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Comment by jart | Hacker News Reader

The fact that the IMF thinks your choice of operating system should impact your creditworthiness is something I've been warning people about for months because it shows why we need cosmopolitan software. Since it's nice to have the ability to pick up and move our apps elsewhere should we discover we're using the "wrong" one. Because political winds change, but good engineering endures. https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan

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> The fact that the IMF thinks your choice of operating system should impact your creditworthiness is something

At some point in the past or maybe in another universe, a well known accommodation booking site might or might not have been offering better rates to people using Linux than OSX. Not confirmed, obviously.

I think this counts as confirmed (it was kayak/ orbitz)[1]. Pretty sure I heard one of the engineers talking about it in an interview too?

[1]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304458604577488...

I think it's the other way around. People who demonstrate that they have lots of money by showing off their "OS X" user agent get the tourist rebate.

BTW, I also believe that flight prices magically increase on iOS...

It’s well known amongst marketing people that targeting iOS users results in ‘better leads’

I've tested this multiple times with friends who use an IPhone, and indeed I got better rates on Android. Might do course also been other aspects involved, maybe they analysed my data realised I'm a penny pincher.

I think the thought there is just that STEM nerds tend to have stable high-paid jobs and thus good credit, and so OSes/browsers that nobody but nerds use / would tolerate using, are signals of having good credit.

This just sounds like including income in credit score with extra steps.

Income, or even 6mo income history, doesn't predict how likely you'll be to get another job if you lose your job. What lenders really want to know is how in-demand you are in the market, and so what they should predict as the "floor" on your future income.

Add to that how likely someone with your personality-type is to just decide to take a few months/years off between jobs living off of savings, and you've got a heuristic nearly as predictive of loan-repayment as all the rest of the information lenders use today put together.

Time to link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_tag and because of where it came from, maybe to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nontheist_Quakers

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