YC Hacks Winner: Athelas – Blood imaging and analysis from your smartphone

In this case, those parameters would be the image data and whatever health parameter is of interest (e.g. white blood cell count). My initial skepticism, perhaps that of the parent comments as well, has more to do with whether the measurements are of high enough quality for any reliable analysis to be done. The app doesn't seem to require any background or contextual data either (though I haven't verified this). If not, false positives and negatives could be problematic.

Anyway, machine learning isn't a form of magic that can transform data with no meaningful sensitivity to something into a something that is sensitive to it.

More data is always nice, but typically you see accuracy level off (diminishing returns). ML is a constant process of improving your data, increasing the amount of available data (not the same as improving your data), improving your features, and improving your model. No one thing is sufficient.

This is at least more in the right direction than what I had seen previously.

I saw much worse a few months ago at a competition I was in. The winning team "created" a device (that looked like a USB key). They claimed that if you had a sore throat you could take a sample with a q-tip, insert into the device, and it would magically determine the presence of an infection. Those were their words. I was horrified and when I approached the organizers afterwards they didn't understand my explanation on why it was not possible. Indeed, after that time as I have spoken about it most people do not understand that it's not currently possible. Sci-fi blurs the realm of possibility for many and it seems reasonable to them. Back to the actual contest, mine was an "idea competition" and not a YC Hackathon.

Tanay's idea is leaps and bounds closer to the realm of possibility than the idea behind the other team I witnessed. For that, his age, and his other work on his startup clipped.me, I congratulate him and look forward to seeing him come up with something truly useful in the future.

Still, a lot of smart money says the smartphone-pic-to-clinician thing could have a big impact. See Foldscope, for example, which takes this idea to the next level: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...

By the way, nice to see a Raman shout-out! Here's a slightly newer Raman paper with some nice pictures (compulsory open-access for the win): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3806096/

You can still use Windows for general software development, many people do, but most tutorials and tools are aimed at unix compatible systems. Also, when it comes time to deploy a server on AWS (or any cloud provider other than Azure), it'll help to know your way around a unix-like OS.

Also consider that for iOS development you need a Mac, and those seem more lucrative these days than Windows apps.

The Microsoft world runs .NET, Visual Studio, C#/VB.NET/ASP.NET, targets the Windows desktop runtime (tho increasingly also the web), relies primarily on proprietary (and usually non-gratis) libraries and tools, etc.

The Open Source world revolves around *NIX, uses open-source languages (gcc, clang, Java, V8 Javascript, MRI Ruby, etc), targets the Linux runtime and sometimes OS X/iOS, relies primarily on open-source (and gratis) libraries and tools, etc.

The ecosystem differences go pretty deep. For example, even though either world can interop with practically any SQL database, inhabitants of one will largely choose Microsoft SQL Server while inhabitants of the other will largely choose MySQL/PostgreSQL.

Both can have great software development or terrible software development. It's possible to mix and match (eg, using Windows doesn't preclude you from writing Ruby).

But startups tend to choose the Open Source world, likely due to the combination of lower licensing costs and the "hackability" of open-source software. I'd argue that due to those same reasons, the Open Source world has produced more innovation in the last decade.

Windows has ports here and there, and there's always Cygwin, but it's going to feel like a compatibility layer the whole time you're using it (especially if you're following guides/stack overflow help).

I've used all three stacks for years and couldn't happier with my latest MBPr (hardware or software wise).

OSX took the intelligent step forward of basically reskinning BSD (not exactly but it's concise enough) and adopting the Intel platform on the hardware side was enough to bridge the gap and eventually overtake it in many tech circles.

http://spectacleapp.com/