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Poll: What is your age?

news.ycombinator.com

171–180 of 318 posts

Re: Poll: What is your age?

#171
post #67
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Young children have an easier time reading low contrast text. Make them read light gray on gray.

Re: Poll: What is your age?

#172
post #151
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wow. Exactly what kind of pleasure does a person derive from giving false answers to the question "What's your age?" on an anonymous internet poll? I am not asking that facetiously -- I really am curious to know. Is this some people's of idea of "being bad"? "being funny"? 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 e…

Pleasure? That's not what comes to mind. I haven't answered the poll, but I did think about putting 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).

Re: Poll: What is your age?

#173
post #151
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wow. Exactly what kind of pleasure does a person derive from giving false answers to the question "What's your age?" on an anonymous internet poll? I am not asking that facetiously -- I really am curious to know. Is this some people's of idea of "being bad"? "being funny"? 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 e…

I is just my habit of creating some noise in any data collection effort. Based on the fact that pg is apparently digging through the results and trying to profile certain user behaviors it is somewhat proving the point. You never know who is going to fiddle with the data so you better noise it up.

Re: Poll: What is your age?

#175
post #62

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.

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.

I second this one to the max!

Re: Poll: What is your age?

#176
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that bad? Please enlighten a naive hacker

If you convert this to Unix epoch time (Seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00), the result will be -1. 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 love how I learnt a real hacker titbit from an age poll.

Re: Poll: What is your age?

#177
post #67
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Ponies.

Re: Poll: What is your age?

#178
post #62

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.

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

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...]

Re: Poll: What is your age?

#179
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 ;)

Re: Poll: What is your age?

#180
post #39

Born on the first january of 1970.

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.

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.
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