Google is killing Google Reader. Announced it Wednesday, buried in a blog post. Hacker News has been on fire for three days. I use Reader every morning; it’s how I read every one of the blogs that taught me to code. The lesson everyone keeps repeating: if you’re not paying, you’re not the customer. I’m signing up for Feedly like everyone else and feeling weird about depending on free things. ...

Sony announced the PlayStation 4 last week at a two-hour event and didn’t show the console. Just specs and demos. 8GB of GDDR5 though, and my work laptop has 4GB and I’m running a database on it. The gamer group chat has already picked sides for a console war that starts in November. At work I got my first feature fully shipped end-to-end: migration, backend, UI, the works. It’s a settings page. Users will never notice it. I have screenshotted it like it’s my child. ...

The floodlights failed during a Champions League match at Old Trafford this week. Half the ground went dark for a few terrifying minutes. United still bossed the game, but as someone whose job now includes keeping a application up, I felt that outage in my bones. Somewhere there’s an electrical engineer having the worst postmortem meeting of their life(hardware failures are the worst). Tech-wise: everyone’s arguing about that Tesla vs New York Times range-test story. Elon posted the car’s logs to fight back. Data logs as a PR weapon. Noting that. ...

Two launches this fortnight and they could not be more different. Twitter shipped Vine — six-second looping videos, and I already can’t stop watching them. Meanwhile BlackBerry launched BB10 today, their big comeback play. My tech lead says it’s three years too late. I feel bad? Rich Kids at my college had a Blackberry or Android(Sony). That was two years ago. This industry is BRUTAL. Startup land: applications are getting hyped for Y Combinator’s summer batch, and someone at the IRC mentioned in the channel their demo-day pitch in the winter batch is “Airbnb for boats.” I honestly can’t tell what’s a joke anymore. ...

Okay so I’m doing this. Every two weeks, I write down what I learned. The world ships an update, I read the patch notes. That’s the deal. Context: I’m a year and a half into my first real job, writing enterprise Java at a big IT-services firm in Hyderabad — change requests and release coordination by day, Hacker News way too late at night. This week HN has been heavy — the community is grieving Aaron Swartz, and I’ve spent hours reading about everything he built. I never knew one person could touch RSS, Reddit, AND Markdown. ...