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Comment by minus1 | Hacker News Reader

I assume this type of poll is self-selecting and that Windows is greatly underrepresented. In a 2005 article, PG states that the ycombinator visitor OS breakdown is as follows: Windows 66.4%, Macintosh 18.8%, Linux 11.4%, and FreeBSD 1.5%

I would love to see the current OS breakdown from ycombinator logs to compare. Anyone?

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Here's a breakdown based on referrals from YC to a short essay I wrote about a month ago comparing Bing Travel and Kayak. There were 2382 uniques from YC over two days to that page:

  45.5% Windows
  37.6% Mac
  15.1% Linux

Comparing that with an e-commerce site I work with which has a less geek-centric audience, during the same two days:

  84.94% Windows
  12.46% Mac
  1.55% Linux

Thanks for the information. These numbers seem more plausible given my own anecdotal evidence. Now compare this to the poll percentages:

  21.37% Windows (199)
  40.28% Mac (375)
  35.12% Linux (327)

My conclusion is that a Linux user is far more motivated than a Mac or Windows user to respond to this poll, making the results interesting, but not accurate.

It's also possible that a lot of the Windows users are not registered here and are therefore not able to vote in the survey

It's also possible that linux/OSX users are less likely to be interested in a Microsoft product (bing) or an article about one.

It's certainly possible, but I don't think it can account for the full difference. Hopefully PG will provide some recent server stats.

Surely some people are in possesion of more than one computer.

I for one browse hn on my Macintosh, play tf2 and warsow on my windoze xp machine and have wholesome programming fun on my Linux box.

Interesting to see those and grandparents numbers and compare them with the poll.

Seems like there's a discrepancy somewhere, and I would say that it's users voting for the OS they would like to use as their main OS and not the one they actually use.

The little tricks that psychology plays on us...

It seems more likely that OSX users (like me) are much more interested in a "what OS do you use?" poll versus a "Microsoft product blogpost" story.

A lot of people have to use Windows at work, and i think that's why Windows scores that high in the visitor OS breakdown.

It wouldn't help much: I imagine people are mostly on HN when they aren't working, and so are possibly on a secondary computer that doesn't necessarily run their preferred/default OS.

Actually we would need 2 set of numbers from PG.

[1] ycombinator visitor OS breakdown

[2] ycombinator visitor OS breakdown of people who actively contribute by voting/comments. (note intentionally avoiding the ones who post)

Given what user ratsbane reports (above) - windows 46% & mac 38% the gap is not big. So it could be like among visitors the breakdown win-(mac+linux) is like 60-30, then among ones who check out articles 45-50 and among ones who contribute it is 30-60.

Additionally it might be the case looking at comments people vote on both mac & linux as they use both and at same capacities.

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