Poll: What is your age?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5536734

by xijuan • 13 years ago

328 300 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

roy_s• 13 years ago

Cub3• 13 years ago

Same here

zahir642• 13 years ago

Good practice,thanks

joelrunyon• 13 years ago

Shouldn't there be a stagger for the ages so there aren't double counts?

I.e. 16-20, 21-25, 26-30, 31-35

waterlesscloud3• 13 years ago

Most the time the average age cited for readers of this site seems to be 24. I don't know where that came from, but it seems to match what's stated or implied in a lot of comments.

l33tbro• 13 years ago

For those also interested in Male to Female ratio (data courtesy of user 'pdx'):

1309/89 == 15 to 1

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1571216

1377/72 == 19 to 1

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=591309

506/31 16 to 1

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2175603

466/35 == 13 to 1

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=749617 reply

drivers99• 13 years ago

Also this one from 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5520342

1207 M / 73 F / 30 other

jk4930• 13 years ago

Looks like the ratio in CS courses. I came up with the constant 4: Either 4 or 4% are female, whichever is less.

tracker1• 13 years ago

Wild that at 38, I'm at the tail end.

zahir642• 13 years ago

incompatible• 13 years ago

Strange that there are so few here who are older than Paul Graham, who is about 49.

D9u6• 13 years ago

I was also disappointed by the amount of responses in my age group. (49)

niggler• 13 years ago

I'm curious about these (5 as of the posting time) people that are over 90

clark-kent• 13 years ago

Also curious about the 13 under 10. Some young geniuses.

tiredofcareer2• 13 years ago

I have a brand-new bridge over the East River for sale, low miles, navigation package included, e-mail on my profile if you're interested.

icemelt8• 13 years ago

Is the next answer "get over it?"

sbashyal2• 13 years ago

I created HN Charts to visualize HN Poll data. Click the following link to see the result of this poll in an easy to read chart: http://hnlike.com/hncharts/chart/?id=5536734

samstave• 13 years ago

Awesome!

Here is the chart fdrom my recent poll:

http://hnlike.com/hncharts/chart/?id=5522156

sans Winklevii

spiralganglion• 13 years ago

This is nice, and I'm really glad you have both Front Page and Best sections. A link from the chart back to the poll post would be helpful.

jjcm• 13 years ago

Can you provide a link back to the original poll somewhere on the page?

sbashyal2• 13 years ago

That can certainly be done!

pjmlp• 13 years ago

Oh man, no wonder many on HN are unaware of how technology on the 80 and 90 was like.

NuZZ• 13 years ago

One issue; on these charts there doesn't appear to be a link to the original HN thread. This should be there.

tuananh• 13 years ago

over 90 !? noise?

lostlogin2• 13 years ago

Wonder who the oldest reader/contributor is? Anyone want to start that ball rolling?

xijuan2• 13 years ago

Some people suggested I should not included some of the options. But your questions are one of the reason why I chose to include options such as over 90. It would be really interesting to know the age of the oldest reader.

epsylon• 13 years ago

I'm waiting anxiously for the "What is your quest?" poll.

caffeinewriter• 13 years ago

17, and a proud hacker.

D9u6• 13 years ago

I've always thought that when someone refers to oneself as being a "hacker" then they're most likely not.

http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#what_is

kintamanimatt4• 13 years ago

Are there really people over 80 and under 10 on this site, or are people just clicking shit for the hell of it?

willlll• 13 years ago

I always vote every option in any poll that you can pick more than one thing.

kintamanimatt4• 13 years ago

Why? Why fuck up the data like that? The thing with HN Polls is you've no way to create polls in which you can select only one option. All you can do is list the options you want included in the poll, nothing else.

On a side note, your personal website is fucking hilarious.

kaoD• 13 years ago

Enjoy your blinking high-contrast giant fucsia text.

jacquesm• 13 years ago

Would you like me to treat you as under 10 or over 90 from now on, or both at the same time?

Please put your reading glasses on and take the dummy out of your mouth, then re-read the poll text:

"Please be honest and click one answer only!"

danboarder• 13 years ago

As I am writing this, there are 8 under 10 and 8 over 90. I think that's a good clue as to a 'margin of error' that should be applied to the results overall.

Edit: wow that went up fast. Now there are 20+ under 8/over 90... I guess whenever an option says "don't abuse this option" there are those who just can't resist.

cynwoody3• 13 years ago

Quantcast thinks [1] the top three age groups for this site are 35-44 (37%), 45-65 (24%), and 25-34 (15%). Of course, Quantcast also estimates the gender ratio at 53/47 M/F.

To be sure, Quantcast is measuring lurkers + members, whereas this poll is measuring members only. But, nevertheless, my gut feel is Quantcast is simply wrong.

[1] http://www.quantcast.com/news.ycombinator.com#!demo&anch...

yagibear• 13 years ago

Old enough to know that this has been asked before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2322031 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=517039 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=126923

JamesLeonis• 13 years ago

It's interesting to compare the responses here to those. I especially like the "spike" in users over 60 that mysteriously showed up between then and now.

manojlds• 13 years ago

But not old enough to know that there are new users all the time? ( and maybe old users leave too ) The numbers are going to change every year, and it would be interesting to know how HN users are distributed in terms of age.

MichaelApproved3• 13 years ago

759 days ago, 1448 days ago and 1867 days ago, respectively.

I think it's OK to ask this question after 2 years. It's great to see how communities change over the years.

Yes, I know it's not scientific at all and does a poor job of reflecting real demographics. But, if you think there's value in asking, then there's value in comparing previous answers.

pavanky• 13 years ago

It is also interesting to see what the median age is. I think it is between 25-30 now where as it was between 30-35 before. The ratio of teenagers also seems to be decreasing.

rdl3• 13 years ago

Average account age (especially for people broken down by submitters with frequency, commenters with frequency, and quality commenters by frequency) would be MUCH more awesome than age, I think.

ricardobeat• 13 years ago

In graphs: http://infogr.am/HN-age-poll-12515/

Went from a couple hundred answers in 2008-2011 to +3000 today, and counting.

The distribution doesn't seem to have changed much other than the current fool answers, hard to tell since the charts are not in absolute scale. Would be cool to aggregate all the years for comparison, but I have no idea how to merge the age ranges.

Script used to get the data: https://gist.github.com/ricardobeat/5370218

andreasvc• 13 years ago

Nice graphs. It would be nice if the categories had the same colors across graphs, to enable comparisons.

robinreekers• 13 years ago

JakeL• 13 years ago

17!

pseut2• 13 years ago

355687428096000?

lucb1e• 13 years ago

Int overflow. I can't read that age.

cynwoody3• 13 years ago

Let me guess ... You are either an aging gopher, born 9 April 1981, or you are an eleven-year-old.

Void_2• 13 years ago

A few under 10, awesome. What do you kids find most interesting here?

cfontes• 13 years ago

Nothing... probably those votes are from older guys just clicking in everything.

solistice5• 13 years ago

Icecream, Assembly, Legos and FPGAs. How about you? //that's not a serious question, so why a serious answer.

Void_2• 13 years ago

Not it isn't not anymore. And put a space after your "//".

lakeeffect• 13 years ago

I think saying please don't abuse makes way for a joke, and may act from the numbers as a planted seed.

xentronium• 13 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=517039 -- 5 years ago it didn't.

slu• 13 years ago

I think the "Please don't abuse this option..." has had the opposite effect than the OP wanted...

jkestner• 13 years ago

It's a honeypot.

biswajitsharma• 13 years ago

21 Under 10 Geniuses ... All hail!

benaiah• 13 years ago

17 - and I'd like to note that this is one of the few forums on which I can have that information public and still be able to participate in (mostly) civil public discourse, without put-downs, pats-on-the-head, or pandering. It's a breath of fresh air.

Zombieball• 13 years ago

That is unless you start a post with "Show HN: I am 17, look what I made..." some people seem to take offense to that :P

I think its great that people of all ages can connect on HN through a common passion for technology.

singular• 13 years ago

Well done lad, good for you! pats head ;-)

Only kidding, maturity varies wildly in online communities, I think age is very often not correlated.

Oftentimes I think that kind of patronising can be the result of jealousy. You know, youth is something you come to miss more than you think you would (31 here...)

cstuder3• 13 years ago

Born on the first january of 1970.

AdamTReineke• 13 years ago

Makes it really easy to figure out how many seconds old you are!

brokenparser• 13 years ago

Do you celebrate birthdays or time_t milestones?

adlpz2• 13 years ago

My mind just got blown. For some reason, I never thought of this possibility.

cstuder3• 13 years ago

It's not my real birthday, it's just the one I use on the net. Like waterlesscloud I hop it will break something somewhere. Or at least amuse a fellow engineer.

Somebody else however suggested using 31st december 1969. Now that's just evil...

waterlesscloud3• 13 years ago

That's the date I use on every site that asks for it (it's not my birthday). I have the vague hope it will eventually break something somewhere.

qb45• 13 years ago

There are lots of people born before 1970 and any system processing birth dates as epoch times would fail immediately. I'd rather try Feb 29, 1899 or just some plain old SQL injection instead.

BHSPitMonkey2• 13 years ago

Dude. That's epoch.

D9u6• 13 years ago

Ah yes... Unix!

camus• 13 years ago

33 use to tag te walls of Paris before writing some php & java.

austenallred• 13 years ago

I find it hard to take this poll seriously, given the 33+ in the "over 90" range.

DigitalSea• 13 years ago

I don't know how accurate the results will be from this poll. I seriously doubt there are 36 users on HN over 90 (not entirely implausible, but most likely not the case). For anyone wondering I just turned 25, so in the 21 to 25 bracket and voted accordingly. Another fact worth pointing out is that you can vote more than once, so you can vote your real age and then vote on every other age to game the poll if you want too.

vl• 13 years ago

Well, at least he is going to know what people from HN that choose to answer polls say about their age.

gobengo• 13 years ago

I'm curious to see more granularity on 21-25

nu2ycombinator• 13 years ago

One conclusion from poll results you can deduct is "You are not that successful in life, if you are older than 30 and still checking hackernews"

lostlogin2• 13 years ago

Why? Learning new stuff regularly is right up there in my definition of success.

D9u6• 13 years ago

My sentiments, exactly. (I'm 49)

sukuriant4• 13 years ago

Or your incredibly successful and an awesome person all together, because you're learning to program and thinking of starting your own business --- or HAVE been programming and still are, at 90

wilfra4• 13 years ago

Too many options. All I can really discern from a quick glance is that ~71 people trolled the poll (under 10+over 90) and most HN'ers appear to be 21-30.

TazeTSchnitzel4• 13 years ago

Why do you assume they lied?

wilfra4• 13 years ago

Look at the old polls. Low single digit %'s of people were under 15 or over 60 and now nearly 10% of people are under 10 or over 90? Riiiight.

I realize it's possible demographics changed in that time. Maybe HN is all the rage in nursing homes and kindergartens these days. Doesn't pass the sniff test though.

One demographic does appear to be distinctly on the rise though: trolls.

thomasfl• 13 years ago

BTW: this poll is displayed beautifully with bar chart on HN for mobile http://cheeaun.github.io/hackerweb/#/item/5536734

chmike• 13 years ago

It looks like 44 people over 90 isn't very realisic. I guess some people find it funy to screw the poll. It's a waste of creative potential. What else have you done lately to make this world a better place to live ?

pg2• 13 years ago

The most significant result of this poll is that HN now seems to be past the point where we can rely on an honor system to prevent users from giving junk answers to polls. A few years ago we could. That's an unfortunate change.

However, it's an ill wind that blows no good. When I'm done reading applications, I'll add a little tweak to HN to make the fonts super big for all the users over 80.

SCdF• 13 years ago

My thoughts exactly. That's a lot of <10 year olds...

pg2• 13 years ago

I'll have to think of something extra for them too. Any ideas? Bear in mind that about half the users under 10 are also over 90, so whatever it is can't conflict with extra large fonts.

S4M• 13 years ago

How do you know some people are lying here about their age?

notimetorelax• 13 years ago

From the other comment:

> Bear in mind that about half the users under 10 are also over 90

endianswap• 13 years ago

Multiple answers, at least, would be my guess.

TeMPOraL5• 13 years ago

You could, in most cases, go from their e-mail or whatever data they put in their profile description back to their LinkedIn account, at which point you can get a pretty good estimate of their age (based on education and work history). In theory, you could even automate this. ;).

gegenschall• 13 years ago

Put a poll out there, give it at least one irrelevant/obviously inapt answer and people will click it. Not really an HN problem if you ask me...

aethr• 13 years ago

At first reading, I thought you were suggesting a poll that was the human version of a honeypot!

Put up a poll with one obviously troll answer, and anyone who upvotes the troll answer gets hellbanned immediately. Obviously a heavy-handed approach, it just made me laugh thinking about it.

aptwebapps• 13 years ago

The Cowboy Neal option, in other words.

MichaelApproved3• 13 years ago

> However, it's an ill wind that blows no good.

I never heard that phrase so I looked it up. For anyone else that's interested: http://www.usingenglish.com/reference/idioms/it%27s+an+ill+w...

"This is said when things have gone wrong; the idea being that when bad things happen, there can also be some positive results."

mtdewcmu2• 13 years ago

I love a well-used idiom. It may have originated as a reference to sailing. http://www.answers.com/topic/it-s-an-ill-wind-that-blows-nob...

officemonkey• 13 years ago

You're in for a treat:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8a6xtg0auyk

ritchiea• 13 years ago

It's also an issue that you can give multiple answers to polls. I attempted it just to see if the poll enforced giving just one answer but now I've given multiple answers to this poll as an experiment.

pointyhatuk• 13 years ago

It still looks roughly like a bell curve. I think the genuine answers are enough to extrapolate some information from this.

mtdewcmu2• 13 years ago

The OP was asking for it when he included 90+ as an answer, don't you think? If you throw out the outliers, it looks plausibly accurate.

petercooper2• 13 years ago

Exactly. A lot of us have been brought up on Slashdot polls where joke answers are the order of the day (I'd have voted for CowboyNeal if I could). If the top bracket had just been 50+, I imagine the responses would be a lot more realistic.

RobAley• 13 years ago

PG, have you considered that many (though granted not all) of the "junk" answers may due to the hacker mentality, people asking themselves questions like "what if I choose more than one option, will it let me?", "what if I 'accidentally' select the wrong answer, can I undo it?", "What if too many people give implausible answers, can it be corrected for or will the poll be junked?" and so on. Hackers - tinkers and the curious.

Working in survey based stats all day, I can tell you that the easiest junk answers to filter out are the ones you're seeing at the moment. The plausible looking results you used to get aren't necessarily as good as you think they were.

dhimes• 13 years ago

pg's point still stands. If I wanted to know that, I wouldn't screw up an existing poll but I would start one of my own for that purpose and invite folks to test it with me.

ebbv4• 13 years ago

That sounds fine in theory but in reality anyone with a hacker mentality should see that the poll is obviously based on the honor system and is simply a series of options to upvote without actually attempting to ruin the results.

brudgers• 13 years ago

"have you considered that many (though granted not all) of the "junk" answers may due to the hacker mentality"

What I find more interesting is that this thread has been allowed to survive rather than being downmodded. And that tells me that some influential HN'ers consider the responses to this survey meaningful - either individually or in aggregate. One of the often ignored aspects of HN is that to a meaningful degree it is an extension of people's workplaces. I find it handy to remember that when participating.

I rather doubt that the point of the survey is actually collecting data on HN'ers ages. Detailed demographic information about people on the internet is readily obtainable from other sources.

On the other hand, information about who is likely to "vandalize" HN is more difficult to collect and highly relevant, and this is the jist of PG's response as I read it. I couldn't really come up with a better term for crapping on a poll than "vandalize." The scare quotes are there because what is happening is normal internet behavior.

Perhaps the vandalism is somewhat invited by the absurdity of the youngest age and the quasi-absurdity of the oldest - does it really matter from an HN demographic standpoint to distinguish between those over 80 and those over 90 - both cohorts must have came to computing as adults.

Not that this excuses the behavior, and perhaps the invitation to vandalism is intentional because the wording and presentation of many attempts at data collection via ASK HN is awkward enough to invite meanness of which vandalism is one form.

[EDIT] Indeed, the creator of the poll claims to be studying quantitative psychology.

jrs235• 13 years ago

You know sometimes on My tablet touchscreen (iPad) I go to click a link, or arrow in this case, and my fat fingers cause it to register the wrong one. I'd suggest making the arrows bigger and the vertical space between them larger too.

PAULHANNA842• 13 years ago

Anyone who knows the functionality of HN (I would expect a hacker to) knows that you could choose/upvote multiple answers.

oulipo• 13 years ago

This is a problem with all web polls but this is absolutely not a problem here: you can measure quite precisely the amount of noise in the answers (seems to be about 20 to 50 fake results per age range) and deduce the approximate correct values for all ranges (assuming people that give wrong answers lie uniformly in the answers :)

TeMPOraL5• 13 years ago

> assuming people that give wrong answers lie uniformly in the answers

This assumption doesn't seem right, because age of HN users is not uniformly distributed, and we can assume (yes, I'm exchanging one assumption with another ;)) that people who lie won't pick their own age as a "lie". Therefore the biggest age group should be underrepresented, and the others, on average, overrepresented. :).

lifeisstillgood2• 13 years ago

I recently signed onto Coursera and being US university derived, they took their honour system quite seriously - I had to read the "I promise not to cheat or publish answers" bit and click yes.

Could I suggest pg drafts his own view of the HN honour system. If we agree we could make explicit what as a Brit is supposed to be implicitly understood by all good chaps anyhow.

Yours Adrian Mole 13 3/4 years old

mrcalzone• 13 years ago

I attend a course at Coursera by Dan Ariely on Behavior Economics, and he talks about the effect of signing an honor code. Interestingly, his experiments showed that people stopped cheating when signing a honor-code, even if no such code really existed at their university. Being reminded of moral seems to be enough.

[http://www.researchgate.net/publication/228263998_The_Dishon...]

clicks• 13 years ago

> When I'm done reading applications, I'll add a little tweak to HN to make the fonts super big for all the users over 80.

I'm in my mid-20s, I did not vote dishonestly in this poll, but I wish you'll make the change for me anyway.

The small font on a 1080p screen (13" screen) is practically unreadable for me. I have to zoom in about 150% to make out anything.

radarsat1• 13 years ago

Some browsers have a handy feature called "minimum font size."

Firefox: http://i.imgur.com/m2doXpX.png

Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/minimum-font/pofdg...

lahabana• 13 years ago

If you just want to increase font size for a website/short time. Almost every browser can do so by doing ctrl(cmd)+ or -.

dunham• 13 years ago

Have you considered a user.js script? I'm using one to fill in the white borders and wrap comments at a reasonable width:

  // ==UserScript==
  // @match https://news.ycombinator.com/*
  // ==/UserScript==
  (function () {
    document.body.style.backgroundColor = "#f6f6ef";
    var s = document.createElement('style');
    s.innerText = "td.default {max-width: 40em; }";
    document.head.appendChild(s);
  })()

(For Chrome, name the file hn.user.js and drag/drop it onto the chrome://extensions page.)

davidroberts2• 13 years ago

As long as you are tweaking things, could you add a confirmation option to the flag link? Its placement next to the comment link makes it all too easy to hit by accident on a smartphone screen by fat-fingered people like me.

gailees2• 13 years ago

I second this one to the max!

jrajav• 13 years ago

You should try Chrome or Opera mobile, they both have a fat-finger zoom when you tap ambiguously so you can confirm what you really wanted to do.

fr0sty• 13 years ago

Once you "flag" an article the text changes to "unflag" and clicking again changes it back (at least for me).

But downvotes are forever.

lmm• 13 years ago

If HN is no longer entirely full of goody-two-shoes I count that as a plus. Anecdotally my impression is that the diversity of stories has increased; we seem to have a wider cross-section of interests than a year ago.

mindcrime• 13 years ago

Anecdotally my impression is that the diversity of stories has increased; we seem to have a wider cross-section of interests than a year ago.

Yes, but that's not necessarily a Good Thing. What we're getting are more and more stories on the front-page that are things that you could read about on CNN, MSNBC, or see on ABC Nightly News. This is "Hacker News" not "World News Tonight".

mixedbit• 13 years ago

In general you shouldn't be able to associate results of such polls with users accounts. Any such data is a liability.

blablabla1232• 13 years ago

It may sound odd but according to this

http://www.census.gov/prod/2011pubs/acs-17.pdf

more than 0.5% of the U.S. population is over 90 in 2010. In the poll it is 1.7%. Maybe it's fake, maybe tech people stay longer online...

WiseWeasel3• 13 years ago

Look at the curve though. Age should be a smooth bell curve, but here it spikes on the ends (even when accounting for the fact that the end choices potentially cover more than the 5 years covered by the other options), which is clear evidence of error.

trotsky2• 13 years ago

If that font change comes with a proportional increase in the size of the voting arrows our younger brethren will be kicking themselves for their honest answer.

On a serious note, I'm surprised to see you offering this specific post as a bellwether - by my memory we've seen basically identical versions of this at least a half a dozen times with similar results. It doesn't seem like there's a big gap between something like this and a "what's your favorite snack chip brand" to me.

I really do appreciate the quality you've maintained by having an opinionated moderation system, but between this and a few other recent comments like "we're keeping track of the people who vote up these dumb comments and considering retroactive punishments [to the voters]" it's really kicked the open contempt for your users vibe up a good notch as compared to a year or two ago.

That said, you can't argue with the results. The active story position penalties especially are spot on 9 times out of 10 and really improve things.

skizm• 13 years ago

Under 10 year old users should have to have their parents "e-sign" a permission form before they are allowed to browse.

TazeTSchnitzel4• 13 years ago

Before they are allowed to comment, please. My 10-year-old self liked programming and perhaps would have found this site.

rdl3• 13 years ago

In general I think people are more likely to lie on polls than before, but also have always been more tempted to lie on polls which make them offended or defensive, which age probably does.

I'm curious if the take over 80 set are more likely people in their 30s-50s who find age polls somewhat offensive (or at least the implication), or people under 20, or whatever.

Perceptions of age bias actually interest me more than age distribution on HN.

sophacles• 13 years ago

While the numbers indicated suggest that some people are lying, there are a couple "old guys" I know who would read this site. One is a professor emeritus at the university I work at, and he still keeps up with this stuff. Another is a guy who showed up at our local python user's group a few weeks ago. He's in his late 70s or early 80s and decided to pick up python as a retirement project. (It's kind of an inspiration, I would like to walk into a room of 'kids' in 2060 and say: teach me what you are doing). I've recommended this site to both of them.

Jun85• 13 years ago

I've been here for some time and I usually agree/upvote pg's comments, not because of reverence to him or because I'm start-struck but because, well, the man is a well of wisdom (I regularly buy Hackers and Painters and give it away as presents to the young students I mentor. And OK, I may be a bit star-struck, too.)

This is his first comment I disagreed completely and downvoted. As a personal policy I downvote any comment here that gives the old "HN has deteriorated, it's going the way of X" hash without presenting any evidence other than gut feeling. Now, this being pg, it's true that his gut feeling about HN may trump yours or mine. Still, looking at the results of a personal poll and concluding that the HN honor system is broken is too strong a conclusion for me.

When I'm asked a question about my gender/age/ethnicity, if I can get away with it (e.g. no possible jail time :-) I either choose "other/not want to disclose" or if that's not an option give wrong answers. My reasoning behind that, quaint as it may seem, is that these things shouldn't matter; it's generally wrongheaded to collect this information. Knowing the browser/editor/proglang/personal hero/etc that HN'ers think is the best is a nice poll. Asking about their age/gender/ethnicity is definitely, I think, not.

Since there was no "Don't want to disclose" option here, I marked my age as "under 10" as a sort of protest against this poll. Stupid? Maybe. But it wasn't because I don't believe in the HN honor system.

SpeakMouthWords• 13 years ago

A similar solution would have been to not answer at all. Is there a non-tangential purpose served by answering "Do not wish to disclose" on a non-mandatory poll?

eeeeaaii• 13 years ago

I think you are missing the point that this poll is voluntary. So, the "Do not disclose" option is there -- just click on one of the many other links on HN today, or otherwise do something else with your time. There, you "did not disclose."

bkanber• 13 years ago

This poll was optional, and you could have simply ignored it.

Your action was exactly the type of thing PG's talking about. In the past, the community at large either would have been truthful or simply not responded. Now, a significant portion of the community is responding non-truthfully. Your motivation doesn't matter: whether it was "not believing in the honor system", or "protesting against the poll", or anything else, you still contributed to the pollution of the data.

rattray• 13 years ago

While I disagree that responding falsely was a better move than simply not responding at all, I agree with your point about hn quality lamentations.

As someone who came to hn after "the good ol' days", I would much prefer to see constant reminders of "That's not how we do things here" than "Man, things sure have gotten bad". Entropy is the norm; everything degrades without constant force applied.

rednum• 13 years ago

I think that he actually has a little more than gut feeling here:

> about half the users under 10 are also over 90

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5537050

bjhoops12• 13 years ago

Not sure what's more ridiculous - that you took the time to skew a perfectly reasonable poll, or that you expected anyone to understand your tortuous logic in doing so.

Just because you personally don't like coffee doesn't mean you should go out of your way to defecate in someone else's mug.

kelnos2• 13 years ago

I disagree with both your opinion and response.

First off, who are you to decide that this kind of poll is useless, and actively damage it? If you think the poll is useless, fine: we have a flag button for that. I happen to disagree that the poll is useless; I think any data set can be interesting given that you understand the limitations in interpreting it. But that's just my opinion and I totally get that other people could feel differently. Just don't ruin it for those who care. It's immature.

You may not exactly fit the profile of the kind of person that pg is talking about here, but you're definitely acting out and ignoring community standards.

micampe• 13 years ago

I ignored the poll but if it comes with a sane font size i'll go vote for over 90 right now.

msellout• 13 years ago

I'd forgotten the fonts were small, because I've had them magnified on this page for so long. I'm only old according to Peter Townshend.

wambotron• 13 years ago

I'm not over 80, and I didn't answer falsely. I DO however kind of wish the font size were larger. I guess I can make a custom stylesheet for that, though.

MartinCron• 13 years ago

it's an ill wind that blows no good

Even if we can't count on the honor system, we can still count on occasional slivers of pure poetry. That's something.

sukuriant4• 13 years ago

Reddit, Something Awful and 4chan all have quite a bit of slivers of pure poetry within them. This forum was meant to be something different; and I think that's what pg is thinking about when he said that.

This site will still have plenty of good discussion, just like those places, but the amount of bad discussion/trolling/useless information will be increasing

Mz• 13 years ago

I am only 47 (and, silly me, voted my actual age) but I got bifocals at age 30. At age 33, while being fitted for my second pair of bifocals, the fitter repeated over and over and over "God, you're YOUNG for having bifocals."

Those of us with 80 year old eyes look forward to the site tweak.

heavenike• 13 years ago

26 and I always think that I am still 21 years old。。

sthangav• 13 years ago

over 30

cmutty• 13 years ago

Thank you for putting 25 in the younger pool! I hate feeling as old as 30 :)

abrahimsh• 13 years ago

سكس

zerr• 13 years ago

Another reminder that Life is very short.

kokey• 13 years ago

There's a lot of 21 to 30 year olds acting like under 10 year olds by pretending to be over 90 years old.

sukuriant4• 13 years ago

I'm just shocked, shocked! that you would insult our centennial user base by suggesting they're lying about their age!

rydgel• 13 years ago

I’m 12 and what is this?

Wista• 13 years ago

kadaj• 13 years ago

84 people over 90 and 68 less than 10 at HN, shows honesty :|

ameen• 13 years ago

I'm 24, and come to think of it. I haven't really achieved much that I hoped to achieve by now when I was younger.

I wish I could turn back the clock to the last 7 years and get right to what I really could do instead of wasting my time at College[1] and chasing useless dreams.

All the best youngsters and to those that made it cheers. And for others like me, stay at it. We'll never know when lady luck will smile upon us.

[1] Went to an Engineering college in India. While the syllabus was pretty good for a CS student, the teachers sadly were the worst. This is one of the biggest reasons why I believe innovation in Education is long due.

By contrast, the US Higher Education system is pretty decent compared to what I experienced in India (vicariously, i.e.,).

alan_cx2• 13 years ago

Get the HELL on with it then.

You feel bad now? Im 40 and feel worse. I would give anything to be your age again, and have to 16 whole years, plus the 7 you regret, to achieve......well...... anything.

I promise you, if you don't you will bitterly regret it. I'm a busted flush, but you have every opportunity. You can even fail lots until you get it right.

Oh, forget luck. It does not exist. Its just recognised opportunity.

reinhardt• 13 years ago

I'm 34 and have stopped having any pretense of pursuing "achievements", if I ever cared at all. It's liberating.

solistice5• 13 years ago

I'm sure there'll be another person coming in with 50 years of age and more existential regret to reprimand both of you, but I'm not that person because I'm frankly not that old. None of you two (or any number out there) is a busted flush till you've stopped breathing for about 15 or so minutes, so don't sweat it. Alan, you're 40 years old, and your expiration date is proably still another 30-50 years off. That's more than enough time to do something that makes you happy.

Yes, I'm younger than you two, but I had to say it. I mean I thought my life was done for and wasted when I was 13 years old (tsss...truely depressing times weren't they?), and that was obviously not true. But lack of hope for the future is understandable when your plan A seems blocked, your plan B is nonexistent, and a lot of people tell you you will fail if you don't pull the ship tight together. But there is always a second route to Rome, and along every limes there's a hole you can get through, no matter how extensive it looks. Especially since I only looked for one meter to either side back then.

Anyways, none of you guys are as doomed as you make yourself out to be. If you start out now, will you be as sucessfull as the 19 year Wunderkind who started his multi-million dollar company with 16? No, but you don't need to.

TheLegace• 13 years ago

What shocks is me that there are 71 points for people under 10, and 87 for over 90. That stat just amazes me.

unkoman2• 13 years ago

I wish I was 10 again.

kintamanimatt4• 13 years ago

Clearly you forgot puberty, high school, and being unable to sign a contract or get credit. Having said that, to be 18 again...

unkoman2• 13 years ago

I'm not american only puberty applies. So once again, I wish I was 10 again.

damon_c• 13 years ago

25 is when you can (easily) rent cars (in the US). That's definitely a sweet spot.

Of course until 35 you still can't run for US senate or president...

alan_cx2• 13 years ago

Thank you sooooooooooo much for the 36-40 group.

Im 40, and I really cant get my head round that. I cant even really accept that Im a proper grown up adult, with kids. So, being put in a 36-40 group in stead of a 40-whatever group has very much cheered me up.

My your god bless you, eve if she is your wife ;)

acheron3• 13 years ago

Heh, I am ten years younger than you, and I was happy to be in a 26-30 group too. :)

garysweaver• 13 years ago

I'm not sure why I was surprised at how much it goes down after 40, but it makes me a little sad inside. BTW- You can remove one of the under 10 and one of the over 90 points. Was having too much fun with it.

EFruit• 13 years ago

16.

I'm disappointed to see people skewing the results. I was hoping to see the lower brackets. So much for that.

silasb• 13 years ago

I'm surprised at the people over 90 years old, 102 seems very very suspicious.

sidcool• 13 years ago

Over 90, 102!!

tokenadult• 13 years ago

It would be interesting to know which age group(s) HN readers consist mostly of.

Voluntary response poll results will not provide reliable data on this question. You should have seen this FAQ with the previous polls. (See also pg's comment,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5537023

which I imagine will continue to be the top comment in this thread.)

As I commented previously when we had a poll on the ages of HNers, the data can't be relied on to make such an inference. That's because the data are not from a random sample of the relevant population. 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.

-----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.

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

For more on the distinction between statistics and mathematics, see "Advice to Mathematics Teachers on Evaluating Introductory Statistics Textbooks"

http://statland.org/MyPapers/MAAFIXED.PDF

and "The Introductory Statistics Course: A Ptolemaic Curriculum?"

http://escholarship.org/uc/item/6hb3k0nz

I think Professor Velleman promotes "Voluntary response data are worthless" as a slogan for the same reason an earlier generation of statisticians taught their students the slogan "correlation does not imply causation." That's because common human cognitive errors run strongly in one direction on each issue, so the slogan has to take the cognitive error head-on. Of course, a distinct pattern in voluntary responses tells us SOMETHING (maybe about what kind of people come forward to respond), just as a correlation tells us SOMETHING (maybe about a lurking variable correlated with both things we observe), but it doesn't tell us enough to warrant a firm conclusion about facts of the world. The Literary Digest poll

http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5168/

http://www.math.uah.edu/stat/data/LiteraryDigest.pdf

is a spectacular historical example of a voluntary response poll with a HUGE sample size and high response rate that didn't give a correct picture of reality at all.

When I have brought up this issue before, some other HNers have replied that there are some statistical tools for correcting for response-bias effects, IF one can obtain a simple random sample of the population of interest and evaluate what kinds of people respond. But we can't do that here on HN.

Another reply I frequently see when I bring up this issue is that the public relies on voluntary response data all the time to make conclusions about reality. To that I refer careful readers to what Professor Velleman is quoted as saying above (the general public often believes statements that are baloney) and to what Google's director of research, Peter Norvig, says about research conducted with better data,

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

that even good data (and Norvig would not generally characterize voluntary response data as good data) can lead to wrong conclusions if there isn't careful thinking behind a study design. Again, human beings have strong predilections to believe certain kinds of wrong data and wrong conclusions. We are not neutral evaluators of data and conclusions, but have predispositions (cognitive illusions) that lead to making mistakes without careful training and thought.

Another frequently seen reply is that sometimes a "convenience sample" (this is a common term among statisticians for a sample that can't be counted on to be a random sample) of a population offers just that, convenience, and should not be rejected on that basis alone. But the most thoughtful version of that frequent reply I have previously seen in online discussion did correctly point out that if we know from the get-go that the sample was not done statistically correctly, then even if we are confident (enough) that HN participants are young, we wouldn't want to extrapolate from that to conclude that the users of any technology site are young, or that users of the Internet as a whole are young.

On my part, I wildly guess that most HNers are younger than I am in part because this kind of poll recurs often on HN. Other preoccupations of younger rather than older people make up frequent topics on HN, and I've tried looking for signs that there are large hidden numbers of old participants here without finding many.

catzhang2• 13 years ago

So you are saying that almost all studies in social sciences (e.g. psychology) are invalid because almost all of them require participants to voluntarily sign up for the studies.. Also most psychology studies are done with college students, hardly a very representative sample of the population...

jeremyjh2• 13 years ago

This is not new information to social science researchers. Responsible research will attempt to correct for these biases and/or simply acknowledge them upfront and not generalize their result further than the demographics included in the study.

tellarin• 13 years ago

Yes. There was even a story posted on HN about this some time ago.

svachalek• 13 years ago

The second part is true. The first part is partially negated through trickery; what is actually being studied is almost never what the respondents believe is being studied.

gyardley• 13 years ago

Here's the relevant article, 'The Weirdest People in the World?' Led to a ton of conversation about exactly what you're talking about:

http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/WeirdPeople.pdf

gesman• 13 years ago

We need supplemental poll. Questions:

1. Did you click your correct age?

2. You click your incorrect age?

3. Did you click more than one age?

pani2• 13 years ago

To confuse furthermore: 4. Are you honest?

sukuriant4• 13 years ago

6. All of the above?

Remember to click all that apply!

BHSPitMonkey2• 13 years ago

Are you a: (Please choose only one option)

1. Knight

2. Knave

xijuan2• 13 years ago

I did adopt the third question on your list!

klrr• 13 years ago

I doubt so many are under 10 or over 90.

niico• 13 years ago

In dog years im like 80

catzhang2• 13 years ago

It just shows that the number of trolls on HN have increased

rdl3• 13 years ago

This might be self-serving, but I'm convinced "year of birth" matters more than age (and, more specifically, "when did you have computers and the Internet" and such).

I think 50 year olds in 2030 will still be involved in tech in ways 50 years weren't in 2000 or 2013.

jeremyjh2• 13 years ago

Yes but there will be differences that may matter a lot. I suspect that a lot of members of my cohort (I'm 36) still have no idea why we would want to tweet. I spent a lot of time on IRC when I was younger (not any longer) and I suspect that both being young as well as birth year play a part in some of these behavior patterns. This behavior and interests would also be affected by other factors that may correalate with age (such as having a spouse and children).

acheron3• 13 years ago

My grandfather bought a home PC when he retired in 1986, and he was in his mid-sixties then. He kept up with new PC technology for many years after that. So there are always outliers!

thewisedude• 13 years ago

I find it hard to believe that there over 125 people who read this website and who are over 90!

I think what happened here is, some guys read this and decided to be naughty and decided to pick the max age. If lets say we provided another choice saying over 150 yrs old, I am sure it would have been picked and we could have safely ignored the whole set data points without affecting our interpretation of the different ages of people.

Thiz• 13 years ago

CmdrTaco's Law says that the last option in a poll is the funniest and some people will go right for it.

greyfox• 13 years ago

im only t1rteen wanna psyb3r~?

parnas• 13 years ago

I voted for several age groups accidentally, just started clicking on those little arrows.

vinayakponangi• 13 years ago

timme• 13 years ago

junk polls get junk answers.

wild91• 13 years ago

I just don't see the point in lying. You want to answer?Do it and be honest. You don't want to?Don't. It's plain easy.

pani2• 13 years ago

The nineties are missing some zeroes. It's over 9000.

dev-devil• 13 years ago

vuzum• 13 years ago

Many of us seem to be in our 20s. :)

wallzz• 13 years ago

PAULHANNA842• 13 years ago

Minus the under 10, I think there is some truth in the pattern from the point of 16+. Hacker News/Y combinator primarily attracts entrepreneurs,hackers,engineers...people who are constantly learning based on self-interest. 26 is the average age for a Y Combinator alumni and 26-30 is also the majority of users in this toll. Essentially what I'm trying to say is I think this is a reflection of ambition dwindling with age based on the general overall population.

kbkaiez• 13 years ago

Age doesn't matter.

Poll: What is your age?

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