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Comment by josh2600 | Hacker News Reader

It's really hard to build trust when products disappear. Building on top of google is hard for this reason, and Facebook is beginning to look eerily similar. Recall all of the wonderful social graph access that once existed and see, now, the wake of crippled API's where they once lived.

Since it is impossible to build everything from scratch, some compromise must be made, but I wonder whether that compromise can reasonably include offerings from $BIG_CO? Certainly open-source projects implode as well, but rarely with the scale of things like Google Reader or Parse...

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What's even more ridiculous is that their homepage says:

    From startups to the Fortune 500, hundreds of
    thousands of developers *trust us*.

Trust you to what? Pull the rug out at some point? Why they even put that word on the HP is a separate question.

The acquisition happened nearly 3 years ago. To their credit, they kept running it for longer than a lot of other companies would have.

Anyone in the situation of seeing their platform provider acquired should see the writing on the wall. It's unfortunate, but it's the reality. Enjoy the continued services while [if] they last, but always have a Plan B.

>> "Anyone in the situation of seeing their platform provider acquired should see the writing on the wall."

In this case though FB seemed to embrace Parse and continued to develop it. It would have been much better to shut it down after acquisition. FB's support of it probably helped it gain more trust that it would stick around.

The extension of that sentence, when related to Facebook, is "dumb f*cks".

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg

Trust you to stay in business long enough that they can make money until the unavoidable demise.

"Since it is impossible to build everything from scratch.."

Impossible how? If anything, web/api dev has become way easier than it was 10 years ago.

Do you write your compiler from scratch every time you push an update to your web server?

Edit: it is turtles all the way down (and the only way it's not impossible is by virtue of standing on the shoulders of giants).

the parse server is just a couple K sloc, and not (from a cursory browse) exactly revolutionary. writing such a backend (which one would probably leverage over several projects) is qualitatively different than "writing your own compiler from scratch every time".

I understand and appreciate your point.

Mine was that, in the larger context that is computing, you must build on top of something because redoing everything from scratch every time would be ridiculous. You likely trust your CPU instruction set, and your bios and a million other things, but some things you can't trust. Knowing the difference is non-obvious, which is the fact I was lamenting.

Read the post carefully. "Parse Server" isn't the actual Parse server. It's a reference implementation of many features.

> Building on top of google is hard for this reason, and Facebook is beginning to look eerily similar.

The danger is using something closed-source and proprietary. Most of the popular products/services released by Google and Facebook are open-source, at least.

Even in this case, Parse provided open-source tools that will keep legacy code running with minimal changes. I think it's about the best-case scenario you could ask for when a closed-source platform is shut down.

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