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Comment by somishere | Hacker News Reader

The great thing about the Firebase API is that it's live, so you can subscribe to updates to a post/comment/profile and see them as they're made (no polling, just websockets). I'd hope any future version would retain this feature.

I'm reluctant to lose it as I'm about to release a browser extension that relies on it pretty heavily :)

[Edit]: this feature is undocumented in the link above, but it's a standard feature of FB and works as expected in all client libraries https://firebase.google.com/docs/database

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Hmm. I'm sorry but I can't promise that. It isn't part of the HN API, though I can understand why people use it since Firebase offers it.

So is that to say it's just an unintended consequence of the data being hosted on Firebase? That's wild. Especially as I'd be surprised if most integrations aren't using this feature (IMO it's by and far the best feature of the API).

To demonstrate, here's an example in 18 lines of code that v. efficiently listens to live updates to a profile (yours): https://codepen.io/theprojectsomething/pen/xxWBOWN?editors=1...

It was certainly an unintended consequence of the data being hosted on Firebase. I'm not saying it isn't a valuable feature! And if people are doing interesting and useful things with it, I'm open to implementing something to keep that going—as long as it's simple and there's a clear line between it and "reimplement Firebase", which would be a foolish thing for us to try to undertake.

Thanks, appreciate the insight! I think client pub/sub is the feature request, not firebase clone :)

To that point there's definitely a few OSS solutions out there that provide this kind of functionality out of the box (recent YC alumni among them). But then who knows what problem you're trying to solve. Sounds like this is just rain on the tip of the iceberg.

Oh, does that mean the /v0/updates endpoint will disappear in the new API? I found it to be quite valuable.

It depends on how hard it is for us to implement something like that in HN's software. I'm sorry not to have a clear answer for you guys, but we haven't had a chance to think carefully about this and it will be a while before we do.

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