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Comment by _wmd | Hacker News Reader

A domain just for developers! Until it abruptly shuts down Feb 19, 2021. Why would anyone trust Google with something with any kind of long-term requirements as important as a name? They should have registered ".chump" instead, because that is really what users of a Google-managed TLD are declaring

"Dear VALUED developer, thanks so much for being a part of the .dev experiment! After a long hard period of staring at our shoes, we realized we cannot extract sufficient value from our users in this manner. As of midnight, your name will automatically be migrated to our newer, better, faster TLD, .plus, the future of the open web"

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I don't think this is a huge concern - at least ICANN has the power to designate a successor registry, and I guarantee someone will break down the doors trying to get that particular gtld.

Yeah it will never happen. As long as you pay the registration fee you won’t lose your domain even if the registry goes bankrupt.

A TLD "with benefits" from Google is a money-printing press. While Google has a certain track record, this makes it rather unlikely for them to discontinue it in the near future.

I mean, I get your point, but I think this is a meme exclusive to HN. Other than Google Reader, there really isn't much Google has shut down without having a newer, better product you can transition to.

When it comes to something like this (AKA not a consumer product, makes money, relatively easy to run, etc), I genuinely can't see them shutting down a TLD like this.

If anything, the complaint should be the lack of official support you should probably expect for it.

Google Wave shut down without a replacement google service. [0]

Google code shut down without a replacement google service. [1]

Google plus is shutting down too. [2]

[0] https://support.google.com/answer/1083134?hl=en

[1] https://opensource.googleblog.com/2015/03/farewell-to-google...

[2] https://support.google.com/plus/answer/9195133?hl=en

Also, can I add Google Code Search? That thing was such an incredibly valuable resource for figuring out how to work around inane edge cases in eg GTK. Just search for the function that's giving you issues, and find a dozen projects with extensive comments describing their workarounds.

Google Inbox is about to close in a month or two.

You may've missed the recent news on Google Fiber pulling out of Louisville (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19106998) as well as Google Plus shutting down.

Some folks make a hobby out of the stuff Google spins up and then abandons: https://killedbygoogle.com

This is an amazing list. It might not be 100% fair since a few products got replaced with something better, but I think most didn't.

Fundamentally, Google is just an advertising company that happens to employ very smart people. If you go to work for Google, you have to understand from the outset that you're working for an advertising company and you're not going to change the world. You might be allowed to work on a fun project, but if it doesn't directly serve the needs of advertising it will be shut down. But hey, it'll look good on your resume.

The 'Google Graveyard' meme is known far and wide beyond HN - I'm a long time member on a [n ostensibly] design-focused forum where it's been a long time running gag (of the acerbic kind) too.

Tlds generally won’t be shut down and can’t be shut down.

Yeah, that won’t happen. Even if a registry goes out of business the domains and tlds will still resolve, most likely operated by another registry.

Domains will be useful for Google search ...

Somebody makes this post on every HN thread involving Google now. But the three big public deprecations I'm aware of are Reader, Inbox, and G+. All consumer products. All the other stuff on that killed by Google site is stuff I've barely even heard of, and all consumer products.

To my knowledge, no major GCP component has ever been deprecated. Am I missing something? This seems like it has just become a groupthink HN meme at this point.

> To my knowledge, no major GCP component has ever been deprecated. Am I missing something? This seems like it has just become a groupthink HN meme at this point.

It's not like these complainers actually read articles they're commenting on. You could see this in the Chromecast DNS rantfest - the path is "Google in title => rant about your pet peeve" not "Read article => complain about topical thing".

> But the three big public deprecations I'm aware of are Reader, Inbox, and G+.

Google Code. Also Wave and half a dozen chat apps, but Code was a serious one that broke a lot of the developer web.

>Google Code. Also Wave and half a dozen chat apps, but Code was a serious one that broke a lot of the developer web.

What did it break?

It hosted repos, and broke links to those repos and links within them. It also broke processes that relied on the repo, e.g. automatic issue creation in CI, but that's less serious.

URLs that change without good reason are a PITA.

They have a process for setting up redirects. They also provide read only access to all public code AIUI:

https://code.google.com/archive/about

Setting up a redirect works if you are the administrator of the project...and are still alive. Migrating a project was simple if it didn't have a wiki. There are a lot of details that caused some real headaches. I remember it being like a mini Y2k at the time, and there's no telling how much we just collectively lost from it.

This is simply incorrect. As the person who (led? handled?) the shutdown/archiving, the vast majority of the 'developer' web had gone to github. The handful of active projects were given white glove treatment once we decided to shutter the site.

> the vast majority of the 'developer' web had gone to github

I see hundreds of thousands of repositories on Github responding to the search "Automatically exported from code.google.com", which means they only transferred _after_ the shutdown was announced (when the export tool went live). Any wikis would have had to be hand-converted to not be broken, since the markup between the two systems was not compatible. I mean, thank you for handling it as well as it was handled, and thank you for (if you were part of that) the export tool, but let's not pretend that it wasn't disruptive.

I heard that old google cloud offering price was increased 10-fold on short notice. Not the same, but close

Thats made up, but ok.

It happened, but in the transition from preview to product, so not at all the same thing as a deprecation.

https://www.informationweek.com/cloud/platform-as-a-service/...

Every year google deprecates at least one "cloud" service/api. Not to mention the appengine pricing story.

The famous app engine pricing increase happened when app engine left preview. People still mention it often, but it was never meant for production usage while at the preview price.

You haven't been watching long enough https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/deprecations/

Most of those sound like "you have to upgrade to the latest version"?

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