Cool. Wish I could be there :) No such stuff in the EU as far as I know :/
And yes I know; but this gives some background maybe of why people would hate MS so much. They have been stung too many times in the (recent) past to allow anything of theirs to rise to fame. I know quite a lot of (older) people who are like that for the reasons I detailed.
I upvoted the Nokia tablet story and of course it did not deserve to be thrown off. It looks like a nice product hardware wise. I noticed it too that high ranking MS stories suddenly disappear, but I noticed that with other stories (I found interesting) as well. I don't know exactly how that works here.
I also look forward to chatting with Gilad Bracha, many of the Google PL people will be there that I don't get to see very often. EU has ECOOP (every) and PLDI (this) year, I also went this summer to a nice workshop in Leiden on language design.
I have good ideas on why people dislike Microsoft, but it baffles me that they hate it enough to play dirty in getting those stories revoked. Why would they even bother commenting on an article they weren't interested in anyways? It doesn't make sense, it begins to look like Slashdot all over again. Did microsoft cause so much trauma to them when they were children, or is this just some sort of bandwagon-based nerd rage?
HN basically is the same draw as the Slashdot crowd ... with iPhone vs Android being the dominant flamewar in place of Linux vs MS. (or KDE vs Gnome).
And fewer hot grits.
I'd say a lot of it was due to trauma in the 90s and early 2000's. People really, really grew to hate Microsoft on a personal level, more intense than the relatively trendy/casual Apple hate these days.
Things like the Halloween memos. The Java debacle. The massive industry time waster known as WS-* (thanks IBM too). But also business practices like using patents to try to dissuade Linux adoption in 2004 by threatening to sue their customers if they don't pass over some payola (happened to my company at the time). I truly am not lying about that last one - I worked for a large telecom that received this threat.
That said I still have respect for MS Research and a lot of the work being done on C# and .NET. Early in my career I was a COM/COM+/.NET guy but decided it wasn't a company I wanted to do business with.
And yes I know; but this gives some background maybe of why people would hate MS so much. They have been stung too many times in the (recent) past to allow anything of theirs to rise to fame. I know quite a lot of (older) people who are like that for the reasons I detailed.
I upvoted the Nokia tablet story and of course it did not deserve to be thrown off. It looks like a nice product hardware wise. I noticed it too that high ranking MS stories suddenly disappear, but I noticed that with other stories (I found interesting) as well. I don't know exactly how that works here.