
bar.foo - jingwen
http://bar.foo
======
growt
So now I finally know who made that awful smart compose thing in gmail [1]
(the one that hides all but 2 lines of the message that you're trying to
write, most of the time): Maria what have you done ?!!!

[1] [https://bar.foo/gmail.html](https://bar.foo/gmail.html)

~~~
nkurz
Google finally added an preference setting that provides a reasonably sized
compose window, but (presumably) in keeping with their new interface
guidelines, it's well hidden to prevent accidental discovery.

To change it, you need to open a compose window and click on the "down arrow"
in the lower right corner. You can then choose the option "Default to full
screen". It still pretends to be a pop-up window, but it's large enough for
real use.

Arguably, this is a reasonable place to put this setting: it affects only the
compose window, so the setting is only accessible from the compose window. But
personally I never would have found it without searching the web for a
solution.

------
iainmerrick
"It's really an exciting field because you can have a group of 2, 3 or 4
people produce something that is used by hundreds of millions or billions of
people using your software and benefiting from the capabilities that it has.
There are very few careers where small groups of people can have this kind of
influence..."

Why do they need tens of thousands of engineers, then?

~~~
heurist
I'm guessing Jeff Dean is not a typical Google engineer.

~~~
wetmore
For whatever reason the non-technical public has this impression of Google
engineers (or just engineers in general) as really smart people who do things
they don't understand.

This is the impression typical Google engineers have of Jeff Dean.

------
gtrubetskoy
Nice try, Google, but most of us are not willing to relocate to the overpriced
and not very family-friendly areas where your offices are.

~~~
mehta
You should visit Google - Orange county. It's an awesome office in a great
location and it's family friendly :).

(I work there)

~~~
Bjorkbat
Heh, I always get a bit of a giggle when I read sentences like this that end
with a ":)" or similar emoji.

I have this weird mental image of your desk being being suspended above a tank
of sea bass with lasers, and unless you tell me about how awesome the office
is on hacker news, they're going to lower you in.

So you comply, but you include that little emoji at the end as a subtle cue
that maybe not all is as it seems.

I really hope I'm not responsible for you being fed to the sea bass.

~~~
mehta
I think that is just a habit(or reflective of my state of mind). They do not
sacrifice employees for good reviews on Hacker News (at least not that I am
aware of...).

/note-to-self: I should really find out if there is a hidden room somewhere in
this office where this happens

------
iamandoni
As a correlation to this site, there is a secret programming challenge within
google at: [http://www.google.com/foobar/](http://www.google.com/foobar/)

You have to get invited to it (via searching the correct keywords, etc. I got
invited when googling about dependency injection). It is a series of
programming challenges that get really difficult. But after completing them, I
got a final round interview at Google, which was pretty cool.

~~~
peachepe
Does anybody know if it only invites you if you're in specific countries?

~~~
iamandoni
I do not know about inviting - as I was only invited in the US. However, when
they asked for which office I wanted to interview, I chose from the global
list of offices.

------
morley
Maybe it's too early on a Monday and my reading comprehension is off, but I'm
not sure I get the point of this. Is this just a fancy blog for engineering
stories as a means of hiring more engineers? If so, I'm not sure the magazine-
like reporting style is speaking to me here. I'd much rather see these types
of stories in a first-person, conversational blog format. But maybe I'm
missing the point, or I'm the wrong target.

~~~
inglor
Companies like Google used to traditionally pick the best engineers because
they were years ahead in mentality.

That is not the case anymore and there are a lot more people who choose to
work for other companies - even large ones.

It only makes sense that among the ton of other effort Google pours towards
hiring good engineers it does this.

This is just a marketing venue.

------
inopinatus
To me the most interesting of these was the solution to collaborative editing
in Google Docs. Sadly the description provided is a helicopter view. It
appears to reference OT[1] and is suggestive of the event sourced pattern[2].
My interest is piqued; can anyone reference an in-depth publication/paper on
the D&I of their "collaboration engine"?

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation)

[2]
[http://martinfowler.com/eaaDev/EventSourcing.html](http://martinfowler.com/eaaDev/EventSourcing.html)

~~~
javaJake
Google Wave used operational transformation in their protocol[1]. I've always
assumed that the lessons learned on Wave got reused in the Google Docs
rewrite.

[1] [http://www.waveprotocol.org/whitepapers/operational-
transfor...](http://www.waveprotocol.org/whitepapers/operational-transform)

------
shimon
Minor factual correction: The Google Docs article on this site says "When
Google launched Docs in 2012"... but Docs launched way earlier than that (Feb
2007 according to
[https://www.google.com/webhp?q=when%20did%20google%20docs%20...](https://www.google.com/webhp?q=when%20did%20google%20docs%20launch)).

~~~
snewman
FWIW, it was actually 2006:

[http://techcrunch.com/2006/10/10/google-docs-spreadsheets-
la...](http://techcrunch.com/2006/10/10/google-docs-spreadsheets-launches/)

However, the realtime collaboration described in this article came from a
ground-up rewrite, really an entirely new product, that did launch in 2012 or
thereabouts. The original Google Docs word processor would synchronize at
intervals, on the order of every 15 to 30 seconds. The new architecture is
much more realtime. It also contained a completely new approach to in-browser
editing, doing away with content-editable in favor of a pure JavaScript
editing+layout engine that allowed for pagination and other features not
supported by browser content-editable implementations.

(Source: I was part of Writely - the startup that became the word processing
side of Docs. We launched around June 2005, were acquired by Google in March
2006, quietly relaunched on Google infrastructure at the end of June, and I
don't recall the exact launch date of the combined "Docs & Spreadsheets"
product but October 2006, as stated in the article linked above, sounds about
right. My only involvement in the rewrite was to hand that team a list of
reasons I thought that what they wanted to do wasn't possible.)

------
subie
Such hover, Much animation.

~~~
btdiehr
One thing I find interesting about programming forums is without fail, a good
portion of every discussion divulges into off topic, largely useless and
redundant commentary on one of the following:

\- Page uses JavaScript (when it doesn't need to)

\- The page uses too many animations

\- The page size is too large

While I love hacker news discussion for the most part, these reoccurring
themes seem to never, ever die.

~~~
coldtea
If a page breaks when I have Javascript disabled I just assume I am a bizarro
troglodyte and deserve it.

I don't know why people assume they somehow deserve to see the page and then
complain about it.

~~~
blub
You're not a bizarro X or Y, you just gave up on expecting that front end web
developers have some professional pride and self-restraint left to not use a
ton of JS frameworks plus 3rd party tracking and advertising for the simplest
HTML documents.

------
tambourine_man
Someone should tell those bright engineers that hover doesn't work on mobile.

------
dheera
How do I register a .foo domain? Namecheap asks me to "make offer" and various
other domain registrars ask me to "pre-order".

~~~
kevinoconnor7
For all the new gTLDs you can go to nic.tld to find WHOIS info and usually a
list of registrars. In this case nic.foo goes to Google's registry, which
doesn't seem to offer the TLD for sale yet (or if it ever will).

------
dclowd9901
Cool site, but it's really too bad Google isn't willing to open up offices
outside of California (like, say, Portland? :) ). I'd like to see them
innovate the remote teams space, but maybe that's too difficult a challenge
for them?

~~~
morgante
> Cool site, but it's really too bad Google isn't willing to open up offices
> outside of California (like, say, Portland? :) ).

Uh, Google has offices all over the world (including major engineering in
other US cities).

[https://www.google.com/about/company/facts/locations/](https://www.google.com/about/company/facts/locations/)

------
tonetheman
where can you get a foo domain... all my google searches came up with nothing.

~~~
wging
IANA website says it's administrated by Google:
[https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/foo.html](https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/foo.html)

However, they don't advertise it:
[https://www.registry.google/about/domains.html](https://www.registry.google/about/domains.html)

So there may be no way.

~~~
Artemis2
That's really crappy on their part, like the .dev controversy.

------
DroidX86
Regardless of the content the design of that website is pretty great. The
pages load almost instantly! Can anyone with more front-end knowledge tell me
what's going on under the hood?

------
giancarlostoro
Off-topic in a way but discovered through this domain's nic.foo : Interesting
that Google now has .google but search.google isn't a thing yet. :)

~~~
chei0aiV
[http://com.google/](http://com.google/) is though...

------
happytrails
Must be getting desperate to find talent.

------
aidenn0
This fails to resolve for me:

    
    
        Host bar.foo not found: 2(SERVFAIL)

------
orliesaurus
they really needed to register a .foo TLD for this?

~~~
new_hackers
I think its interesting that the original term 'fubar', which has an adult and
cynical meaning, has morphed into something that literally could mean
anything: 'foo' 'bar'. The fact that this thing that has no real meaning is
meaningful enough to warrant a TLD, is perhaps fubar in its truest form?

~~~
sbierwagen
You're about 40 years too late to complain about foo and bar being debased:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasyntactic_variable](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasyntactic_variable)

~~~
new_hackers
not complaining, just observing. I realize that we have been bastardizing TLDs
for a long time to cleverly apply them to programming terms (I'm looking at
you .io). Perhaps '.foo' is the TLD that could mean anything?

------
halflings
Your comment follows a worrying trend I've been seeing on HN:

1) Start humbly by saying you might be wrong / you're not sure / ...

2) Criticize the work showed in the link from your personal opinion, without
real arguments.

3) End in the same way: "Just saying." "I hope I'm wrong".

Yes, this "just a fancy blog for engineering stories as a means of hiring more
engineers". I'm not sure how one can say such a precise thing without being
sure.

~~~
nkozyra
I believe this is an inherent effect of upvoting/downvoting. In an effort to
protect against negative sentiment, qualifiers and requests for correction are
included.

It's intended to dull the edges of an opinion (correct me if I'm wrong here,
I'm not entirely sure).

~~~
Arnt
That sounds nice.

Haters gonna hate, I've heard. But maybe one or two haters had second thoughts
while adding insincere hedges and qualifications, and decided not to post
their bilge after all? Or decided to read the original posting before
commenting?

I'm going to hope so. The thought will make me read a hundred hedges and
qualifications with a smile.

------
lisper
Headline should be:

bar.foo: Stories from software engineers at Google

------
sidcool
Most comments here are so off topic. No one has so far discussed about
opportunities at Google and how can one get in.

Let's take this as a challenge guys

~~~
Redoubts
Well, the join us button just directs people to the standard Careers page, so
I'm not sure what's interesting about that part.

