This has been a long time coming. Four years ago I began work on my own feed reader, NewsBlur, and it's now a full-fledged Google Reader competitor. It's also a paid app and has been paying for itself nearly since the beginning.

http://www.newsblur.com

I hope HN finds NewsBlur useful, especially since it's got native mobile apps on iOS (iPhone+iPad), Android, Windows Phone, and Nokia MeeGo. Native story sharing was launched last Summer and I expect NewsBlur to be around for quite a while.

It's also fully open-source, in case you decide to build your own private community: http://github.com/samuelclay.

I also have a full-scale re-design in the works, but if you can't get to the main site you can try using the beta site: http://dev.newsblur.com

> a 24-year-old software engineer > ... > Soylent contains all of the nutritive components of a balanced diet

What utter bollocks. We're (as in, scientists studying nutrition and how utterly wrong food industry has gotten that in the 20th and early 21st century) finally starting to get our collective heads around the benefits of whole foods vs. highly processed foods, and just how badly our bodies deal with the latter. It may be theoretically possible to create some processed food that's on par with the nutrition of whole foods, but I doubt that anyone alive today knows how to do it. He may see "good" results on some metrics due to a lack of any desire to go hypercaloric -- i.e. there's probably no artificially boosted food reward[1] mechanisms in his glop. But that won't make up for the glop's likely deficiencies.

So an impatient _software engineer_ comes along and claims to have whipped up a drink that eliminates all that. A task that specialists have so far failed at.

> "I read a textbook on physiological chemistry and took to the internet to see if I could find every known essential nutrient."

I've seen this enough to be sick of it; it seems to be form of the software "everything is just an [easy] problem" mindset gone badly wrong. The supplement and meal replacement powder/drink industry is a multi-billion dollar market. First sanity check: _no_ staff scientists for any of these companies thought to go look at a textbook and the intertubes and do the same thing? DOH! Egg's on them!

Another example of this failure: when software/CS types wander off to do experimental science (e.g. human subjects) without _any_ training in how to do experiment design, data collection, or analysis. "Just ask 'em some questions!" The general form of the problem seems to be a blindness to the depths of domain knowledge required to be effective in other disciplines.

You sound like an industry-insider explaining why a new startup will fail. "They're too young!" "They don't have the experience" "We've devoted our LIVES to figuring this out, one kid in his basement didn't do it in a few weeks!" Etc etc

No offense but we've heard the exact same thing about every successful idea.

And what's more:

People look at the human GI totally wrong anyway. They think, what can I put in to get the best results? When in reality, the human GI evolved to support an extremely broad range of inputs as it's most significant factor.

With humans all over the earth eating an extremely disparate diet pre-civilization (and even post), the most significant factor of the human GI was it's ability to handle the wide variety of chemically diverse inputs and provide a consistent, reliable output.

So why do you approach this, which is nothing more than a new input, and claim that the output is going to be different? Dangerous? Impossible?

Seems to me like you're indignant with a touch of ego: "How dare he pretend to do my job. It's an insult to me that he is doing this!" That's the feeling I get from you reading this post.

The authors are from a prestigious school, CMU. Still, I was curious to know who funded this research. Alas, not surprisingly, it is MPAA.

The CMU lab is called Initiative for Digital Entertainment Analytics (IDEA), and according to CMU's press release "The creation of IDEA was made possible through a gift from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)"

http://www.cmu.edu/homepage/society/2012/fall/entertainment-...

"The MPAA was interested in CMU in part because of our unique strengths in the performing arts, computer science and technology, and management," noted Smith.

Looks like MPAA also had something else in mind, when they funded this lab.

This is a huge problem, as big as the server issues and the DRM.

The game is, IMO, mostly unplayable at this point. I have no idea how they let this one out the door with the pathfinding problem, which in my book is an absolute showstopper.

Clever, dedicated, and somewhat masochistic players have found ways to "hack" the poor pathfinding behavior. The most popular format right now is to build a city with no intersections, since the AI deals so spectacularly poorly with them. Which is to say, the entire city is a single, long, winding road. This forces your dumb sims to have no choice but the right one.

Some apologists have claimed this is simply the rules of the game, but I still maintain that SimCity fails unless it maintains some semblance to real-life cities. If the only way to play the game effectively is to build something that bears zero semblance to any real city, then it has failed.

The funny part is that this loosely resembles the recent Heroku fiasco. In the game your civic services (police, fire, ambulances, garbage) are supposed to intelligently service the city - in reality their pathfinding results in basically random behavior, vastly increasing the amount of capacity you need to build to statistically serve an area. You have to grossly over-build your fire and police departments because their pathfinding is awful and random.

I'm not usually this hard on others' hard work - but this game is a travesty that should never have shipped in this state, even disregarding the server issues. There are core gameplay mechanics that are still fundamentally broken.

There are two issues here: a particular dispute between O'Reilly Media and one of our authors, and the relative advantages of using a publisher versus going it alone. I'm only going to address the former here, but if you read between the lines, you can see the signs of an author who imagines the upside of self-publishing, but is not prepared to accept the costs on the downside.

I'm the last person to suggest to any author that self-publishing is not a good idea, since I started out as a self-published author who then took on other authors, and grew a real publishing company. But in the course of that odyssey, I learned why publishing is not as easy as it looks, even today when the options for self-publishing have proliferated.

Let me respond to the particulars of this case.

As reasonable people know, there are two sides to every story. Far from being the story of a heartless publisher running roughshod over an innocent author, the O'Reilly Media side is a story of a particularly demanding author, for whom we've bent over backwards.

In response to a bad printing job, which as Steven Few notes, did produce a substandard printing of the book, we not only took the bad copies out of distribution and reprinted it to Steven's exacting specifications, which included a specific, very expensive paper, we foolishly agreed to let him inspect each print run. (As he notes, we didn't always follow through on this agreement, but he continued to buy the reprinted copies, which came from the same printer, from the same files, on exactly the same paper, without complaint.) When the Kindle edition (which we had every right to produce) turned out to be substandard, we took it out of print.

When he asked us to revert the rights, it is true that our publisher did assert, as we believe, that we had the rights to produce the second edition. But when Steven was clear that he did not want to produce the new edition with us, we didn't fight his wish to revert the rights, and agreed to his desire to cancel the contract.

At that point, Steven made clear that he expected us to continue publishing the first edition until such time as he no longer needed it. Given that this is an expensive four-color book for we have been printing approximately twelve months of inventory, we declined to go back to press when we ran out of stock three months short of his planned new edition.

This is fairly standard publishing practice - and it doesn't come from heartless disregard for authors, but rather, from thoughtful regard for customers. Most customers would not be too pleased to buy a book only to discover that there is a new edition available. They would rather hear in advance about a new edition, and wait for it, than buy an outdated version.

Steven's need for books for his seminars is a special case, but one that he could have anticipated and communicated to us in a cooperative way.

We have offered to provide to him all the source files for his book, so that if he chooses, he can arrange to print his own copies. After all, since he plans to self-publish the second edition, there is nothing to prevent him from self-publishing additional copies of the first edition if he requires them. We even offered to help arrange the printing.

What we were not willing to do is to incur the enormous cost of an extremely short run printing of an expensive book, when the need for that short run is driven by the author's own decisions and schedule, and not by ours. We even offered to set him up with a print-on-demand vendor who could produce copies on short turnaround at what we believe is probably acceptable quality, but he is not interested in that option.

When I first heard about this problem, Stephen was threatening litigation unless we printed books for him, despite the fact that he'd already terminated the contract. Let's be clear, he threatened to sue us for not continuing to perform on a contract that he himself asked to be canceled. (The contract did not require us to continue publishing the book in any case.)

When our publisher asked for a phone call to discuss options, he declined to talk with her, insisting that he'd only communicate about his issues in writing. And given that each of his messages seemed to have as a precondition the admission of guilt for various "offenses", that made communication rather difficult.

For what it's worth, when Steven published his blog post, I replied in the comments. He has declined to publish my reply. (I had also thought I had replied when he first contacted me by email twelve days ago, but I discovered the unsent message in my outbox.)

Here's the comment that I wrote for Stephen's blog, but which he did not publish:

Stephen,

While I was not directly involved in your discussions with the editorial team at O'Reilly, I have looked into your allegations, and would like an opportunity to respond.

A couple of salient facts that your readers of this post might want to know:

1. It is our interpretation of your contract that we had the right to produce a second edition, but we also agreed that you had the right to terminate the contract. So when you said you wanted the rights back so you could self-publish the second edition yourself, we accepted that. That is hardly a soulless machine that gives no regard to the interests of authors. Not only that, when we reverted the rights, we agreed to provide you with all the design files so that you could print additional copies of the first edition yourself.

2. Because of your exacting design requirements, the book is a four-color book printed in Italy, with a 6-8 week reprint lead time, and a cost that is highly dependent on the number of copies printed. We have only just run out of stock; effectively, you wanted us to print enough stock for only three months of sales. This would drive up the unit cost dramatically. By the time I even heard about the issue, you were asking for a reprint that has a two month lead time with only three months to go before you were planning to publish the second edition. (You had originally told us that you were going to publish the second edition in June; in your account above, I see that has now slipped to July.)

This is one of the real problems with the old-fashioned printing methods that are the only ones that seem to provide the quality you insist on. You have to buy large print runs, which don't always line up neatly with real-world demand, requiring large investments in inventory. We've moved to print-on-demand for many of our books (even for four-color books such as yours), but that leads to precisely the kind of quality tradeoff that you insist you don't want. Print-on-demand allows for continuous availability as well as for sudden spikes in demand.

But in any case, it is normal publishing practice to let a first edition lapse in the months before availability of a new edition. If you're a consumer, the last thing you want to see is a new, improved edition of a book a few days or weeks after you just paid for what is now the out-of-date edition.

In short, there is no "spite" in the decision not to reprint the book.

I'm sorry you and your students got caught in a squeeze here. Given that we have reverted the rights to you, you can most certainly consider reprinting the first edition yourself, perhaps using print-on demand and accepting some reduction in quality to meet the gap in availability.

I wish you well with your self-publishing endeavor. I started out as a self-published author myself, and built up my company from there. It's more challenging than many authors imagine, but it's most certainly doable. But it does put you in touch with the messy realities (and economics) of manufacturing, inventory management, and distribution that make this kind of difficult situation come up from time to time.

If you want to see if print-on-demand could satisfy your requirements to produce copies of the first edition until the second is ready, I'm sure we could connect you with some appropriate vendors.

Aside from this being about design and not HTML5, is anyone else not surprised they didn't include "550 social +1, like, tweet, twat buttons"?

Look at that website: there's a social banner, a social footer, a social sidebar, animated gifs for ads. Make that 15 lousy web design trends.

That's the first Google service shutdown that I'm affected by.

Sad to see it go.

What do you guys recommend for replacement? I know about NewsBlur [1], but I never liked it that much.

I think I'm just looking for something that would emulate Reader's full-screen view as close as possible.

[1] http://newsblur.com

edit: Here's what I consider an absolute must-have in RSS app:

- complete navigation with keyboard (j/k preferred)

- full screen mode (really, I don't need a sidebar of a fixed header all the time)

- feed view (not just list of items, show me excerpts!)

And I know I may be the weird one, but I really, really dislike readers that try to show me items directly from feeds webpage. I find it jarring and distracting when I have five totally different layouts flash before my eyes within 10 seconds (I skim headlines and then skip most of items in my feed).

And for the love of god, please, please, no goddamn 'WE LEARN WHAT YOU LIKE' or any kind of bullshit 'smart selection'. I selected my feeds myself, I can manage them just fine by myself, just get out of my way, please.

Device fragmentation on Android is nothing like fragmentation used to be. At least on Android you can write one app and then tweak it to work on different devices, previously you had to write apps as different as Android/iOS/Windows for each device - and often individual manufacturers even had multiple platforms to write for.

And don't even get me started on distribution. You used to have to negotiate with carriers in each country to get them to carry your application. Now I publish on Google Play and my app is available to 750 million people four hours later. And if you build a good app, and figure out the app SEO, you will get hundreds or thousands of downloads a day.

So I think we owe Google some congratulations.

Google Reader is irreplaceable, it is not only about reading RSS. That is the easy part. It is about going back in time and accessing all past feeds in an organized way (it is difficult to rebuilt that from crawling and web scraping). If you add a blog now you can read articles that are not present in the current feed.

Google Reader is the core of my information diet. Not twitter. Thousands of blogs starred, liked, and commented. An interesting feature that you couldn't replace is automatic translation: reading a russian blog asmit was written in english. Once I shared one of its articles and one friend asked me if I knew russian or if it was a joke my share! Because obviously the share was in the original language.

Google is evil. While I can understand a business decision, there are ways to hand it over to other companies or organizations.

I share some of my previous criticism:

- Extraction of Main Text Content Using the Google Reader NoAPI: http://blog.databigbang.com/extraction-of-main-text-content/

-Google Search NoAPI: http://blog.databigbang.com/google-search-no-api/

- The Data Portability Fact Sheet: http://blog.databigbang.com/the-data-portability-fact-sheet/

- Reverse Engineering and the Cloud: http://blog.nektra.com/main/2012/06/01/reverse-engineering-a...