Poll: How old are you?
I just read this comment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=516949 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.
So I thought I'd make a poll to see how old you guys all are.
Don't pick more than one ;-)
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124 comments
| 122 points
| on HN
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(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.
I've read so many comments here that I've completely disagreed with, but they always give a valid point or opinion.
I'm also 16. But I don't think these are very important things to know, then again, I like CS more than programming.
I'm more of a business guy. To each their own.
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:-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_distribution
I feel better now.
Hey bub, who you calling not young?
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.
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 :-(
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 :-)
Wonder how many know what that's from :-p
Take the limit as 25.0000....
Given this you should pick 20-25 (21-25) if you're 25.
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EW...
Its a "just for giggles" kind of thing.
Your post is sarcastic and belittling. mixmax's post is curious and intriguing.
When I said "just for giggles", I said it with curiosity in mind, not sarcasm.
> "I'm too tired/busy."
I hope you feel better.
Sorry, then. I take back what I said earlier. Your first choice of 'abacus' sounded sarcastic to me. I guess I shouldn't judge so quickly.
In that sense, I think the idea of how someone got started in programming is an excellent poll topic.
EDIT: I was not trying to imply anything when I said "I hope you feel better". Please don't take it the wrong way.
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.
However, I don't feel a day over 12.
I just use guile and experience, rather than brute force. I'm working on iPhone apps now, and trying to rely on taste and thoughtfulness to separate myself from the crowd (barely working).
Wow!
It's not an exclusive club though. It only takes a little time.
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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).
(Hypocritically I probably would have found it interesting at that age :D).
EDIT: Im 22 incidentally.
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 [[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.[/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...
http://aurora.wells.edu/~srs/Math151-Fall02/Litdigest.htm
is a spectacular historical example of a voluntary response poll that didn't give a correct picture of reality at all.
"The median poll selection of a HN visitor who clicked on a poll which was on the front page on the following weekdays (and national holidays in the following countries:...) was..." etc.
If the information content is sufficiently hard to extract usefully that it would be easier to redo the sample in a sensible way, then you could call the sample worthless. (A bit like uneconomic oil reserves).
Of course, you'd have to figure out how to define "regular HN users" and what would be a significant portion of them.
If this poll were to get that much response, it would also tell you something interesting: that HN users respond to polls in statistically significant numbers :)
So, voluntary response polls are not worthless if enough people voluntarily respond to them, but this is a tricky problem.
No. If 50% of HN visitors voted but 99% of those over 40 didn't (due to whatever confounding factor you like - say embarrasment), you'd still wouldn't be able to extrapolate from the sample to the category of "HN visitors".
eg: a gender survey in the general population that transgender respondees do not answer -- ends up with a 99% sample size (all but the transgenders) -- and thus gives a pretty significant bit of data on male:female ratios, etc..
Agreed in principle though.
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 ;)
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...
Polls in general interest magazines, especially women's magazines, are usually wholly unreliable for modeling reality. (One thing that happens is the college-age men stuff the supply of replies full of phony responses, especially if the survey is about some salacious topic such as sexual behavior.)
I responded to a telephone call that came to my home phone number from Gallup Poll a few weeks after the United States presidential election. Gallup attempts to proactively call all households in the United States, and to correct for households that refuse to answer its calls. The interviews are quite long, and they ask a lot of demographic questions for stratifying the data gathered. If my caller I.D. box had not said "Gallup Poll," I never would have picked up my phone for a cold call. I got another poll call just this weeked, and many years ago got a call from the Harris Poll. The major polling companies attempt to actively gather random data samples, so what they do is distinguishable from voluntary response. But a magazine that writes a little sidebar "email your response to [email address]" is simply gathering worthless data. The same is true of TV stations that tell viewers to cell-phone text a response to some number they designate, or websites that have a poll form for anyone who surfs by.
If you are gathering data to improve a website, you are much better off conducting a live usability study in which you observe the user directly than simply polling visitors who voluntarily respond.
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.
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?
If you have an unbiased sample of 584 votes and 60% of the sample responded "25 - 30", could you say with 95% confidence that 60% (+/-4%) of the sampled population would select "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?
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.
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.
Yup same :-)
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".
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%
Who participate in online polls on Sunday evenings and happened to see this one.