Google humans.txt

[Sukotto]

I was expecting something like

  Hi! Thanks for visiting us.

  Feel free to look around in:
     /accounts/o8/id
     /ads/preferences/html/
     /ads/preferences/plugin
     /alerts/manage
     /books/about
     /booksrightsholders
     /globalmarketfinder/*.html

     [snip]

  Please stay out of:
     /accounts/o8
     /aclk
     /addurl/image?
     /ads/preferences/
     /advanced_blog_search
     /advanced_group_search
     /adwordsresellers
     /alerts/
     /analytics/admin/

     [snip]

[cromulent]

http://humanstxt.org/

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2131692

[stephth]

I really love this idea, a standard place to find the authors and the tools (!) used. But I'm not a big fan of the name. Calling it humans.txt to mirror robots.txt doesn't make much sense to me, even as a joke. I think it should be named something direct and comprehensible like credits.txt.

[ry0ohki]

Very cool, I've never heard of this before but really like the idea. Kind of a tech secret to find out who's behind a site.

[arturadib]

re: humanstxt.org - totally unrelated, but it's amazing how many facial expressions one can draw with one circle and three strokes.

[InfinityX0]

Seems appropriate (although somewhat fractal) - http://humanstxt.org/humans.txt.

[dude_abides]

http://www.bing.com/humans.txt should be there in about 2 weeks

[mrspeaker]

Damn, I was hoping they'd implemented the humans.txt captcha to keep out humans: http://www.mrspeaker.net/2010/07/15/humans-txt/

[eschulte]

no linebreaks? it's not animals.txt

gentlemen stay within 79 characters of the start of a line

[bradya]

The HTML5 boilerplate provides a boilerplate humans.txt

https://github.com/paulirish/html5-boilerplate/blob/master/h...

[Andrex]

Gmail has one too, I noticed the other day: https://mail.google.com/humans.txt

[nametoremember]

How did you notice it?

[riffraff]

it is the same as the one in the news item no?

[dexen]

Just for the fun factor: http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/robots.txt

(also, the comments in the source of the root page, http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/)

[nhebb]

"Google is built by a large team of engineers, designers, researchers, robots ..."

Wait, does that say "robots"? This is how it starts people, with a robot creating a humans.txt text file, posing as a friendly Googler. Bill Joy must feel so vindicated now.

[iwwr]

The Google motto is: "Robots scale, humans don't". Or otherwise, the resource constraints and reproduction rates are not good enough.

[ma2rten]

Here is a google query that lets you find people's human.txt files http://www.google.com/search?q=filetype%3Atxt+inurl%3Ahumans...

[jarin]

I think humans.txt is great, but it would be even better if the "standard" was to use a human/machine-readable format like YAML. The example on the website is really close to that.

Yes, I know it's an ironic request.

[paulirish]

Even at google we were debating how to structure a humans.txt.. and to make it machine readable, etc.

Personally I say fuck it.. While machine-parseable would be nice, that's not the point of this file.

More creativity without some sort of YAML constraint. In the HTML5 Boilerplate ours has effing stars, bro: https://github.com/paulirish/html5-boilerplate/blob/master/h...

[autalpha]

http://news.ycombinator.com/humans.txt

Unknown.

---- Awww... :(

[drKarl]

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&biw=192....

[nametoremember]

How is http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/humans.txt the 4th result? Google fail..

[lukifer]

Thanks, this is more what I was expecting looking at the headline. ;)

[tlrobinson]

http://flickr.com/humans.txt

[notJim]

I cry foul, unicorns and pandas are not humans.

[PhatBaja]

Why is this the top article on HN? Is it really that relevant to talk about this?

[gabrielroth]

It's an idea that was discussed here recently, and its adoption by Google is a sign that it's got some traction in high-profile places.

[slouch]

I was surprised to find out it has some traction.

[jschuur]

So basically, Google has too many people for them to be able to list them all. Or Google didn't want to try and list them, thinking they might miss someone, or subject them to poaching.

That seems to be a fundamental problem with humans.txt: The bigger, more interesting a project gets, it creates several reasons why it will only vaguely be able to lost anything, out of a conflict of interest, rather than give full credit to the team behind the site.

[sixtofour]

http://www.google.com/search?q=inurl%3Ahumans.txt

[bauchidgw]

better: "inurl:humans txt" filetype:txt

[jonah]

Not too much interesting in the headers. ;)

  x-content-type-options: nosniff

  Server: sffe [1]

[1] http://code.google.com/p/sffe/ ?

[rmccue]

I doubt those are the same sffe.

[cellis]

Which reminds me of Google Code Jam ... which starts in 2hrs. I'm not really expecting anything but i'll try the problems.

[kennymeyers]

The irony of the words contrasted with naming the file human.txt is not lost on me.