Poll: What is your age?
It would be interesting to know which age group(s) HN readers consist mostly of. Please be honest and click one answer only!
300 comments
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
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
Born on the first january of 1970.
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.,).
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.,).
There's a lot of 21 to 30 year olds acting like under 10 year olds by pretending to be over 90 years old.
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 ;)
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 ;)
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.
I find it hard to take this poll seriously, given the 33+ in the "over 90" range.
Are there really people over 80 and under 10 on this site, or are people just clicking shit for the hell of it?
BTW: this poll is displayed beautifully with bar chart on HN for mobile http://cheeaun.github.io/hackerweb/#/item/5536734
I'm curious about these (5 as of the posting time) people that are over 90
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.
Wild that at 38, I'm at the tail end.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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 [[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 1998 5:10 PM To: [email protected]; Kim Robinson Cc: [email protected] 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.
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 [[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 1998 5:10 PM To: [email protected]; Kim Robinson Cc: [email protected] 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.
I think the "Please don't abuse this option..." has had the opposite effect than the OP wanted...
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.
I think 50 year olds in 2030 will still be involved in tech in ways 50 years weren't in 2000 or 2013.
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 ?
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.
Thank you for putting 25 in the younger pool! I hate feeling as old as 30 :)
84 people over 90 and 68 less than 10 at HN, shows honesty :|
I'm waiting anxiously for the "What is your quest?" poll.
26 and I always think that I am still 21 years old。。
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.
What shocks is me that there are 71 points for people under 10, and 87 for over 90. That stat just amazes me.