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
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?
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.
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
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.
<- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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? :-)
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)
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?
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.
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.
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
If it is, then it isn't a very well designed experiment because Google is a reputable and trusted (?) entity, so it isn't much of a leap to give access (especially when one already has gmai, gcal, etc. running in other tabs).
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.
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.
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.
177 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 222 ms ] threadSeems like you need to be "invited".
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?
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8588080
> 11 hours ago
Also, there are a lot of rabbits.
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://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.paramount....
Same thing here... I'm guessing that Google figures anyone cynical enough not to trust Google implicitly is a less desirable potential hire.
I believe this app/page is part of that push. Bunch of problems to complete.
"""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."""
[1] http://www.theverge.com/2014/10/7/6927605/welcome-to-endgame...
also found the rhgame reference in css...
Why do I find it irritating? Because it seems both elitist and adolescent, in a child-like "secret society" sort of way.
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.
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
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
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.
EDIT: Turns out you need a history of googling this stuff. My heavy Python phase in school was timed wrong it seems.
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? :-)
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?
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
edit: here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8590018
foo, bar, baz, qux, quux, corge, grault, garply, waldo, fred, plugh, xyzzy, thud
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.
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
anyway, it doesn't look relevant to me.
Stay away. They would just waste your time.
'questions'
'terminal', 'console'
'editor', 'ace_editor'
'count_down_timer', 'prompter' and 'resizer'
and the media rules for mobile, laptops, desktops
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:
<div class="error">...</div>
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foobar#Usage_in_code