[thebigshane]

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]

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

It's Lake Wobegon and all you need to enter is a Reader account and some outrage.

[thebigshane]

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]

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]

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.