Ian Hickson

I found myself asking the same questions after reading this. You might consider reading the followup post: https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627532&count=1 It suggests that, in spite of his problems with management, the author remains bullish about Flutter (and likely Dart).

Not trying to create a conspiracy theory, but I wonder whether this has any relation to Ian Hickson's departure from Google/Flutter team [1], where he specifically called out some names: > Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google. A symptom of this is the spreading contingent of inept middle management. Take Jeanine Banks, for example, who manages the department that somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other things) Flutter, Dart, Go, and Firebase. Her department nominally has a strategy, but I couldn't leak it if I wanted to; I literally could never figure out what any part of it meant, even after years of hearing her describe it. Her understanding of what her teams are doing is minimal at best; she frequently makes requests that are completely incoherent and inapplicable. She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set. She is completely unable to receive constructive feedback (as in, she literally doesn't even acknowledge it). I hear other teams (who have leaders more politically savvy than I) have learned how to "handle" her to keep her off their backs, feeding her just the right information at the right time. Having seen Google at its best, I find this new reality depressing. [1]: https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373

The original blog post was migrated back to my blog when Google+ shut down: https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1344621190&count=1

https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1714717681&count=1 is a sensible estimation

Lol. Hixie quit. https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373&count=1

It feels like a large bundle to me, so they probably want to go for selling phones and computers much more heavily? Sounds interesting if you are okay with going all in with Google stuff, I'm not sure it's good news if you are using Android or Chrome otherwise. Also, it feels like this merger will lead to a similar article to Hixie's in about 5 years: > A symptom of this is the spreading contingent of inept middle management. Take XYZ, for example, who manages the department that somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other things) Flutter, Dart, Go, and Firebase. Her department nominally has a strategy, but I couldn't leak it if I wanted to; I literally could never figure out what any part of it meant, even after years of hearing her describe it. https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373&count=1

From that thread, a related post from last year: Reflecting on 18 years at Google (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38381573 https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373&count=1

The blog post this discusses is freely available: https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373. I don’t see it agreeing fully with the title of this post. It says: “Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google. A symptom of this is the spreading contingent of inept middle management.” So, it claims “inept middle management” is a symptom, not a cause.

I think this blog post is a good summary: https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373&count=1

Your question "why" is probably because you think google should know better. However, I am reminded of the post from a few weeks of the person who left google after decades of working there who claims the culture has changed and attracted more incompetent corporate, political types. EDIT: found it, not decades but almost 2, he left after working there 18 years. https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373&count=1 See the HN comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38381573

Maybe this: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38401242 - https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627532&count=1 (this is one of the main Flutter contributors which has left google, which might be indicative that the project might lose funding)

Here's a post from that person on it: https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627532&count=1

It seems like this is a response to Ian "Hixie" Hickson (co-founder and tech lead of Flutter) leaving Google (but not leaving Flutter). https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627532&count=1

Very interesting that he plans to continue working on Flutter after leaving Google: https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627532&count=1 I agree with him that Flutter is on a good trajectory.

Fixed now. Thanks! Btw HN didn't strip them -the submitted URL was https://ln.hixie.ch/. No doubt this was the top post at the time. We do strip some query strings, but only for larger/known sites.

The submitted link is missing the query params (or HN stripped them) that lead directly to the post: https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373&count=1

I think this link should point to the post at https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373&count=1

ISTM Hixie's own blog [0] would be a better link than a wayback reference to a G-funct service. [0] http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1363672582&count=1

The post is still up on the author’s self-hosted blog, no archive needed: http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1363672582&count=1

WHATWG also stands for "What working group", as in "What working group is going to work on extending HTML" http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1086387609

Some links: https://blog.mozilla.org/mrbkap/2013/08/12/the-old-html-parser-is-dead… http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1138169545&count=1 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=324875

I think this is what I was remembering: http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1115899732&count=1 ...which is to say, IE6 supported more event types and more configurable behaviour than HTML5 supports, but some of those extra features were just too weird, or outright crashed IE, so they didn't make it into the spec.

Reminds me of these: https://hsivonen.fi/script-execution/ http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1296711456&count=1

> but Flash still really has to go for 99 percent of the web. I think you are saying it’s inappropriate 99% of the time. If so, I agree. (But if you are alluding to Adobe’s frequent claims of a 99% install base, my own stats indicate that only 95% of visitors have Flash 9 or newer installed.) ⁂ And the “Adobe doesn’t fully support HTML5” meme is hardly a canard: http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1265967771&count=1 comments: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1120394

Google has muddied the waters on their Gemini usage statistics as it now powers a big chunk of Search. Depending on how you cut it, Gemini (and Gemini powered products) are probably producing the most output tokens seen by the most human eyeballs by a large margin. Google at its core is not a dev tools company and it has become evident that is where the money is given the verifiable nature of software. Hixie's reflections on his tenure at Google still ring in my head to this day, though I have never worked there[1]. The people at the helm of Google no longer see the company's identity as something which must be channeled through a product or an experience. Some will point to the DoubleClick acquisition, others will point to Google Reader, or Pichai's ascension. Despite his very short tenure, MBA/McKinsey-brain is a very real phenomenon and it's no mistake that it shaped the "promotion packaged as a product launch" culture that steered Google away from seriously betting on anything that wasn't ads. To quote the signull tweet linked elsewhere in this thread, you can have everything at Google, except for permission. Most importantly--I don't think there's a single tech product where I can point and say "Google wouldn't do that". You can contrast this with say, other Alphabet companies which don't suffer from this remotely as much. It is VERY clear what Waymo and YouTube are trying to accomplish, and while it frequently makes a ton sense for the companies to share…

Firefox's arguments for not really bothering with the remaining parts of Acid3 was that it seemed like it they weren't testing particularly relevant standards and that the implementations of the other browsers for those standards were mostly to pass Acid3 and not particularly useful either. See http://limi.net/articles/firefox-acid3/ for more info. That seems like valid reasoning to me. I've also seen Hixie make comments that seem to indicate him wanting to avoid these issues for any potential Acid4: When we do Acid4 (probably around the time we have at least three major browsers shipping Acid3-passing browsers), I think we'll have to focus on testing fewer, more critical things. Acid3 tests a lot of critical stuff, but also checks a lot of less important stuff at the same time, and it's in those areas that we've had the most problems with specs changing under us. From http://ln.hixie.ch/?count=1&start=1215829569

Dear John@Adobe, if you did due diligence, then you already would have talked to the people at Adobe that participates in the working group, have found out exactly what was said on the email lists, and would have posted all the details and an apology for holding up the work due to minor process details. And you would have ensured us, that such behavior will never again be seen from Adobe. What you did was to post an almost-ad-hominen attack, calling names such as "total ignorance/laziness", lack of "due diligence". Your only 'content' is quotes from 2 blogs that says Adobe is a nice kid without telling the details about what happened, what the w3c emails said. When Hixie says "blocked by Adobe", you better come up with better arguments than "these 2 guys I've selected myself says that Adobe is a nice kid". If anybody knows anything about html5, it is Hixie. He has done an incredible job getting html5 forward, and he has fully earned his respect. http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1265967771&count=1 And you would have pointed out, that Adobe would from now on take a back seat and not veto the canvas and other new html5 features as Adobe isn't a browser vendor.