Hacker News Reader

Comment by rocky1138 | Hacker News Reader

Of course! With some defensive programming, e.g, the client ignoring unrecognized elements in the XML response while still reading the ones it does recognize, and not changing the API endpoint URLs, so long as the API output contains the values the client is looking for, there shouldn't be any reason why this stuff would break.

If the client used tilemaps versus vector data, I would expect the tilemap data to be out of date, but the directions would still be valid.

View on HN

Well, they're probably reading proto buffers instead of xml[1]. And proto deserialization automatically drops unrecognized fields. So yeah, as long as you continue shipping your core data in already-established fields, and don't radically change the interpretation of those fields, backwards compatibility is going to be built in.

[1] - So goes the standard joke: Some people think Google is an advertising company. Techies recognize Google as an advertising company. But in reality Google is a company which turns protobuffers into more differenter protobuffers.

Proto deserialization does not drop unrecognized fields. There was a change that made proto3 do this, and that has now (thankfully) been reversed.

https://github.com/google/protobuf/issues/272#issuecomment-2...

I agree it could be, usually.

But this is Google. They deprecate things with last week's milk. I feel like they have a pretty good idea of what's still running, and shut it down if it doesn't make them at least half a billion a year. I still miss many products, and I wasn't even a Reader user (so no, it's still other stuff I'm disgruntled about).

These days you can't even do a Youtube search without an account, and an account needs a phone number of course, so you have to resort to HTML scraping to do simple stuff like just using the top hit (so you can fire off a tab with some song in the background, without waiting for it to load and click a result with the mouse). There used to be an API for simple things like that.

If it's not costing like > $5MM / yr, it's unlikely someone would waste the time to turn it off, TBH.

This is exactly what everyone thought about Reader, and Wave, and Picnik, and Revolv...

If Reader was running on old infrastructure, it's very possible it could have cost more than that just to maintain status quo.

Right, but if it requires maintenance, and it doesn't bring in enough money to cover the costs of that, turning it off might be more cost-effective than doing the maintenance.

Look at Google Finance, for example - uses Adobe Flash, which is 2 years away from EOL. Presumably it's not making any money and doesn't have a maintenance budget; if it did, they'd have moved away from Flash when the iPhone came out. But when Flash hits EOL, maintenance is mandatory.

Turning it off is what I'd do in that situation.

> These days you can't even do a Youtube search without an account

Hyperbole or...?

https://youtube.com/results?q=never%20gonna%20give%20you%20u...

seems to work fine without an account.

Sorry, I was unclear. I meant they used to provide an API for it but that has been deprecated, just like many other useful things have been. See:

> so you have to resort to HTML scraping to do simple stuff like just using the top hit [...] There used to be an API for simple things like that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com