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 few

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.