Data Firmware

Googles AI vs Koreas top Baduk player schedule and livestream link

Real quick here, a while ago I mentioned the baduk battle between Googles A.I. computer "AlphaGo" and expert player Lee Sedol. I live-streamed a bit of the first match today, which featured some American guy commenting on each move (in English), which was pretty cool, as he was explaining the game and strategies being employed so that a guy like me, with no baduk knowledge at all, could sort of follow along.

The games will start at 1pm Korea Time (4am GMT; day before 11pm ET, 8pm PT) on these days:
- Wednesday, March 9: First game
- Thursday, March 10: Second game
- Saturday, March 12: Third game
- Sunday, March 13: Fourth game
- Tuesday, March 15: Fifth game

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Feedly vs Inoreader my thoughts part 2

Note: This is Part 2 in my humble series, as I agonize over whether to commit to Feedly or Inoreader as my RSS reader of choice. See Part 1, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5 if youre interested. 

Revisiting Feedly vs. Inoreader

Its been a few months since my last post on this topic, so I thought Id revisit these two fine products. I think Ill just cut to the chase this time:

While I like that Feedly has upped its search features for free users, Inoreader continues to innovate also, doing things Ive really wanted to see in a feed reader. For me, two things have stuck out since last time: difficulty parsing smaller feeds, and Twitter integration.

Issue 1 : Smaller feeds : The case of r/Lubuntu

Im a big fan of Reddit, but a bigger fan of RSS. So its not surprising that I subscribe to multiple Reddit RSS feeds. I peruse them in my feed reader, and if I care to see (or make) a comment, I click-through to the Reddit thread itself. Normally, this works great on both Feedly and Inoreader. No problems.

But, for smaller subreddits, it becomes an issue. Heres an example. Im a huge fan of Lubuntu, so naturally I subscribe to the r/Lubuntu RSS feed. Heres what it looks like:

Raw feed data for r/Lubuntu, in Firefox

Im showing you this because, have a look at this raw feed data for r/Lubuntu (as displayed here in Firefox). Notice the most recent entries, the latest being 11/06/2014 10:12 AM. Thats just a few hours ago.

Now, lets compare how r/Lubuntu looks in both Feedly and Inoreader. I took all these screen-shots just minutes ago:

r/Lubuntu on Feedly

Here you can see that, even after a few page refreshes, Feedlys articles for this feed are wildly out of date, the last being 162 days old. At some point, it seems Feedly just stopped polling this feed. Thats a problem, as it means I missed over a hundred days of posts.

Notice also that Im not the only RSS subscriber for this feed: 5 others are presumably having the same issue. OK, so were not a huge contingent by any means, but I think one of the joys of RSS is not having to worry that were missing articles. We know that each and every post will show up in our reading list. If items start going missing, and we have to visit the site itself just for updates, then it defeats the point of RSS.

Now lets see what it looks like in Inoreader:

r/Lubuntu on Inoreader

Here you can see that even the most recent post, along with each and every other recent post, is accounted for. Compare these posts to the raw feed data, and youll see everything at it should be. Inoreader blows Feedly out of the water in this example. For reliability, I have to give it to them.

Note that Inoreader has alerted me to something wrong with this feed. Unfortunately, I cant share with you what that is. I refreshed the page, and the error disappeared. Checking the "Feed Info" (a nice option, missing in Feedly) no longer indicates any error. Ive spent a few minutes unsubscribing/resubscribing, trying to recreate the error, but no luck. Note also that, in clicking the manual feed "refresh" icon, Inoreader polls Reddit immediately (and this info is reflected in the feed info section). Feedly, meanwhile, appears to have removed their feed refresh icon from the gear menu.

So, its possible that Feedly is suffering from whatever issue it was that Inoreader had faced. Yet its hard to argue with the results: Inoreaders got the items there, Feedly doesnt.

If you read Part 1 of this series, youd know that this unreliability with smaller feeds was an issue for me several months ago. I have to admit, I have noticed better performance with Feedly since then on many of the problematic feeds. This was just one example of an area where Inoreader wins overall. The real trouble, to me, is that I cant be sure which of my Feedly feeds arent updating or arent working, short of manually opening each and every feed in Feedly, then opening the raw feed, and comparing dates. Aint nobody got time for that.

Issue 2 : Twitter Integration

I dont think I need any screen-shots for this (though you can see my Twitter feed just visible there in the shot above), and its quite self-explanatory, so Ill be as brief as possible. I absolutely love that Inoreader has integrated Twitter into the normal feed stream. Feedly had that side-bar Twitter integration, which felt, to me, very cluttered and distracting. I shut it off ages ago and never bothered to turn it back on.

Before Twitter changed their API, I had subscribed to most Twitter accounts via RSS. When the API changed and public RSS feeds were removed, I felt a hole in my consumption habit. One of the beauties of RSS is that it brings everything together, in a simple, uniform style. I think Inoreader hit the mark very well with their integration, treating my Twitter Home Timeline as a feed.

I think the only way it could be improved is if each person I follows tweets were arranged into their own "feed" and my Home Timeline (or even better, my Twitter Lists) were treated as a feed group or "Folder".

Final thoughts 

Honestly, I still havent chosen a single reader, and keep floating between the two. Im very happy that Feedly has added mobile tagging (and I can view my tagged articles on mobile, which to me personally is more important than the act of tagging). But Inoreaders steady stream of adding new features, with G+ support recently added, has had me hooked for the last few days.

Both are great services with great products. This post isnt meant to disparage anyone. If anything, I hope it draws attention to a few issues I think are important in the world of RSS feed readers. And anyway, Im just one guy with a shitty little blog. What do I know?

Thanks for reading, and for more of my comparisons, see this series Part 1, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5 if youre interested. 

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Googles AI vs Koreas top Baduk player coming this March

It looks like Google will be bringing their A-game to Seoul in March for an epic man-vs.-machine match. SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY.

UPDATE: The match will be held March 9, 2016. See more here:
 - AlphaGo creator remains confident-INSIDE Korea JoongAng Daily
 - Historic Go match set for March 9-INSIDE Korea JoongAng Daily

"FloorGoban" by Goban1 - Own work. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons.

In a blog post today, Google highlighted the achievements of some artificial intelligence program called AlphaGo, designed to play the ancient game of "Go" or "baduk" as Koreans call it. The machine has already beat some hotshot player in Europe and in a small blurb about the next step, Google will bring the tech here to Seoul in March to face off against some local Korean hotshot. But why not hear it form the horses mouth:

What’s next? In March, AlphaGo will face its ultimate challenge: a five-game challenge match in Seoul against the legendary Lee Sedol—the top Go player in the world over the past decade.
[Official Google Blog: AlphaGo: using machine learning to master the ancient game of Go]

Mr. Lee is ranked 9-dan in the game, which is apparently good. Fans of "Reply 1988" (???? 1988) may notice that the baduk-playing character Choi Taek (??) is also ranked 9-dan, as was the real-life inspiration for the character (maybe).

Anyway itll be interesting to see how the match goes, and whether any nationalist (Korea vs. USA),  corporate (Naver/Samsung vs. Google), or humanist (man vs. machine) sentiments appear. I hope they do, frankly, because excitement.

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Feedly vs Inoreader Part 4 The End

This will likely be the last installment of a 4-part series Ive done on the pros/cons of Feedly and Inoreader for my own personal needs. This is Part 4. You can also see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 5 if youre interested. 

This week was a milestone week for me in my agony over whether to commit to Feedly or Inoreader. A few days ago, I cleaned out my Feedly account and deactivated it. Today, I signed-up as a paying customer with Inoreader, under their "Plus" plan ($29.99/year).

I dont even need all the features that accompany the Plus plan. I could have done with the Starter plan. But over the last few months, Ive come to love Inoreader so that I wanted to support them with a higher payment plan. From someone as notoriously tight-fisted with money as me, let me tell you, there is no higher vote of confidence.

If youre reading this, youre probably wondering why exactly I finally made my choice to go with Inoreader. There were three main areas I considered:

Reason 1 - Feed Parsing 

If you read the earlier parts of this series, youll know that I tended to have trouble with Feedly capturing smaller feeds, particularly from Reddit subreddits, Reddit searches, and message boards. While this has improved greatly in Feedly, with most Reddit subreds now having all posts pulled-in, the issue remains for some Reddit Search feeds and for Reddit personal feeds. Im a big fan of the Reddit. I love the openness of the platform. I just prefer sorting through the information with an RSS reader, then taking action if necessary (commenting, reading comments, voting) on the site later. I find this to be the most efficient way of keeping up with a variety of my interests. So if a reader has problems parsing Reddit, its a red flag for me. Here are some examples of that.

Case Study 1 - Reddit inbox feed

For example, I receive my Reddit inbox comments/replies/messages via a personal RSS feed provided in the Reddit account preferences. I find this to be a better way of tracking conversations, especially when people PM me important information/links I need to file away in an organized way for later.

The problem is: Feedly shows the most recent item of this feed being 424 days old. Somehow, from that point onward, Feedly stopped parsing the feed. A look at the XML (which I wont post here, for privacy reasons) shows many new recent items since then. Inoreader, meanwhile, lists the most recent post at 3 days ago, and in fact its listings do match up with the XML feed. It works.

Thus, I can receive all my Reddit inbox comments via Inoreader, but if I had relied on Feedly, Id be left in the dark. This is particularly so since Feedly doesnt offer a warning/indication that a feed has not been updating. In Inoreader, it is clear to see, either on the main Dashboard or in the Subscription Manager, how inactive a feed has been and whether there are any problems with it. For reliability then, Inoreader wins.

Case Study 2 - Reddit searches: George Takei

Heres another example. In a prior post I talked about how to get Reddit search results via an RSS feed. I used a search for George Takei as an example. Lets say you had gone ahead and subscribed to that feed. How would it look in Feedly and Inoreader today?

Here are some screenshots, all taken today. Lets take a look.

Reddit Search for "George Takei" at http://www.reddit.com/search?q=george+takei&sort=new&t=all Notice the most recent result was 1 day ago, titled "Season 2 of..."

XML feed for this search (using Firefox, as the feed display looks better) at http://www.reddit.com/search.xml?q=george+takei&sort=new&t=all Note again, the most recent new entry (ignoring the recommended subreds) is titled "Season 2 of..." and dated 1 day ago.

Heres the feed in Inoreader. Most recent item: "Season 2 of..." and dated 1 day ago. Looks good.

Heres the feed in Feedly. "Oh, My!" as Mr. Takei would say. Most recent item is dated 124 days ago. Oops.

The takeaway message here is pretty clear. If you needed your daily dose of news and commentary about that great Japanese-American treasure, actor and social activist George Takei, which feed reader would you rely on?

Sure, these are very specific examples. I doubt many people (sorry George) would subscribe to these feeds. But whether the feed has 10,000 subscribers or 1, the beauty of RSS is that all content should be treated equally, unlike with a mysterious algorithm like Facebook. The truth is that I have nearly 2,000 RSS feeds in all, many for very specific things (a comment thread I want to follow, a message board category, my Feedburner personal alert feeds, etc.) I need the feeds to just work, pure and simple. And if they dont, I need some indication that theyre not working right. Inoreader checks both boxes for me.

Reason 2 - New Features 

The second reason I committed to Inoreader is their breakneck introduction of new features over the last few months. Take a look at their blog and youll see what I mean.

One of the best, for me, was their integration of Twitter. True, Feedly integrates your Twitter timeline in a separate space, but it does not interact as would a real RSS feed. I love being able get my Twitter timeline in Inoreader as if it were just any other feed, and apply rules/filtering to it to better organize and integrate with my workflow. In Feedly, Twitter is just a side-thing. In Inoreader, its essentially a feed. Its the best thing since Twitter removed RSS feeds.

Thats just one of their new features though. Let me highlight another now, that I feel a personal connection to.

Let me tell you a secret. This might be coincidence, or might not be. But let me show you just how responsive they are. Here is the text from an email I sent to Inoreader on 25 June 2015:

This is just a suggestion / idea:
It would be great if Inoreader had its own built-in feed filter. Something like "Feed Rinse"
This can be done with an IFTTT recipe (IF a feed item contains XXX) but this only works to filter-in, not to filter-out.
Maybe Inoreader can do this with "Rules" right now, but it would require multiple rules; and the payment plan has only 15 rules. I think Rules could work better with other uses anyway, not for this.
Anyway just an idea! I really like the idea of Feed Rinse but that website is often unreliable.
Just an idea! I love Inoreader!

Inoreaders "Filter Feed" menu option

Our newest feature - feed filtering. It enables you to remove all the content you’re not interested in from a specific feed. Filtered Feeds only show articles from the past month. You can always delete the filter you’ve created to see all articles from your subscription and you can also edit the filter to refine or completely change your filtering.

Reason 3 - Price

Final Thoughts

Inoreader

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Feedly vs Inoreader my thoughts part 1

Note: This is Part 1 in my humble series, as I agonize over whether to commit to Feedly or Inoreader as my RSS reader of choice. See Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5 if youre interested. 



When Google Reader died, I was heartbroken. Luckily, like a rebound lover, Feedly was there to pick up the pieces and make me feel all warm and safe. However, as time has gone on, Feedly has started to seem to lose interest in me, pushing me into the arms of another lover: Inoreader.

Basically it comes down to one key point: each RSS readers treatment of "small time" feeds. What I mean are those feeds that are maybe not updated very often, such as once a month or once every two months, and those feeds with very few subscribers (including, but not limited to, feeds for which I might be the sole subscriber).

Examples of what I mean include:

• Reddit subreddits that have just a few new posts each month
• Blogger and Wordpress comment feeds (subscribing via RSS to new comments on specific posts)
• Sourceforge application update feeds
• Craigslist search results feeds
• Blogs of some personal friends

I first started noticing that Feedly was dropping these feeds when Id get curious about some sites, sites that I knew had updated, not showing up in my Feedly. Visiting the feed from within Feedly indicated no new material, even after manual refreshing. Yet a quick visit to the feed URL itself confirmed my fears: the feed was updated, and nearly a month ago, with two new items. Feedly totally missed them. Had I relied purely on Feedly to deliver my news, I would never have seen them. That, to me, is a big problem.

Putting them to the test: Inoreader on top

So Ive tried out Inoreader for the last two weeks. Basically, I pared down my subscribed feeds, cleared them all out, then started fresh on both services by importing the same OPML file into both, and watching the results.

After two weeks of this, it became clear: many of my "smaller" feeds were being ignored by Feedly. One or two had "feed issues" (the Reddit feeds) according to Inoreaders informative subscription management pane, but were nonetheless being fetched by Inoreader.

Here you can see the relative fetching speed of each service. I erased all my subscriptions, loaded a fresh OPML subscription list (a smaller one than I usually use, just 20 feeds) into each service, then waited two hours. Here was the result:

Feedly

Inoreader

You can see that Inoreader did a better job of feed fetching.

Some thoughts about both: Feedlys revenge

This may seem that I am overwhelmingly in favor of Inoreader, but thats not exactly true. Im still a bit on the fence, and heres why:

1. Feedly, for better or worse, seems the dominant player in RSS feed readers, which is a small enough field not to permit too many competitors. Most Google Reader refugees originally fled to Feedly. This may change in the future (Inoreader seems right on its tail, which to me suggests that others are migrating as well), but for now Im still hesitant to leave behind the large and potentially more stable Feedly in favor of yet another newer reader.
2. Feedly is more beautiful. This may not be an important factor for some, but I personally find Feedly to be the more "readable" of the two. It feels a little more slick, a little more polished, a little more concerned with appearances. And to me, as someone who reads hundreds of feeds a day, that matters. Inoreader is not ugly by any means. Its really just a personal preference. The font, the transitions, the design, seems smoother, especially in the Android app, on Feedly than Inoreader. This may change when Inoreaders update comes out.

Additionally, although this should be unnecessary, there are a few things Ive done to improve the performance of Feedly:

1. Feedburner. Going through my subscription list, I discovered many blogs for which I was subscribed to the blogs own RSS feed (like blog.com/feed) but that the blog also has a Feedburner feed. Switching my subscription to the Feedburner feed improved Feedlys performance in fetching articles, especially infrequently-updated blogs.
2. IFTTT. For feeds that are rarely updates or unique to me, Ive found that IFTTTs "feed" channel is equal to Inoreader at fetching articles from sources quickly and accurately. Thus Ive just created IFTTT recipes for those problematic few feeds, so I now have new posts e-mailed to me. This has the fringe benefit of drawing more attention to these infrequently-appearing posts, which I might have inadvertently scrolled past in an RSS reader.

Final thoughts

After all this, I find myself leaning towards Feedly still. Ive been with them since Google Reader, and feel willing to give them one more shot. Of course, until Im more confident about the quality of their service, theres no way Im buying a pro plan, even if Id like to. Too risky to invest in a service I might soon see a need to flee from. Maybe they can change their ways, or maybe Im going back to an abusive relationship and will long to get out again soon and into the sexy seductive arms of Inoreader. Either way, its great that both of these services allow import/export of your OPML reading list, so that moving between them is fairly painless (unless you have a lot of tagged, saved articles you also want migrated, in which only Inoreader supports it.)

Expect a follow-up post in a few months.

UPDATE 2014-11-06: And the follow-up post is complete. For more of my comparisons, see this series Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5 if youre interested. 

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Feedly vs Inoreader Part 3 Shots Fired Reddit and Websta RSS feed issues

Note 1: As I continue to agonize over whether to commit to Feedly or Inoreader as my RSS reader of choice, I look for areas in which one objectively excels over the other. This is now a very short Part 3 of that agonizing. See Part 1, Part 2, Part 4, and Part 5 if youre interested. 

Note 2: Information has been added as "UPDATES" below which may make this post irrelevant. 

 --- 

Case Study: r/southkorea

As I highlighted before, Feedly sometimes has issues with parsing smaller / less active RSS feeds, and this seems especially true for Reddit feeds.

Now, for the very active r/korea subreddit, Feedly has no problem. All those posts load fine. But the other day I noticed that I was seeing things in Inoreader that werent showing up in Feedly, and realized that the issue was the r/southkorea subreddit. Granted, this particular subreddit is not exactly the highlight of the site, as you can see. But that shouldnt matter. Feeds should be treated neutrally, even those with few or even one subscriber. (I wouldnt even mind it getting scrapped once per week, so long as it happens!) To me, this is one of the key philosophies of the open web, and of RSS in general. I dont want to wonder if Ill see the posts or not. If a post is made, I, as a subscriber, want to see it.

But you dont have to take my word for it. Heres r/southkoreas RSS feed as displayed in Firefox. All the following screenshots were taken in immediate succession. Notice that the most recent posting here was on 2015-03-05.

Screenshot of r/southkorea feed

Now lets check and see what shows up in Inoreader. Everything seems to check out. Here too, the March 5th post is the most recent.

Screenshot of r/southkorea on Inoreader

Theres one interesting thing to notice here, and that is that Inoreader does present a warning message alterting me to problems with the feed. This is a feature I really like about Inoreader. In the subscriptions preferences, you get a clear picture of which feeds are not parsing correctly, and can investigate. Feedly offers no warnings, no method of knowing if a feed is actually updating or not. If you love RSS as much as me, I dont have to tell you the frustration of finding out that a site is updating, but all along, sometimes for months, Feedly hasnt been pulling those posts in, and you never knew. For Feedly to gain my confidence, they dont have to do everything perfect, but they should at least let me know if/when theres a problem.

Now then, lets see how Feedly handles this feed:

Screenshot of r/southkorea on Feedly

Oh boy. Posts from 2014, a year ago. Feedly stopped parsing this feed ages ago it seems, and of course, I was none the wiser. It was only thanks to Inoreader that I discovered this.

Look, Im not trying to bash Feedly (too hard). And believe me, I know how stupid and inconsequential a Reddit feed, especially r/southkorea, can be. But some of you out there may need this service for more important reasons. And even if its just for pleasure, as in my case, if a feed reader is not pulling in the feed posts, whats the point of using it? This is why I refuse to become a Feedly Pro member. (And Im one of those people who does pay for apps and services that excel at what they do.)

I do still use Feedly frequently, for the simple reason that it is beautiful. Seriously, Feedly team, if you ever read this, the Feedly product is beautiful, and a pleasure to use. Your UI blows other readers out of the water. But underneath it all, I need you to be reliable. We can date, but I dont think well marry, not quite yet.

*** 
UPDATE - 21 March 2015
A commenter pointed out that Feedly addressed this exact issue here. 
***

Case Study: Webstas "??" tag

Now hold up a second. You didnt think this entire post was going to be anti-Feedly did you? No sir. Inoreader wont escape the wrath of this post either. 

Websta is an Instagram viewer site that conveniently provides RSS feeds for Instagram users and tags, which is great now that Instagram removed their own (thanks, Zuck). For example, if you love seeing whats going on in/around Seoul, you might use their search results for the "??" tag. And if you want to follow these posts via RSS, you can do so easily here. Lets see what this feed page (http://widget.websta.me/rss/tag/??) looks like:

Screenshot of feed page for Webstas ?? tag

Ok, everything looking good there. Lets go ahead and open it up in Feedly:

Screenshot Webstas ?? tag in Feedly

Hmm OK, looking good. Feedlys UI layout here really shines, I think. I want to look at this page and read these articles (or, um, oogle these gorgeous Korean girls?), rather than just click "Mark All As Read" as I sometimes feel tempted to do in Inoreader. Speaking of Inoreader, its never let me down so far, so lets fire it up:

Screenshot Webstas ?? tag in Inoreader

Oh dear... what happened? In my tests, it seems that Inoreader "cannot find feed" when the URL of the feed contains Korean characters. Thats a bit odd to me, as Innologica Ltd, the company behind Inoreader, is based in Bulgaria. Id have assumed they, more than Feedly, would be better equipped to support a variety of language scripts. But what do I know? It just goes to show: nobodys perfect.

*** 
UPDATE - 21 March 2015
Inoreader responded, pointing out that, while the direct non-Latin characters are not supported in the URL, feeds with such characters do work if they are first converted to their equivalent percent-encodings, which a web-browser should automatically do but which was not happening for me.
Therefore, this sample feed for Webstas ?? tag at http://widget.websta.me/rss/tag/?? will work if added to Inoreader as http://websta.me/rss/tag/%EC%84%9C%EC%9A%B8
***

Parting Thoughts: Shots Fired!

This last example shows that reliability is not just a Feedly issue, but the take-home message here should be this: a feed reader should both look beautiful and bring in each post from each of your subscriptions. If it cannot, it should at least have some means of informing you of this. To my mind, Feedly wins in beauty and "mainstream" feed reading... but if thats all you want, then Flipboard is an even better choice. For having custom "off the beaten path" subscriptions and power-user-level tools, Inoreader wins. Ideally, Id like to see Feedly simply (1.) adopt a means of showing users when feeds arent updating properly and (2.) sort out its parsing so that "1." isnt even routinely necessary. In fact, I imagine that if they were to adopt this "1." idea, then I could be aware of issues like subscription changes or sites changing URL or sites simply going down (like my favorite Tumblr blogs have a habit of doing), in which case I could pare down my large number of subscriptions.

I do still use Feedly more than Inoreader, and maybe thats why I want them to get their game together.

After all, theyre not the only feed reader in town, as NewsBlur hilariously reminded me the other day when I did a Google search for Feedly:

Screenshot of "feedly" Google search on Android Chrome

"Better than Feedly" and "with more features than Feedly"... ouch. Shots fired!

--

Thanks for reading, and for more of my comparisons, see this series Part 1, Part 2, Part 4, and Part 5 if youre interested. 

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Feedly vs Inoreader Part 5 Google News is a pro feature

Here is an addition to my series (which even I thought was finished) on Feedly vs Inoreader as the RSS reader of choice. I look for areas in which one objectively excels over the other. This time I get all high and mighty about what RSS means, and why I see one reader moving in a direction I dont like. This is Part 5. For more, see this series Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 if youre interested. 

Google News: a pro feature? 

I thought I was done with the whole Feedly vs. Inoreader thing, because honestly I made the switch to being a paid Inoreader user and have never looked back. But something I saw today made me cringe.

If you have a feedly Pro or feedly Team account, you can use the premium Power Search function to create a Google News feed within feedly.
[Feedly Blog | Follow a Google News Keyword Alert in Feedly]

Google News: use its RSS feeds for free, anywhere

Why this matters 

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