Only a relatively small fraction of the population, mostly
highly intelligent, and well informed, curious individuals
used Reader.
It's Lake Wobegon and all you need to enter is a Reader account and some outrage.
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?
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.