10 ms·
Are you a Facebook employee?
- richchan 15y agoI hope there isn't a flash app on Facebook that is using just that to decide whether to show an employee/admin interface.. Will be quite easy to spoof the result of that page if it is client-side.
- gojomo 15y agoNow, if you were to browse Facebook through a proxy that always tampered with this result in transit to say you were an employee... might some stray client-side code do anything interesting because it trusted that response?
- evan_ 15y agotry it and find out. I doubt anything ever even hits that programmatically.
- Shenglong 15y agoCan someone please edit a question mark into this title? It's frustrating me.
- ry0ohki 15y agoI'm not? What the hell was that walk in the woods for then??!!
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- h00k 15y agoSo, what's the point?
- untog 15y agoI imagine there would be some utility in knowing whether FB employees use your site/app. Though there'd be some complex cross-domain issues to solve first.
- hugh3 15y agoWell, maybe you got hired by facebook but can't remember. If you check this and it says yes, you'd better hurry up and go to work!
- seanalltogether 15y agoHonestly I'm not sure. Facebook's crossdomain policy disallows access from external domains, so you can't load this from a random Flash or JS script.
- gibybo 15y agoHm, I think you can still invoke it jsonp style and overload the Object constructor in older browsers though, right? This would not only tell you whether they were a FB employee, but perhaps more importantly, their facebook UID without needing them to agree to any OAuth access.
- dbloom 15y agoThat only works if it's surrounded by parenthesies. A bare object literal is not syntactically valid JavaScript.
- sxtxixtxcxh 15y agoi think jquery can deal with a straight json response, but i may be wrong.
- flyt 15y ago
- pettazz 15y agoI'm going to start using this as an endpoint for stats checks on my own stuff to see if Facebook employees are visiting my site.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- jannes 15y agoThe same origin policy in browsers will stop you from doing that.
- romey 15y agoCan't you use a JSONP request?
- MiguelHudnandez 15y agoJSONP is a way to consume a feed from a willing website on a different domain name. I say "willing" because the feed must be presented in JSONP -- there is no way for you to alter a JSON feed into a JSONP feed without using some sort of proxy. Because you'd need to use a proxy on your domain to convert the feed to JSONP, you would then lose access to the client's cookies for the target domain. That basically means that no, you can't use a JSONP request to defeat the same-origin policy.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- yid 15y agoFor what it's worth, I am, and I still get a 0.
- hugh3 15y ago"I looked into it more deeply and I found that apparently what happened is that yid was laid off five years ago and no one ever told him about it; but through some kind of glitch in the payroll department, he still gets a paycheck. So we just went ahead and fixed the glitch."
- stiller 15y agoSo, uh, yid has been let go?
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- bmm6o 15y agoWe get it, you guys have seen Office Space. It doesn't contribute positively to the discussion.
- KleinmanB 15y agoThe only thing that stands as a non-contribution is your need to publicly proclaim a lack of a sense of humor.
- sciurus 15y agoIt's occasionally helpful to explain to people why they're being downvoted. Comments that consist of pop culture references usually aren't treated kindly.
- idrinkmusic 15y ago
- the_cat_kittles 15y agowow, I am the 49,200,124th user? we should see who can get the lowest score...
- shadered 15y agoMine is less than 50...
- jforman 15y ago9391, back from ye olde "The Facebook" days
- gammarator 15y ago11##
- hammock 15y ago1,509,###. Joined in 2004 when it was still thefacebook.com. Winning so far (but not for long I imagine) How many people here realize they are outing themselves by posting the whole number?
- h00k 15y ago{"user":0,"is_fb_employee":false} No facebook account here. Do I win?
- flyt 15y agoZuck is UID 4. UIDs are no longer allocated in ascending order since maybe early 2007ish. Here's the full history of how FB UID's have been assigned over time: http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-history-of-Facebooks-user-ID-numbering-system http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-history-of-Facebooks-user-I...
- base2john 15y ago{"user":842915,"is_fb_employee":"Dish Washer"} ? WTF?
- hugh3 15y agoHey, as long as the dish washers get stock options it's still a pretty good job.
- Jarred 15y agoI think this is_fb_employee variable is to check if they should be running the internal testing version of Facebook. Facebook has a subdomain which, in their offices everyone is redirected to. It's something like 'preview.facebook.com'. It houses the latest testing build of Facebook. This way all the employees are testing Facebook just by being on it, and they have other people testing their new builds for short periods of time (~2 weeks). Chances are, the server checks if the user is at an IP of a Facebook office, and that's the only condition where this is true. This would make sense because if they just redirect users to Facebook.com in their offices to preview.facebook.com, then nearly anyone could do it. This would also help prevent leaking of new features as well, because employees wouldn't be able to access them outside of Facebook. They mention this in the Facebook Effect (http://www.amazon.com/Facebook-Effect-Inside-Company-Connecting/dp/1439102112 http://www.amazon.com/Facebook-Effect-Inside-Company-Connect...). Or, at least the part about an subdomain for testing their website in-house. Everything else was me analyzing that.
- mitchty 15y agoWhy not just setup a proxy.pac file and proxy all internal ip's to the test domain?
- spiantino 15y agonot sure what a .pac file is, but yes, this is how it works.
- mitchty 15y agoJust a javascript script file that tests for where ip-wise the user originates from and determines if you use a proxy for the site or connect directly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_auto-config http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_auto-config
- drivebyacct2 15y agoI don't understand. If they're proxying requests, what would this variable ever be used for? This is at an endpoint for a client or their javascript to consume (or just as a recruiting-marketing tool). That would be redundant if they're proxying requests and insanely silly if it's the only way (instead of proxying) that they flex new features on... as they'd be visible in the javascript and it would be trivial to spoof the response to be "yes". I have no doubt that their internal employees or a subset of them are using a different build of Facebook, and maybe I'm missing something, but I don't understand how this is related.
- taylorbuley 15y agoWell played, Facebook: {"is_fb_employee":"maybe soon? https://www.facebook.com/careers/department.php?dept=engineering https://www.facebook.com/careers/department.php?dept=enginee...}
- slug 15y ago{"is_fb_employee":"maybe soon? https://www.facebook.com/careers/department.php?dept=engineering https://www.facebook.com/careers/department.php?dept=enginee...}
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- hjalle 15y agoThats funny actually =)
- idrinkmusic 15y agoHow do they know that I actually fit in that department and not in Marketing? Like... I never put who my employee was or my profession.. EDIT: Oh, I did put my profession. Stupid me.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- jturn 15y agoI thought it was implying that if you are the type of person to find that link you could be in the engineering department (ie it isn't dynamic)
- peterhunt 15y agowe read hacker news :)
- mahmud 15y agoIf you don't have a facebook account, it assumes you're smart enough to go to engineering.
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- deleted 15y ago
- csomar 15y agoAccording to Facebook, I might be soon an employee. {"is_fb_employee":"maybe soon? https://www.facebook.com/careers/department.php?dept=engineering"}
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- ry0ohki 15y agoThey changed it since this hit the top of Hacker News, I'm REALLY impressed with the speed of rolling something like that out on the fly.
- cbr 15y agoThat's good; I was sad they were preemptively rejecting me when I saw "false".
- alastairpat 15y agoNo, they haven't; if you open it in a new tab the referrer goes (at least in Safari), so you get 'false' - just click on the link in the same window and you'll get 'maybe'.
- Kirchart123 15y ago{"is_fb_employee":"maybe soon? https://www.facebook.com/careers/department.php?dept=engineering https://www.facebook.com/careers/department.php?dept=enginee...} Maybe soon ... Engineering department .. I HOPE SO! ..im actually an engineer
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- dreamdu5t 15y agoWho cares? Getting excited over some random graph value used internally... okay? I mean, I already assumed FB had a staging server. Why does this interest people so much?
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- goldmab 15y agoThat's cute but it's not accurate. I interviewed there over two years ago and I appear to be blacklisted, since whenever I look at any of their job descriptions I get this: "Hey, we have reviewed your application and unfortunately don't have an opening for you." I can't really square that with "Maybe soon?"
- nbm 15y agoThat sounds like a bug - from what I'm told by a recruiter, you should be able to apply again by now. You can also start the process by emailing the address in the text at the bottom of job once you click on "Apply for this position".
- weel 15y agoIf ever the online recruiting system gives you trouble but you think you ought to be able to apply, send your application to HR by email. (careers@fb.com should do it, I believe) And tell them about the bug too, so they can get it fixed. Also, if you know somebody who works at Facebook, try to get them to refer you instead of applying directly. (Just email them your resume and ask if they can forward it.) This applies not just to Facebook but to most other big companies, especially popular employers that get a lot of resumes every week. Our recruiters try hard to evaluate all the resumes they receive, but if you guessed that they probably look more closely at ones that reach them by way of an internal referral, I think you guessed correctly.
- leon_ 15y agolet's build a better and stronger platform for ... clicking virtual cows!
- helloburin 15y agoI think it checks the referral page you came from when clicking it and shows the {"is_fb_employee":"maybe soon? https://www.facebook.com/careers/department.php?dept=engineering https://www.facebook.com/careers/department.php?dept=enginee...} when coming from HN. If I open a new window and copy/pasta the URL, it'll say false :)
- mahmud 15y agoln -s user_info.php user_info
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- clarkevans 15y agoIt appears that this web service has a rather obvious defect, the Content-Type is set to "text/html; charset=utf-8" yet, the response body seems to be JSON rather than HTML. The proper Content-Type should be "application/json" with Content-Disposition to "inline". Perhaps they didn't do this since some browsers ignore the Content-Disposition with this Content-Type, and prompt to download the content regardless. Even so, "text/html" is still wrong. Since the content actually isn't intended for a JSON parser, but, a human, "text/plain" would be the most conservative (and not wrong).
- swapsmagic 15y agoOk looks like if the url is referred from Hacker News, then they are displaying, {"is_fb_employee":"maybe soon? https://www.facebook.com/careers/department.php?dept=enginee... https://www.facebook.com/careers/department.php?dept=enginee...} Even if you are logged out. I am not an facebook employee so if i just paste the url in address bar and enter it, it shows: is_fb_employee: false with my UID. If i logged out, it shows UID: 0 with is_fb_employee: false. It's a nice idea to attract ppl from different site and based on the site domain, give them relevant career page url. (May be an intern project) So for HN, it's engineering career page, if the referral site is relevant to some other domain (i.e. sales/marketing) then they will give http://www.facebook.com/careers/department.php?dept=sales http://www.facebook.com/careers/department.php?dept=sales. Not sure how much data facebook have of other websites for categorizing majority of the websites in to different domain, but i feel Google can do much better with the same concept.