It's not remotely surprising that Microsoft would favor its own product. What is surprising (at least to me) is that they would make efforts to APPEAR impartial.
Now I don't feel so bad about having only 300 followers. And, case in point, I wrote exactly one tweet about hockey (wasn't even a good one) and now am followed by some Hockey website. I suspect they won't ever be RTing my standard fare of tech tweets.
HR folks are known for wanting only the blandest of employees and probably will look for any reason to disqualify a candidate whose "lifestyle" is cause for concern. Still, it's a shockingly high number and makes me wonder what else might fall under that "lifestyle" category.
Sounds to me like HN is a victim of its own success and is rapidly going the way of Digg. There's a reason people write "trivial" content: It gets clicks.
I came to Hacker News late and so I have only known it as an aggregator site with a better than average community participation. Certainly more valuable than Reddit and Digg. But I can see how it's not really hacker news or startup news any longer and you have to wonder at what point it's not even going to be technology news.