I don't know anyone that uses desktop Linux, unless I count my sister who I saw using Red Hat at her CAD/CAM workplace four or five years ago. However I am afraid to to state this on HN, given how sensitive and hostile the crowd here can be about Linux.
Yes, people tend to focus more on the tools rather than the product. As long as you don't do things like using LOLCODE for a huge enterprise app, the language and environment you know are more important in making something rather than things like text editors and IDEs.
I guess the point is that it will become like the PC desktop ecosystem. There are new OSes all the time, but which OS broke the 4% mark in the last 20 years? Perhaps OS X, but Mac sales are dropping. The PC market is being disrupted not by another PC but by a change in paradigm to mobile. The mobile market is fast approaching a place where it takes risking billions just to start competing.
Agreed, the stories sunk include ones like the Anandtech review of the Surface Pro, and the site is quite reputed for being neutral, however the excessive number of comments combined with not too many upvotes can easily sink articles which are otherwise just news and this contributes to the filter bubble(funnily there's a anti-filter bubble post right near this article on the front page).
Sorry I have no idea, it's all an opaque blackbox. This is just idle speculation, take it with a bucket of salt. Maybe your account crossed some automated threshold for spam, voting rings, etc. Readers of the site cannot say for sure.
Yes, that came out in a thread where people were complaining that many positive/neutral posts about Microsoft/Nokia were being downranked and disappeared from the front page, while negative stories didn't usually have that problem leading to a chilling effect on the stories submitted and commented on. People seem to have got riled up over it because they thought it was being flagged, but PG said it was because of the flamewar detector that penalizes articles with lots of comments but fewer upvotes, atleast in that particular case.
The flamewar detector does its intended job with things like the gender discrimination stories but it looks like it throws out the baby with the bathwater and contributes to the echo chamber effect.
It's really hard to tell(except if you're pg or HN staff) whether a story disappeared because of the flamewar detector, or flagging or the domain greylist or something else. I guess this is intentionally so.
Can't find the article now, but I recently read that the Youtube ads getting more obnoxious is hurting a lot of small advertizers and sites. Because of the annoyance, even many non tech people are increasingly looking for solutions and installing ad blocks, which block all ads and not just Youtube's. Google can get around this somewhat by paying Adblock Plus to unblock it's own text ads, but a number of small fish cannot.
http://money.cnn.com/2012/04/12/technology/google-earnings/