve the puzzle, this is nothing more than a very popular way for institutions to generate free PR.

It is irritating because the "puzzle" involves having a history of searching for stuff that Google Foobar has tagged as relevant.

If your Google searches are not linked with your Google account or if you search using different search engines, you're out of the game.

I'm using plugins that means I'm not tracked that much. What would I see if I had such a history?

EDIT: Turns out you need a history of googling this stuff. My heavy Python phase in school was timed wrong it seems.

What about people that uses Google Apps accounts? Are they subject to this (corporate)? What about people just use those accounts personally for their own domain? Are they out?

Once again a reminder that Google is, er, a company, whose aim is to, er, make money.

I'm not signed in to Google as a matter of course, and I block their ads, so I provide them very little value. As a result, I won't be able to use "foobar", whatever the hell it is.

Seems fair. Isn't really that irritating, is it? :-)

You're not out of the game. You can apply through all the normal ways - recruiters, ads, networking, etc.

Disclaimer: my opinions are my own and not representing those of my employer or co-workers. I have no direct relationship to this project and haven't looked it up internally.

Has it occurred to any of you that we might do these things for sheer fun, because doing that is not only allowed but celebrated?

I've done a few exercises in the site. While recruitment seems most likely, I haven't seen anything that explicitly mentions applying to work at Google or anything like that. There are coding challenges and a gamified leveling system based on how many coding challenges you complete within the time limit, but no mention of applications.

The people making the big picture decisions are by far and large not the people who would be enticed by such a puzzle. Hence the dissonance you're observing. (applies to most large companies)

Google is self-selecting to employ those people who are fine with the idea of Google recording everything they do. This does not bode well for the rest of us.

Only the very stupid are fine with Google recording everything they do.

You’d be amazed by the amount of doublethink that even very smart people are capable of, and the extreme and convoluted arguments they give for their position.

Yeah, just look at everyone who works for Google. The company is fundamentally about centralizing all of the information in the world. By working for them you support that goal and everything it implies.

I submit that this is only one small tributary to their huge hiring flow, don't overstate the impact this small thing has on their overall culture.

If you are as confused as I was this old HN thread might help:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8588080

> old HN thread

> 11 hours ago

<- Author of that thread. The site is an interactive shell with progressively harder (but fun) coding challenges to complete. It's made to look like a *nix shell and has the basic commands built-in.

Also, there are a lot of rabbits.

There are many in this thread who would greatly appreciate tips on how to access the challenges. Any ideas?

If I remember, I was blanking on the exact Python lambda syntax, so I Google'd "python lambda". I bet it had something to do with other searches I'd done in that session as well though, and I don't remember what they are.

If you wanted to you could check:

https://history.google.com/history

Also, it is possible that the url once you actually enter is different and that may be sufficient to get in.

Thanks!

https://www.dropbox.com/s/lotn6u0koxwevcc/foobar.mp4?dl=0

Is there anywhere one could acquire those rabbits for his or her own everyday terminal use? If not there should be.......

Looks like it's Google's recruiting for Python devs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8588080

More like javascript/web-developer recruiting. The page-source doesn't contain anything other than html/css/js.

But it also contains .terminal and .console class definitions which suggests that there is an interactive shell

Read that post, the person searching for Python had a different page than the rest of us. Something with a console.

Seems like you need to be "invited".

Very interesting but I wonder what the legal implications are. Some companies might file a lawsuit claiming that Google gains an unfair advantage if they continue to seek potential employees this way. I'm not saying I agree with this view but Google does have a HUGE potential in matching employees with their potential employers and might just turn the recruitment services industry on its head.

Is there a law which specifies which advantage is fair and what is not?

Why should any company be forbidden from utilizing assets their employees legally developed, especially when they want to use that asset in pursuit of a key objective ("hire more smart people")? Should a large newspaper be forbidden from advertising their openings in the printed newspaper itself just because other newspapers failed to acquire comparable audience?

Lawsuits are sometimes filed for competitive rather than legal reasons. I just feel like Google could cause a huge disruption for traditional employment agencies. I mean if this helps in finding future Google employees then this could work for almost any tech company. Imagine finding an employee for a very specific machine learning project: You could just filter all persons which searched for a certain paper. That also puts Google+ into perspective - you get a better chance at actually identifying that person.

The legal question is if there is a disparate impact.

On a personal level, I really don't like "we hire Python devs if you search on Google for python topics," but that's separate from saying there is a legal challenge here.

You'd have to argue that it is a perpetual monopoly due to the advantage - which I'd say is unlikely.

I had the "You speak our language..." message pop up while searching for some Python info and send me to Foobar a few days ago. So far I've just done one of the challenges. I'm sure it's a recruiting thing, but they seem like fun puzzles and it's obviously not the only way to get a job with Google, so good for them for building something fun.

I search for python stuff all the time and have never come across this link, I want to do some puzzles too!

Maybe it depends where you search from? If you're not in the US while searching you might not be that interesting.

i searched "python lambda" and it gave me the challenge. :) I was also randomly searching things like "NLP Python" and stuff earlier, to try and trigger it. I'm not a python programmer, so I don't have much related to this in my overall search history.

Huh, this is a really weird mix of subdomains. https://www.google.com/search?q=withgoogle.com

lol http://santadive.withgoogle.com/

interstellar.withgoogle.com

.withgoogle.com is used for mini-sites that are developed externally or do not meet the security requirements to be on a proper Google domain.

Do you know why the new interstellar movie is on that domain? https://interstellar.withgoogle.com

There is a tie-in game on the Play Store. Looks pretty mediocre.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.paramount....

Taking a look at the CSS code included on the page I see things related to "terminal-output" and "editor". This corresponds with what the poster says the page does. There seem to be "question_options" also; likely some sort of quiz. Also see reference to a countdown timer of some sort.

Note also that the application bounces you to /_ah/logout on deny. That is an admin URL within Google App Engine applications. I figure everything on "withgoogle.com" is hosted by GAE?

I checked waybackmachine for mirrors of older versions of the site, perhaps when it had more clues. Nothing. I did direct it to archive foobar.withgoogle.com though, since they did not yet have it cached.

Funny. Two years ago I had an on-site interview with Google. My recruiter understood that I was looking for a "data science" type position, and although I have Java and C experience, I preferred Python. He told me to expect interviewing in Python.

When I arrived, not a single one of the 5 technical interviewers I dealt with used Python and seemed to think I was crazy to be interviewing with Python. Needless to say, I did not receive an offer.

Same story for me, went for a front-end developer position, but didn't get any front-end developer questions.

I think google should make a system where you can play these puzzles by simply asking to and then agreeing not to share your solutions with anyone.

That way, any hacker news people who would like to do so can.

Sure people could enable google search history and google random python stuff, but any privacy minded hackers will have that disabled permanently ( as I do ). I'd like to note that I actually googled python lambda's myself recently, attempting to ascertain whether "lambda:0" is really the shortest way to make an empty object in python...

The fact that google themselves hasn't commented on this hacker news thread itself is somewhat disappointing to me.

> attempting to ascertain whether "lambda:0" is really the shortest way to make an empty object in python...

In what sense does "lambda:0" create an empty object? And how is it better than "object()"?

Specifically I was in need of making an "object" that could have attributes set on it. You can either use lambda:anything_syntax_ok or an empty class. The empty class is much bigger. Lambda is an ugly hack but it works...

For those who are confused, the local papers say Google is looking to hire 30K people?

I believe this app/page is part of that push. Bunch of problems to complete.

Surely not all programmers? Because if so, I may just be able to slip through the cracks!

How is this going to help you? Would you be happy with a job you're not good enough to do properly?

My comment was in jest. I have no desire to join Google, or any other large tech company.

http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_26903436/google-could...

"""But those buildings aren't ready for Google to occupy yet, and the first of the Sunnyvale buildings won't be completed until sometime in 2015."""

I got a little further.

If you append /login to the url, you get another script:

Points to:

https://foobar.withgoogle.com/_ah/logout?continue=https://ww...

I've tried some ways to login to appengine etc but didn't work.

https://appengine.google.com/_ah/logout?continue=https://foo...

I've managed to get it to log me out of my google account. Not sure what's up.

Also I get:

<span class="term-red">Error(6): Login unavailable. Try again later.</span>

I got one like this.

https://appengine.google.com/_ah/conflogin?continue=https://...

Throws a 500 error.

Same thing. Got 500 error by messing with that url. Seems like the idea is to chain that together in a way to login before you login.

I'm guessing in order to successfully log-in, you've to trigger yourself as someone who's eligible? Otherwise, it looks like everyone else is wondering how to make it work.

That sounds right, which implies that you have to be logged in to a google account and searching interesting terms to them. They'll redirect you to that and you can carry on.

I Google Python-related things all the time from work, including yesterday and today, but I prefer not to login to any of my Google accounts when doing so. I've not yet received any kind of popup or redirection to foobar.

> I Google Python-related things all the time from work, including yesterday and today, but I prefer not to login to any of my Google accounts when doing so.

Same thing here... I'm guessing that Google figures anyone cynical enough not to trust Google implicitly is a less desirable potential hire.

hmmm well I have a Python app running on GAE and I dont think I have been allowed access. With all the languages I work in they must be seeking something very specific.

https://foobar.withgoogle.com/staticfiles/img/sprite@2x.4d81...

Is it interesting this is in class "decoded"?

it's not uninteresting

I have search history disabled in my Google account settings. I guess that probably disables the login for me as well. I search for Python related stuff dozens of times a day.

Based on comments above, I: 1) Turned on google search history 2) searched for 'python lambda syntax' and 'mutex lock' 3) got the invite that opened the foo.bar UI

You get a terminal, from the terminal you request coding challenges. They have a minimal IDE to code in. Choice of language is Java or python. Only tried one challenge. YMMV

I got the invite a couple days ago but didn't "play" because I don't have the time or inclination, but I have to say the transition revealing the invite was pretty cool. Although I'm an app developer, based on my search history, I would say getting the invite is not based on how much or how often you search coding-related terms or your history of searching, but how nerdy your terms are, which alone is enough to overcome the barrier of entry (like the people here who triggered the invite searching for "python lambda" and "mutex lock"). So, after you get the invite and accept it, then you can log in on Foobar. The reason the HN link is so confusing is because the it goes to the Foobar login page, which assumes you already got the invite.

I am not sure that it's the normal kind of web puzzle.

The logins are being handled by an endpoint on AppEngine called 'ah'. Also this mysterious url: https://appengine.google.com/_ah/

Though there is definitely some semblance of it being a game, the iframe contains a reference to CSS file called rhgame.css.

There doesn't seem to be any avenue to log yourself in, by the looks of it they first send people to a registration URL of some description (probably a redirect from a specific set of search terms or something similar).

I am not really one for doing the kinds of puzzles where you just shoot in the dark for a while.. if there were actually clues/riddles hidden in the HTML/JS/CSS or similar then I would have alot more fun with it.

/_ah/ contains internal App Engine routes, like authentication, for all App Engine apps; not just Google's. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4408042/what-does-ah-mean...

The puzzle is not figuring out how to log in. You get an invite, then you get the challenges: http://i.imgur.com/xtCdf94.png

They are story problems. The first one is cycle detection for a singly-linked list. After solving that, you can request another (time remaining is reset). In the math category, its a subset sum problem: http://pastebin.com/SEZXhKHY

It seems if you have searched something which Google has interest in, you would be allowed to login. Below code on page points towards this:

  var g=document.getElementById("g");g.src="https://foobar.withgoogle.com/"+window.location.search

My guess is that they have set up some pattern matching or keyword matching against search queries for some particular programming questions related to whatever they are hiring for. NLP, maybe?

window.location.search returns the query string part of the current URL.

All that bit of code is doing is ensuring the frame on the page gets passed the query string the outer page had.

E.g. https://www.google.com/foobar/?hello -> https://foobar.withgoogle.com/?hello

Seems to be broken "message: '<span class="term-red">Error(6): Login unavailable. Try again later.</span>',"

Stay away. They would just waste your time.

It mystifies me especially that the logout URL for the login call is chained a number of times.

logoutUrl: 'https://foobar.withgoogle.com/_ah/logout?continue=https://ww...

It's just logging out for every domain/service, use RequestPolicy and you'll see the redirects for normal logouts.

If you've successfully logged in somehow, please share.

I don't want to share my google information with this app.

I got an invitation a couple days ago when I searched "mutex lock". Not sure whether search history makes a difference, but it worked for the gf too a couple minutes later: http://i.imgur.com/l4rGps5.png

Just google "python lambda" and wait.

Reminds me of HackThisSite & notpron. I have many happy memories of my peers sweating at the thought of not solving those puzzles. +1 to Google HR department, they know what they're doing.

It'd be amusing if it was a social experiment to see how many devs/wannabe devs frantically searched for Python topics after this foobar site was discovered. Like a contrast MRI to illuminate the people who wanted a job at Google.

yeah, no doubt... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/20/google_hiring_proced...

I didn't mean they'd hire good people, I just meant they know how to reach people.

Is there any reason to complete these puzzles if your resume/contacts are strong enough to get you an interview anyway? Apart from fun, that is?

Seems to be some kind of text adventure game?

https://foobar.withgoogle.com/staticfiles/css/rhgame.e6cf5ce...

.console {}

.prompt {}

.terminal {}

.cmd .cursor.blink { -webkit-animation: blink 1s infinite steps(1,start); animation: blink 1s infinite steps(1,start) }

But it seems I've already failed before even clicking on the Login link:

It looks like those css classes match this plugin: http://terminal.jcubic.pl/

"To login, you have to have logged in before"

Have you not heard the stories? Captain Barbossa and his crew of miscreants sail from the dreaded Isla de Muerta. It's an island that cannot be found except by those who already know where it is. http://pirates.wikia.com/wiki/Isla_de_Muerta

Except that's easily solved, by going there with someone who's been there before...

How did your guide get there the first time?

It's guides, all the way down.

He was born there?

He was hatched by the first chicken.

How did his parents get to the island? Were they born there as well? If so, how did the first settler found it? Or is this island the origin of life on Earth?

It doesn't say the the island was always findable only by those who already know where it is. This could have changed at some point.

True. Also most islands are younger then life on Earth, so the island could just appear under the first guide.

Isla Muerta is a piece of continental earth which has been slowly drifting away from the continent for generations. The guide's ancestry has lived there since before the island was an island.

With a little help from, umm, Dr. Google, seems that a song called "Been Here Before" by Jeremy Engik was included as an MP3 in winamp. Random coincidence? Evil plot? Artful noodling? You decide. Here's the song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQQydvAjVYI.

I got in to foobar a few days ago off of a search where the invitation window came up. It's a terminal interface were you can solve some challenges in python or java. I solved the first one right away, but then didn't have time to keep going until today. I can still log in, but it says my invitation has expired and I need to continue searching.

In the name of the file /staticfiles/css/rhgame.e6cf5ce7.css, that RH is probably HR (Human Resources Game).

hmm nice catch :) It would make sense in portuguese as RH stand for Recursos Humanos (literaly Human Resouces).

Could this have to do with Googles ARG Endgame[1]? It seems just cryptic enough to fit the bill.

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2014/10/7/6927605/welcome-to-endgame...

I'll go with this theory as well. Anyone have google glass and an augmented reality app from google? That login logo seems like an AR trigger waiting for someone to look at it the right way.

also found the rhgame reference in css...

Yeah, that image looks like it was designed for easy recognition. Picture search via Google Goggles doesn't return any results, though.

SVG sources gave nothing obvious. Unless they encoded data into path coordinates and/or colours.

it very well could the name of the css file is rhgame.e6cf5ce7.css <-- "RH GAME"

I would imagine, if this came out today, it's something related to the military. foo.bar == FUBAR? Maybe?

foo, bar, and baz are commonly used placeholders for function and variable names in programming examples.

but foobar or FUBAR abbreviated form of fu*d up beyond all recognition this could be related to hangar one as some one pointed out

edit: here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8590018

At least according to Wikipedia, this connection of foo bar and FUBAR is plausible but not proven. You forgot the 4th basic one, "qux" btw.

I believe they track our search results and they check if some keywords are there.. I just made a crawler (again) to get some Python related sentences from the web and automatically append them to the search query with the ei=XKZAJDKLJ code... Let's see if that makes sense....

This seems really dumb!

https://foobar.withgoogle.com/staticfiles/js/landing.5252068... : !function(){ "use strict"; function a(){ var a=document.getElementById("login"); a.addEventListener("click",function(a){a.preventDefault(),window.launchPopup()},!1)} window.handleAuth=function(a){ a.logoutUrl ? window.location.href=a.redirectUrl : window.location.reload() }, window.launchPopup=function(){ window.open("/login/","AppLogin","resizable,scrollbars,status,width=600,height=400") }, a() } ();

This script handles the login. a object looks something like this : Object { message: "<span class="term-red">Error(6): Login unavailable. Try again later.</span>", logoutUrl: "https://foobar.withgoogle.com/_ah/logout?continue=…ps://foob..., redirectUrl: "/denied/", allow: false}allow: falselogoutUrl: "https://foobar.withgoogle.com/_ah/logout?continue=https://ww...: "<span class="term-red">Error(6): Login unavailable. Try again later.</span>" redirectUrl: "/denied/" }

handleAuth() function will either take you tohttps://foobar.withgoogle.com/denied/ or just reload the page.

Google is just getting a tonne of analytics data.

It's strange that the <span> in the login object is never used. Also that the handleAuth function uses the existence of 'logoutUrl' to decide wether it should refresh or redirect, but uses it for nothing else.

You're assuming that's the only thing it will ever do. Just because you saw that particular code doesn't mean that's the same code served for every possible user.

My suspicion is that the HN traffic has overloaded their backend.

So maybe we just have to figure out the right redirectUrl?

I imagine that when you login with the right user account a different redirectUrl would get passed back.

I see no way of finding that out what that URL is though, short of someone who has access to the puzzle posting it.

Have any of you, who had disabled their search history and still got an invite ?

What does this Code means :

Examining the CSS class names there are:

'questions'

'terminal', 'console'

'editor', 'ace_editor'

'count_down_timer', 'prompter' and 'resizer'

and the media rules for mobile, laptops, desktops

The terminal/console references seem to match this plugin: http://terminal.jcubic.pl/

`ace_editor` is almost certainly referring to http://ace.c9.io/ ... but the JS component isn't loaded on the page.

I searched for "foobar login" in the search box and the first result was login to Hackerrank.com for Foobar contest. But it says the contest has ended.

It's interesting to see how people are just focused on solving the puzzle and see what's "behind" more than actually work for google :)

In one of the js files there is window.opener.handleAuth(..), perhaps changin allow from false to true can result. This seem to be a js related essue.

That was my thought too, although I'm not sure how it would be done.

I was thinking about a = document.getElementbyId("login"); a.addEvenListener("click",function(a){a.preventDefault()...}

Perhaps if one can avoid preventDefault the object login may has some href to the real login. Just guessing.

When you click the login button, the following function is called: launchPopup=function(){ window.open("/login/","AppLogin","resizable,scrollbars,status,width=600,height=400")}

Which opens https://foobar.withgoogle.com/login

There, an object a:

a = {

				message: '<span class="term-red">Error(6): Login unavailable. Try again later.</span>',
				logoutUrl: 'https://foobar.withgoogle.com/_ah/logout?continue=https://www.google.com/accounts/Logout%3Fcontinue%3Dhttps://appengine.google.com/_ah/logout%253Fcontinue%253Dhttps://foobar.withgoogle.com/denied/%26service%3Dah',
				redirectUrl: '/denied/',
				
				allow: false
			}

Is passed to the original window's handleAuth function:

window.handleAuth=function(a){ a.logoutUrl?window.location.href=a.redirectUrl:window.location.reload()}

It seems that the allow property of the object passed is never checked :(

Put more simply, you can redefine the handleAuth function to automatically set the allow property to true

window.handleAuth=function(a){ a.allow = true; a.logoutUrl?window.location.href=a.redirectUrl:window.location.reload()}

and then click the button.

But it won't help for the reasons explained above.

anyone not curious on why is the logo a pink square?

are you sure it's not salmon?

anyway, it doesn't look relevant to me.

What do you mean by relevant?

the logo is really strange, but I don't see any reference, inspecting the svg source wasn't useful to me either.

Uncaught SecurityError: Failed to read the 'localStorage' property from 'Window': Access is denied for this document.

Heh, I see that all the time! Oddly, this time not so much, but I permit cookies from *.google.com (perhaps you don't). But the "withgoogle.com" domain causes a redirect loop in the login popup…

unfortunately I do all my searching through DDG :(

You meant.. luckily!!

A strange strategy to hire only developers that aren't privacy and security conscious? Way to go, google.

I haven't been able to solve the puzzle - if there's any, however there is some interesting pattern in filenames.

/staticfiles/svg/error.33ab1eb5.svg -> 33ab1eb5 hexadecimal is 866852533, which seems to be a prime number.

I believe the probability is very low if unintended. Also other file names, can be factored more or less to 1 big prime number and few small primes.

The pattern is they're all hex, we need a cryptographer. The three numbers are

e6cf5ce7 67a53a45 5252068f

These hex strings are beginnings of md5 checksums of these files:

   sh-4.3$ md5sum error.33ab1eb5.svg 
   33ab1eb5129ee5085793166d2f691dae  error.33ab1eb5.svg

I believe the point of appending them to the name is a kind of versioning: one'd want to be able to change these files and cause everyone to drop their cached version. This way when one changes a file, the filename changes too (most likely), so the cached old version will not be used.

Thanks for the explanation!

You're correct.

It looks like they're using Django. You can configure it to add the md5 of static files to each name. [1]

[1] https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.7/ref/contrib/staticfile...

Have you ever seen the movie PI? You sound like Max, the main character.

Interestingly https://www.google.com/foobar/ and https://foobar.withgoogle.com/ seem to be the same page, but they have different source codes.

Actually https://www.google.com/foobar wraps https://foobar.withgoogle.com in an iframe with [absolute/top:0/left:0] positioning.

Also https://www.google.com/foobar uses JS to set the src of the iframe holding https://foobar.withgoogle.com and appends window.location.search to it.

withgoogle.com subdomain list www.fvm.withgoogle.com interstellar.withgoogle.com edudirectory.withgoogle.com atmosphere.withgoogle.com accelerate.withgoogle.com insgruene.withgoogle.com atmospheretokyo.withgoogle.com connectedclassrooms.withgoogle.com think.withgoogle.com smartypins.withgoogle.com streetart.withgoogle.com cardboard.withgoogle.com nikhelp.withgoogle.com docchinogame.withgoogle.com kickwithchrome.withgoogle.com yourtour.withgoogle.com candidatos.withgoogle.com trendstw.withgoogle.com spellup.withgoogle.com impactchallenge.withgoogle.com

I wonder if it works only for people in the US...

Anyone have any idea what this is all about yet?

a ploy to get developers to disable their ad-blockers in hopes of getting a foobar invite? :)

google image search the logo....gives some strange results. I doubt its related.

Given that it's Veteran day, and the term "foobar" is thought to be borrowed from military term "FUBAR," I am guessing that it is Google's attempt to recruit Tech-savvy Veterans.

Foobar is a fairly common term in programming as well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foobar#Usage_in_code

In the article you linked to, there is even a short discussion of the possible connection between "foo bar" and FUBAR. If your comment was meant as a rebuttal, it failed.

I'm not trolling when I say this, nor am I some sort of hater...

But, isn't Google the same company that we're always reading about, the one shaping up to be one of the most evil entities humanity has ever seen? After all, they pretend to protect net neutrality until it's their turn to play ball. They pretend to be pro-freedom, anti-big-brother (maybe you should read a bit about what Julian Assange has to say about Larry Page and Google in general, in case you missed all that), and anything else that will help them gain traction in the minds of the public, especially the techy youth.

They always just want to help, don't they. They're so thoughtful... Now, Google wants to put tiny electronics in our blood... what's next?

My point is, why would anyone want to support such a company? I suppose humanity had supported many bad things. Maybe my convictions don't match up well with the rest of the US anymore.

> the one shaping up to be one of the most evil entities humanity has ever seen?

quite an assertion.

I meant Eric Schmidt, by the way, not Larry Page.

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