Poll: How old are you?

[mixmax]

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 ;-)

[asjo]

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

[DanielBMarkham]

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

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

Here's the direct link.

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

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

[aneesh]

Cool. What are you using to draw the graph?

[whatusername]

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

[rickharrison]

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

[electromagnetic]

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

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

[mxcl]

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

[adrianwaj]

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

[Nuktie]

l

[markbao]

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

[nx]

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

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

[mixmax]

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

-------

---------------------------------------

------------------------------------

------------------

--------

------

-----

-

-

-

[jwilliams]

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

[omarish]

Why would you call it poisson?

[nikblack]

27.. phew .. my guess was 16.

I feel better now.

[DanielBMarkham]

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

Hey bub, who you calling not young?

[mixmax]

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

[geofffox]

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

[pmjordan]

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

[mixmax]

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

It should, of course go like this:

under 15

15 - 24

25 - 29

30 - 34

35 - 39

40 - 44

45 - 49

50 - 54

55 - 59

60 or over

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

[kirubakaran]

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

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

[jonsen]

25-30

Take the limit as 25.0000....

[davidw]

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

[brianto2010]

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

Its a "just for giggles" kind of thing.

[DarkShikari]

"TI calculator" option missing.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

Fine.

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

[cosmo7]

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

[DTrejo]

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

[gommm]

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

[dawson]

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

[helveticaman]

I'm 20 and feel old.

[edcdave]

Three cheers for the Long Tail!

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

[neilo]

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

[batasrki]

(edit) Latest histogram at 50% scale:

-

-------------------------------

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

---------------------------------------

------------

-----------

----

---

-

--

[pg]

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

[bbg]

I'm 34.

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

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

[ErrantX]

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

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

EDIT: Im 22 incidentally.

[markessien]

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

[tokenadult]

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

VOLUNTARY RESPONSE POLLS

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

[quote=Paul Velleman]

-----Original Message----- From: Paul Velleman [[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...

[durana]

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

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

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

[nx]

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

[Silentio]

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

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

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

[tokenadult]

most respondents

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

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

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

[mixmax]

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

[ilaksh]

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

[jwilliams]

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

[paul7986]

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

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

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