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Comment by ratsbane | Hacker News Reader

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

View on HN

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.

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