Poll: How old are you?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=517039

by mixmax • 17 years ago

122 124 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

jwilliams3• 17 years ago

32 here. There have been a few other discussions around this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=63294

paul7986• 17 years ago

33 1st time entrepreneur. I use to feel old as when I started at 31 YC seemed to only fund the 22 to 27 yr old age group.

Though I graduated college late too @ 26, which I thought then too I was way old. Now as I get older I don't care so much, but understand this mind sets comes from society saying college 18 to 24 and 25 to early 30s married w/kids. If you don't follow you feel like an oddball or that people view you that way and unfortunately they do; experience w/extended family.

Overall ... Im enjoying my entrepreneurial ride and hopefully in time will lead me to the supposed societal normal life.

jwilliams3• 17 years ago

33 1st time entrepreneur.

Yup same :-)

pmjordan• 17 years ago

If I'm 25, do I select 20-25 or 25-30?

mixmax7• 17 years ago

Ah, sorry, stupid mistake on my part. Pick 25 - 30

It should, of course go like this:

under 15

15 - 24

25 - 29

30 - 34

35 - 39

40 - 44

45 - 49

50 - 54

55 - 59

60 or over

There seems to be no way to edit poll choices :-(

pg3• 17 years ago

I fixed them.

kirubakaran2• 17 years ago

First option is "under 15". From this you can infer pretty straight forwardly that the next option "15 - 20" means ">= 15 and < 20". (why would he skip the age 15?) ( But you have to read the last option pretty liberally :-) )

Now that I think about this, I realize that there is always one guy in every class who sits in the first row, lifting his hand to ask a question like this :-)

chiffonade• 17 years ago

Also, I'm guessing until probably about age 45, people feel better about hitting the next age bracket so they'll mark the older one if there's any overlap.

jonsen• 17 years ago

25-30

Take the limit as 25.0000....

gpmedia• 17 years ago

Excellent point. The alternatives given should 15, 16-20, 21-25 etc.

Given this you should pick 20-25 (21-25) if you're 25.

screwperman• 17 years ago

Most programmers have the habit of using asymmetric bounds i.e. lower bound included, upper bound excluded.

rickharrison• 17 years ago

20 here and I like the community here because people of all different ages can talk without any form of disrespect or judgement based on age, experience, or any other factor.

adrianwaj• 17 years ago

Sometimes I forget how accomplished some of the people here can be. I just think of it as 'the blob.'

electromagnetic• 17 years ago

I'm also 20 and I've been on HN for a while now, I believe the reason I stayed here but at no other news site is that everyone tries to give an intelligent point of view, and the people who don't often get modded down. I've said things I was sure would get downmodded and ended up getting a couple of points for because I made a good but not necessarily popular point.

I've read so many comments here that I've completely disagreed with, but they always give a valid point or opinion.

Nuktie• 17 years ago

mxcl2• 17 years ago

Saying stuff like that makes you sound young and inexperienced. That counts more than your actual age :P

markessien• 17 years ago

Someone better than me at math should say how many votes we need to have a 95% accuracy.

nx2• 17 years ago

We need the confidence thingy for this online community giving information about their age.

tokenadult6• 17 years ago

The key issue is being good at statistics, not math. The data can't be relied on to make such an inference because they are not from a random sample of the relevant population.

VOLUNTARY RESPONSE POLLS

One professor of statistics, who is a co-author of a highly regarded AP statistics textbook, has tried to popularize the phrase that "voluntary response data are worthless" to go along with the phrase "correlation does not imply causation." Other statistics teachers are gradually picking up this phrase.

[quote=Paul Velleman]

-----Original Message----- From: Paul Velleman [SMTPfv2@cornell.edu] Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 1998 5:10 PM To: apstat-l@etc.bc.ca; Kim Robinson Cc: mmbalach@mtu.edu Subject: Re: qualtiative study

Sorry Kim, but it just aint so. Voluntary response data are worthless. One excellent example is the books by Shere Hite. She collected many responses from biased lists with voluntary response and drew conclusions that are roundly contradicted by all responsible studies. She claimed to be doing only qualitative work, but what she got was just plain garbage. Another famous example is the Literary Digest "poll". All you learn from voluntary response is what is said by those who choose to respond. Unless the respondents are a substantially large fraction of the population, they are very likely to be a biased -- possibly a very biased -- subset. Anecdotes tell you nothing at all about the state of the world. They can't be "used only as a description" because they describe nothing but themselves.[/quote]

http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=194473&tsta...

For more on the distinction between statistics and mathematics, see

http://statland.org/MAAFIXED.PDF

and

http://repositories.cdlib.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=10...

pg3• 17 years ago

Surely it's incorrect to make a blanket statement that voluntary response data is worthless. Worthless means there is zero information in the data, which would only be true in extreme cases.

ErrantX4• 17 years ago

For the record I agree that the chances of the data exactly replicating the reality is minimal.

If nothign else because the youngsters here are more likely to respond (and also respond correctly) even though it is anonymous :)

But even allowing for that I would reckon we can use the data to extrpolate a few guesses. For example the high number of under 20's votes (I imagine these beign the most accurate numbers because of the deomgraphic too).

Plus of course this place is probably more likely to generate valid responses because of the general demographic. I would expect the data to be more accurate than a similar poll on, say, welovebritneyspears.com :)

So, yes (and to abuse a much overused maxim :D), voluntary poll data is untrustworthy. But some are more untrustworthy than others ;)

visitor4rmindia• 17 years ago

This is very interesting - does anyone know just how many of the polls we see on TV or in magazines are voluntary response polls? Should we be ignoring their results?

Intesting Anecdote: NDTV 24x7 (something like CNN in India) had extensive polls in the last (2004) election where they predicted a huge victory for the BJP party. They had poll results state-wise and interviews with eminent psephologists and so on, all predicting a resounding victory.

In the end, BJP lost - and quite badly too! Lies, damned lies, and statistics...

durana2• 17 years ago

I couldn't find a figure on the number of registered HN users, so I used the recent number of daily unique IPs from http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html. That number is 22,000.

For a confidence level of 95% with a confidence interval of 4%, we'd need 584 votes.

I'd imagine there's a lot of science to polling which this calculation probably ignores.

tokenadult6• 17 years ago

For a confidence level of 95% with a confidence interval of 4%, we'd need 584 votes.

I'd imagine there's a lot of science to polling which this calculation probably ignores.

Yep, everything about being sure we have an unbiased sample, which is not likely for a question like this.

What does your calculation say about the grouping of the data into categories?

bbg• 17 years ago

I'm 34.

There's a similar poll from Dec. 2008 at Stack Overflow: "How old are you, and how old were you when you first started coding?": http://stackoverflow.com/questions/327973/how-old-are-you-an...

Looks like that crowd is fairly young (twenties and thirties).

Silentio• 17 years ago

Interestingly enough, it seems that most respondents fall between 20-25 with the next largest group being 25-30.

>I was surprised because I thought the crowd here was mainly young.

Maybe there is something about being +40 that compels one to disclose one's age?

mixmax7• 17 years ago

Being almost 40 I would say that the opposite is true ;-)

unalone• 17 years ago

A lot of us young whippersnappers like to state our age. We feel that youth, for some reason, makes us more likely to know things. We young whippersnappers are kinda dumb that way.

tokenadult6• 17 years ago

most respondents

Good on you to say "most respondents" rather than "most users." This voluntary response poll will tell us nothing reliable about most users of HN, even if more than half of all users respond (which is not particularly likely). See

http://www.edcallahan.com/web110/lectures/litdigest.htm

(you are probably familiar with the example, but this is posted for onlookers) for an example of a poll with a huge sample size that still got the wrong answer.

ErrantX4• 17 years ago

Equating that example to this poll is heading to very shaky territory. I can tgink of plenty of factors that would indicate both why that was an incredibly innacurrate poll (and polling method) and why a poll here on HN is probably going to produce at least soem form of workable data :)

mixmax7• 17 years ago

Here's a histogram of ages, as they appear right now in the poll. It seems they follow a poisson distribution peaking around 27.

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jwilliams3• 17 years ago

Histogram of HN ages.... at midday on a Sunday :-)

mixmax7• 17 years ago

sad isn't it?

:-)

omarish2• 17 years ago

Why would you call it poisson?

bd• 17 years ago

Because it looks like one (compared to Gaussian it's skewed):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_distribution

nikblack• 17 years ago

27.. phew .. my guess was 16.

I feel better now.

gommm2• 17 years ago

And these kind of polls make me feel old at 25... I hate them :-)

dawson• 17 years ago

Tell me about it, I'm twenty-six so imagine how old I feel!

batasrki4• 17 years ago

Ha, I see your 26, sir and raise you 29.

However, I don't feel a day over 12.

mxcl2• 17 years ago

27. I win.

gommm2• 17 years ago

well I'm closer to 26 than 25 (2 more months) but I'm in denial over it...

helveticaman• 17 years ago

I'm 20 and feel old.

markbao2• 17 years ago

16. And I kid you not, I feel old when these 11 year olds are besting me with their jQuery and CSS skills and whatnot.

nx2• 17 years ago

And the Microsoft Professional certificates, the iPhone apps, etc.

I'm also 16. But I don't think these are very important things to know, then again, I like CS more than programming.

markbao2• 17 years ago

Heh, yeah.

I'm more of a business guy. To each their own.

vaksel• 17 years ago

Well it looks like your original conception was correct: 89.5% of users are younger than 40ish

Under 15: 0%

15-20: 8.5%

20-25: 33%

25-30: 31%

30-35: 12%

35-40: 5%

40-45: 5%

50-55: .5%

55-60: .5%

60+: .5%

DougBTX• 17 years ago

> 89.5% of users

Who participate in online polls on Sunday evenings and happened to see this one.

DanielBMarkham4• 17 years ago

I just read this comment ... and noticed that a few wellknown usernames talked about their age, and were in their 40's and 50's. I was surprised because I thought the crowd here was mainly young.

Hey bub, who you calling not young?

mixmax7• 17 years ago

hey - you've got a full beard :-)

DanielBMarkham4• 17 years ago

That's great.

Using the current histogram, I've got socks that are older than 40% of the posters here.

Or maybe, since it is a weekend, all of us senior citizen programmers are all out surfing, caving, working on our tans, and skydiving. It's the young lamers that are here doing polls on HN.

ivanzhao• 17 years ago

you need to change it to finer selection from 16-30

davidw3• 17 years ago

Age doesn't matter. This poll should read something like "I started programming on 1) an Abacus 2) IBM mainframes, punchcards, etc... 3) Apple II 4) Commodore 64, 5) IBM PC, etc... Feel free to take the idea and do another poll. I'm too tired/busy.

brianto20103• 17 years ago

Just because it doesn't matter does not mean we can't ask it. It's interesting to find out the age distribution of HN despite any practical (or other) purpose.

Its a "just for giggles" kind of thing.

davidw3• 17 years ago

So was my answer, but it was missing a smiley or two and the right tone, I guess. Tired/busy, as I said:-)

HeyLaughingBoy2• 17 years ago

Fine.

I started programming on a TRS-80 Model III (in my physics teacher's office in HS), but the first one I actually owned was a TRS-80 Micro Color Computer. Not quite as old as the PC, but missed it by just a few years.

DarkShikari• 17 years ago

"TI calculator" option missing.

colins_pride2• 17 years ago

That's where I started, too

wglb• 17 years ago

cdc 3400 and ibm 1130 missing

batasrki4• 17 years ago

(edit) Latest histogram at 50% scale:

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pg3• 17 years ago

Can you scale it so it doesn't break the page width?

batasrki4• 17 years ago

I'll try.

batasrki4• 17 years ago

Hopefully, this version is better.

cosmo7• 17 years ago

Straw polls are interesting, but full of bias. For example, older users are more likely to be in a relationship and/or have children, making participation on a weekend less likely.

DTrejo• 17 years ago

There is also no way to tell how many people saw the poll, but chose not to vote.

ErrantX4• 17 years ago

I have to say the most intruguing stat is the under 20 group. I would imagine one or 2 but nearly 90 people seems suprisingly large. I wouldnt have expected that many people finding an interest here at that age.

(Hypocritically I probably would have found it interesting at that age :D).

EDIT: Im 22 incidentally.

antirez• 17 years ago

The jump from 34 to 35 kills a lot of people...

dw0rm• 17 years ago

I just turned 24 today :D

gdee• 17 years ago

Happy birthday ! :)

ilaksh• 17 years ago

To what degree do these results reflect the likelihood of responding rather than the actual demographics? I actually think younger people may be slightly more inclined to respond.

kamidev• 17 years ago

16 points

leed25d• 17 years ago

Looks to be closer to a Gaussian, not Poisson, distribution to me.

geofffox• 17 years ago

My last computer class was in high school--1968. I have owned a personal computer for over 30 years now. Alas, most of my contemporaries have let the leading edge pass them by. I won't allow that to happen to me.

dmh20002• 17 years ago

if you had a computer class in high school in 1968, you went to an awesome school!

jws• 17 years ago

Apparently I'm old enough in this population that I will have to end all my posts with "you young whippersnapper." from here on out.

jhatcom• 17 years ago

53 here. :)

asjo4• 17 years ago

Graph, updated every hour: http://koldfront.dk/misc/hn/age.png (until I kill the cronjob :-))

DanielBMarkham4• 17 years ago

Great minds think alike! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=517447

(EDIT) I deleted my comment, because I like your chron idea much better (BTW, what'd you use for the scraping?)

Here's the direct link.

http://www.whattofix.com/images/HNUsersByAge.jpg

Like I said in the original, glad to update it if anybody likes the 3-D that much better.

asjo4• 17 years ago

Cool! I didn't see yours before posting mine... (I get a 403 Forbidden currently?)

aneesh• 17 years ago

Cool. What are you using to draw the graph?

asjo4• 17 years ago

I'm using curl to get the page, piping it into a simple one-off Perl-script that produces a comma-separated file, which in turn is read by a tiny R script, which then produces the graph.

whatusername2• 17 years ago

you don't happen to still have the hourly scrapes do you? A line graph showing when age-groups were online/voting might be of interest. (I noticed that 20-24 was first, and has dropped to 2nd now)

asjo4• 17 years ago

No, it was a quick hack late at night, and I didn't think of archiving the data - sorry.

edcdave• 17 years ago

Three cheers for the Long Tail!

It's not an exclusive club though. It only takes a little time.

chanux2• 17 years ago

Just outta curiosity... How did u put those vote up buttons in your post? :D

eru2• 17 years ago

Look for "poll" in http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html

chanux2• 17 years ago

Thanks alot. I'm happy that there are real hackers who can remember that they even had a first time in learning something. The real hackers share.

The lamers just blame away the "askers". In HNs case the lamers 'reducing points' (at their will). I believe that those lamers think that they are 'born knowing everything' & haven't ever heard the phrase "With great power comes great responsibility".

hendler• 17 years ago

age 22 is peak. After 25 is downhill - though I feel ok. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/4995...

gaoshan• 17 years ago

I'm 118. I refuse to click the 60 and over category as those young whippersnappers are beneath me.

MaysonL2• 17 years ago

Golly - more teenagers than 40+ (as of 7:30 PDT).

catfish• 17 years ago

Mentally young, physically old.

cookiecaper• 17 years ago

blender• 17 years ago

neilo• 17 years ago

I'm 29 going on 30 this year which means, given the results here, that I am on my way down and out. Either that or I'm at the crest of a wave that will move and break as we all die off. Morbid ...

dmh20002• 17 years ago

ok, who's the oldest founder of a startup selected by YC?

Poll: How old are you?

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