Since this post is recording its death, here's the HN post that recorded its birth:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6429564
Edit: Another blog post from someone that noticed it: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2013/08/google-timer.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6429564
Edit: Another blog post from someone that noticed it: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2013/08/google-timer.html
https://www.online-stopwatch.com/timer/1hour/
Also from that thread, a Google engineer saying (out of context:) "We want our users be able to depend on our features and services, and if you can't do that, we're letting you down."
How long before Google realizes that these casual shut-downs of side projects are harming their image tremendously?
The Google i18n font repo (https://github.com/googlei18n) went private all of a sudden in the last few weeks and it broke my Yocto build (and hey boot2Qt team, if you're listening, you're broken too).
I've been steadfast in not adopting any of the Google toy side-projects (e.g. Brillo, Weave, Things, etc etc) but now I'm expanding that rule to anything and everything from them at all, including AOSP. It's all quicksand.
Unless you're referring to a different font repo they had?
https://github.com/googlei18n/noto-fonts → https://github.com/notofonts/noto-fonts
I don't know why original poster was linking to that!
I misunderstood, indeed. Kind of funny that a bunch of other HN discussion then took off about how it was evidence that Google as an entire giant company was now terrible! Ah, HN.
Same process used by Amazon, Meta, etc. And then they wonder why there's no more innovation at any of these places.
Whether that is working or not is harder to say, but i can at least say that high level googlers have all been quite good in my experience
The former is obviously true, if you go back far enough. Aiming for concentrating talent, the bar you can set if you need 10-20-30 engineers a year is wildly different than what you can do if you need thousands. Same applies at team level; it's possible to put together a top world-class team of 10 people, a struggle to put together 100, and beyond that order probably not going to happen, for a host of reasons.
The latter though, doesn't seem to be true at all. I don't think I know anyone in tech who holds google technically in the same regard they were held in 15 years ago as an organization. Individual teams, sure.
Google does not need thousands of engineers, they simply don't have enough financial pressure to stop themselves from hiring dead weight.
Right there in the About panel: Noto fonts, except for CJK and emoji
If there's some technical/licensing/political issue about the font sure, whatever, I get it. I'm just saying it's all brittle and obviously a lesson that I need to internally fork every. single. thing. when working with Yocto.
> This repository is in the process of being migrated.
...oh
If it doesn't involve ads, Google will kill it off at some point.
Actually, never mind that. They know. They just don’t care (for a variety of reasons).
You cannot rely on the managers that you want to let go to implement the change that you need.
I also cannot generate the change I need by myself. It’s a losing proposition to expect too much.
They don't care because they're not incentivized to care. It will remain like that until maintaining projects well is at least as good a path to a promotion as creating new projects.
But then there's equally a danger of becoming IBM, which would be worse. (In this case, if Google creates something that people need then pull it, then other open-source people can replicate it).
I think the sane middleground is for them to clearly identify what's experimental, what may be discontinued/deprecated/pulled, and to communicate those expectations and timeframes, in advance. Even Yahoo did this.
That might not work well for Google specifically, thinking about how long GMail was branded as "beta". Also, much of their consumer-facing things need network effects (think their piles of messengers)…
Stop using their services, stop giving them free data. Stop giving them access to your life to sell to the highest bidder.
It will. You will see some day.
Until something big changes they reap record profits off our data and people continue to be the product while their customers continue to be the advertisers.
They'll just what microsoft did, and say "look, we are good people now". The world will forgive and forget, and use their product hapilly. But because the underlying cause hasn't change, only the context, as soon as the context will change again, we will be back to square one.
One I like better, no ads, no stopwatch function though: https://e.ggtimer.com/
One one hand, sucking the life out of the web ecosystem and then killing their vampire implementation is really bad.
On the other hand, the alternative to shipping a DOOMED implementation is Google not shipping these in the first place, which people also don't want.
The least the company could do to not destroy the ecosystem would be to open source or at least write up these implementations for someone to rebuild black-box.
Realistically, any developer could write a blog with black-box reimplementations.
An alternative is to keep a team explicitly for life support of these projects.
It does have a better UI and it's nice that it supports running multiple concurrent timers though.
Ideally it would support sending a browser push notification so you know the timer is done even if your volume happens to be on mute.
There's an iOS and macOS app called Due [1] that has all the bells and whistles if anyone else uses a lot of timers regularly.
I honestly wonder if they might be able to solve the issue with branding.
That kind of ethos used to exist at Google circa 2004 and was the way the majority of engineer and the few product manager behaved.
Very few of these folks are left and are a very tiny minority.
Most folks at Google these days don't give a rat's ass about that kind of thinking nor about the company itself, they're just here for the GSUs and the free food.
Give how often they sunset things it often feels like a solid argument.
> Yet again I am reminded that my google is not necessarily the same as 'your' google. Just like how "define: something" doesn't show a dictionary definiton for me anymore, a functionality i used all the time. And now can't be sure whether was actually removed, or just removed for me!
> Google software engineer here. These gripes are legitimate. We want our users be able to depend on our features and services, and if you can't do that, we're letting you down.
Still a legitimate gripe nine years later, it seems...
Having seen the video many times it should have been easy.
Nope.
8 pages with cutoutd for videos and gifs all of the exact same 'fail video' of apparently a person who attempted to be swallowed by one purposefully and chickened out.
200 hits on that one stupid video. Articles. Videos. Listicles.
Changed to duck duck go and it was the first freaking hit.
Old tech needs to die. All of faang especially are just dust, let them blow away.
Google then sat on the sidelines as GitHub grew to a tens of billions dollar business, and now Google spends billions trying to get more developers on GCP which they could have gotten for free if they still owned the portal to the code all the developers use.
A lot of Google wisdom sounded a lot wiser before we saw how it fully played out.
I can’t. They killed that feature.
Darwin was a balanced, caring and conscientiousness, highly complex figure who placed immense value in emotion, family, and ethics.
Google is cold, callous calculating machine that chews up its users and other businesses to sacrifice them on the alter of money.
[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/darwins-subterranean...
Nope, evolution is the only game in town. We can not replace it, we can only play it.
To be fair though, the entries on killedbygoogle seem to average ~5 years before death. By that metric 9 years is a respectable run.