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.

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.

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.

Being unwilling to share personal information is no reason to vandalize it.

Wanting to "click all the buttons" is only a valid excuse if you are under the age of 8.

What's silly is defending the dickheads who purposely ruin the poll.

Was phreaking illegal? Totally. Was it unethical? Yes. Do we not consider it a part of hacker history and culture? You can disagree with people and say what they did was not morally sound, but it's silly to say people don't belong on a hacker site because they have an anarchist kind of worldview.

This isn't nearly as interesting of a discussion as you think it is.

I'm glad we found someone who can objectively decide what's interesting! Now you can suggest books and movies to me! Do you work for Netflix?

But seriously, I never made a value judgement about the poll. The poll costs real time, and real money to host. But data from a poll is not a window. Adding noise into a poll is not breaking a window.

This blatant inaccuracy is actually harmless, because it basically invalidates the two buckets which were already going to be an insignificant part of the poll. Absent any response I would've said those buckets are there to absorb troublemakers, but pg's response implies I'm giving him too much credit. The bigger risk is people who are fudging by one or two buckets, giving plausible but inaccurate data. Hell, the whole poll could actually be inaccurate, but we're focusing on the fact that there are a few joke responses which can be discarded safely.

I get to decide this isn't interesting because I'm half of the discussion. And I'm telling you, this is boring.

I think that is too wide a definition of unacceptable.

While sure, this might be the case, it still doesn't negate the fact that fundamentally, HN's arrows (of all kinds) should be able to be "undone". Accidents happen, people are curious. We shouldn't blame the users for a system that is broken and relies on them to ignore long-standing standard UX practices when it comes to these types of elements. This poll could have only been abused so far if users were only allowed to pick one, even if they chose to pick the wrong one. Given how long people have been complaining about this, it doesn't surprise me they take advantage of it for the sake of proving a point.

In an ideal world, we should not even be allowed to see the results before voting, since it could bias us (it should not in this kind of poll, of course).

But I definitely agree the responses should not be visible until you've voted.

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.

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.

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

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

Hardly anything remains usable - I had to install this extension to go along with it: http://www.cerimorgan.com/products/zoombysite/

Also does the zoom level in your browser affect the resolution of videos/images? It seems like it would.

Technically, setting your font to be eg 14 points, should be an absolute size - the same font should be the same dimensions (in mm/inches) on all displays. Now, you probably hold your smartphone closer to your face than you sit to your 30" LCD screen -- so that might not really be what you want (same font size on your phone and on your desktop screen).

Additionally this only works for scalable graphics -- which is why Apple went trough such hoops to make retina displays usable -- quadruple the dot pitch on screens, and all icons and bitmaps become miniatures.

Personally I just use the browser zoom-function -- I find most sites use too small fonts, and end up with too wide text columns (which is somewhat alleviated by not browsing full screen, but in a "long" window).

Anyway, the following might be of interest:

Xorg, dpi: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xorg#Display_Size_and_D...

Windows (8) dpi/zoom: http://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3153/~/ad...

Some notes from Microsoft on writing DPI-aware applications: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd464646(VS.85).aspx

Android does not have this problem since devs always use dp (density independent pixel) as units of measurement and OEMs choose good DPI values when they are releasing devices.

Although less gracefully, iOS solves this problem too (by doubling the resolution and scaling everything by two).

  // ==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);
  })()

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.

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.

According to your logic, people should just ignore posts on HN that they disagree with rather than writing comments, the "if you disagree, just leave" approach.

Maybe I overreacted and should have just commented on this poll and and not marked a wrong age bracket. OTOH, I at least commented on my motivation to to do. The motivation of the other $n people (currently 121-1 = 120 under 10) is mostly opaque.

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.

Maybe a more apt analogy would have been knocking that Triple Whopper out of someone's hand before they clog their arteries? :P

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.

I don't like the posts that say "weird new tool that everyone but you has heard about has released a new version!" I tried criticizing those posts and got downvoted, probably legitimately.

But my #1 upvoted comment ever, by at least a factor of 3, was this one[1] where I praised a tmux posting that very clearly said what tmux was for someone unfamiliar with the concept.

So clearly I struck a nerve and other people feel the way I do, but I just had to find a positive way to encourage what I wanted.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5462105

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.

I am a HN contributor like you, my opinion does not count more than other people's. And I didn't say it was useless, it definitely has use. I said I disagree with collecting this type of demographic data data.

"Just don't ruin it for those who care."

If you read my comment I haven't actually ruined the data at all, I clearly stated which wrong bin I placed my vote in. The OP can now subtract my vote. Compare and contrast with the 300+ people who clicked on <10, >90, and "I clicked on more than once" categories. Now, that's immature, I think.

> about half the users under 10 are also over 90

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

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."

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

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

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

But downvotes are forever.

..you could let them send in a note from their parents to get unbanned :-)

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childrens_Online_Privacy_Protec...

So, if HN internally keeps a reference from votes in the under-10 category of this poll to the accounts they came from, and if any of those people are under 13, there may be cause for real concern re: COPPA.

There are sort of 3 ways to approach this safely... 1. don't ask, don't tell (eg: Google's main search page) 2. ask, and reject (eg: Facebook account signup) 3. ask, accept, and get consent (eg: some child focused sites)

HN is pretty clearly not a child-oriented website, but if there is concrete knowledge of age, COPPA can apply.

Path's case is different, since the form asking for the birthdate was made by them, so they knew they had that information.

http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty-human-rights...

Something like trolling, getting a rise out of people, etc -- I don't like it or agree with it, but I can comprehend it. In this case, no one is even going to see or know what you did. Is there some pleasure taken in knowing that people think the results are valid while you secretly know they aren't? Or was there an awareness that the moderators would see the bad results, be annoyed by them, and post about it?

The options I would've expected as more reasonable: <20, 20-35, 36-40, 41+. Then you would hope the results of the poll are interesting enough to talk about (otherwise, yes, you'll degenerate into humour).

> setting all the +80s font to extra large and all the <10s font to comic sans

That actually made me seriously consider voting up both the 80+ and <10 answers just to see what "easter eggs" pg implements.

In my opinion the option for over 80 is the proxy vote for please don't post things like this.

https://www.smore.com/clippy-js

Times like these are what really get me pumped about the great community I'm diving into surrounding tech.

It's called second childhood. May you someday be eligible, but yet escape achieving it.

As for the fonts, you can be sure the octo- and nona- hackers will have long since implemented suitable user scripts.

I propose two HN sites based upon basically the same underlying data. A "good" one, and a phantom one. Users who get honey potted end up in a phantom mode where any moderation or posting actions that they take affect only the phantom HN that they view. Phantoms can see the posts and moderation results of good users, but good users can't see the posts and results of phantom users.

Or maybe a little dunce cap icon next to their name.

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.

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

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...

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

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.

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. :).

On the other hand you can vote more than once for some reason, so some people could have just voted for every age. If you couldn't vote for more than one thing though, the obviously-untrue answers would filter out a lot of the noise.

This makes me wonder about the polls that say 18% of Americans believe the Sun goes around the Earth. Is it really that high, or are polls inaccurate plus or minus 18%?

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".

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

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

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.

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

Here is the chart fdrom my recent poll:

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

sans Winklevii

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

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...)

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

1207 M / 73 F / 30 other

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

Which is problematic in several scenarios: - Databases which store dates in integer fields and maybe don't handle negative values. - Other overflows unhandled by date parsers - Libraries, which use -1 as 'invalid'.

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.,).

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.

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.

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 ;)

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.

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...

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

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!"

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.

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.

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

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

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

1. Did you click your correct age?

2. You click your incorrect age?

3. Did you click more than one age?

Remember to click all that apply!

1. Knight

2. Knave

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