2 ms·

The author appears to be playing along as if this is not satire, but I am pretty sure it is. Here is my case for calling it satire: It starts off with caricat

The author appears to be playing along as if this is not satire, but I am pretty sure it is. Here is my case for calling it satire: It starts off with caricatures... every single one of these people do indeed have Twitter profiles, and they are entrepreneurs also, and they're thinking about their next pivot, and they certainly have an opinion on NodeJS versus Clojure even though they've never gone past the tutorial on either platform [...] Stating the obvious the only thing in between a hacker who misses Reader and a working Reader implementation past-June is... nothing Hyperbole... Reader's cancellation will have absolutely no impact on RSS. Reader isn't RSS. It isn't anything but a consumer, one of many, of the RSS standard. whoever is in possession of your RSS feeds probably knows you more intimately than Target, which supposedly knows when a woman is pregnant before her father. It's an intimate relationship, based on trust. But I didn't really become convinced it was satire until this line... Entitlement without effort is like representation without taxation. So, am I the only one who sees this as satire? A subtle poke at Hacker News for taking itself too seriously? Or am I the guy who mistakenly laughs "Ha! Yea that would be crazy, right?" even though the other guy was totally serious?

emin_gun_sirer 14y ago
Here's some straight-up satire: Only a relatively small fraction of the population, mostly highly intelligent, and well informed, curious individuals used Reader. Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5391119 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5391119 It's Lake Wobegon and all you need to enter is a Reader account and some outrage.
- thebigshane 14y ago
  So give it me straight: not satire? You wrote a post to HN about how those who are complaining about Google Reader (a group you admit is not all programmers) should stop complaining about Google Reader's shutdown because these people could just whip up their own alternative? And you see no other facet of this situation that is worthy of being upset about? You very successfully just trolled HN. And that wasn't even your intention?
  - emin_gun_sirer 14y ago
    My post ends on this note: Wouldn't it be much better to channel all this energy towards something more productive? Like, say, writing a few thousand lines of Rails or Django or Node JS or Clojure or whatever code you like to implement a replacement, either from scratch, or by contributing to an existing OSS project. It's a big world out there, we have not "entered a darker timeline in the history of the net," and it's always time to make it better, not demand that someone else do that for you. If that perspective sounds like trolling to anyone, they can just click on any of the other submissions and discuss the relative merits of the Google Reader population over ordinary people.
michaelwww 14y ago
If it's satire, the professor is a very elaborate character creation which mostly lacks a sense of humor. The opposite case is more interesting. That he is for real, actually thinks and writes that way, and because he is from a different culture -- he says European, and I'm thinking the eastern part -- he comes across this way.

emin_gun_sirer 14y ago

Here's some straight-up satire: Only a relatively small fraction of the population, mostly highly intelligent, and well informed, curious individuals used Reader. Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5391119 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5391119 It's Lake Wobegon and all you need to enter is a Reader account and some outrage.

thebigshane 14y ago
So give it me straight: not satire? You wrote a post to HN about how those who are complaining about Google Reader (a group you admit is not all programmers) should stop complaining about Google Reader's shutdown because these people could just whip up their own alternative? And you see no other facet of this situation that is worthy of being upset about? You very successfully just trolled HN. And that wasn't even your intention?
- emin_gun_sirer 14y ago
  My post ends on this note: Wouldn't it be much better to channel all this energy towards something more productive? Like, say, writing a few thousand lines of Rails or Django or Node JS or Clojure or whatever code you like to implement a replacement, either from scratch, or by contributing to an existing OSS project. It's a big world out there, we have not "entered a darker timeline in the history of the net," and it's always time to make it better, not demand that someone else do that for you. If that perspective sounds like trolling to anyone, they can just click on any of the other submissions and discuss the relative merits of the Google Reader population over ordinary people.

michaelwww 14y ago

If it's satire, the professor is a very elaborate character creation which mostly lacks a sense of humor. The opposite case is more interesting. That he is for real, actually thinks and writes that way, and because he is from a different culture -- he says European, and I'm thinking the eastern part -- he comes across this way.