Hacker News Reader

Frankly, except for the people developing the readers, the RSS/Atom distinction is completely irrelevant. RSS is used as a simplification for RSS/Atom.

I am actually developing a reader, so I know the differences. They're mostly minor, and I have to support both formats anyway, so I abstract most of them away.

Most are minor but Atom feeds explicitly state content type. This could be a security issue with RSS since there is no reliable way to guess between plain text or escaped HTML.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(standard)#Content_model

I've been using RSS for ~10 years and I still don't know why I would choose Atom over RSS or RSS 2.0 or whatever.

Because it's possible to represent the characters >, < and & in the title of an item in an Atom feed.

You aren't. Indeed, when I read a headline like "Will RSS die?" for the first time, I expected to find an article about how Atom will replace RSS.