Poll: What is your age?

Post by icebraining » Fri, Apr 12, 2013, 2:05 PM UTC

orenjacob wrote: post #108

staunch wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, I think you're going to have to ban them. COPPA[1] makes it risky to have children under 13 on your web site without clear parental consent. ..you could let them send in a note from their parents to get unbanned :-) 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childrens_Online_Privacy_Protec...

There can be a very real issue if HN accounts have an age or birthdate associated with them which indicate that the user is under 13. In that situation where knowledge of age is in the hands of the website operator, the FTC has taken notice, and action. See Path's recent FTC COPPA ruling as an example. So, if HN internally keeps a reference from votes in the under-10 category of this poll to the accounts they came fr…

Post by jeremyjh » Fri, Apr 12, 2013, 2:14 PM UTC

catzhang wrote: post #213

tokenadult wrote: post #199

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…

So you are saying that almost all studies in social sciences (e.g. psychology) are invalid because almost all of them require participants to voluntarily sign up for the studies.. Also most psychology studies are done with college students, hardly a very representative sample of the population...

Post by jeremyjh » Fri, Apr 12, 2013, 2:20 PM UTC

rdl wrote: post #226

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.

Post by mindcrime » Fri, Apr 12, 2013, 2:28 PM UTC

lmm wrote: post #168

pg wrote: 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.

If HN is no longer entirely full of goody-two-shoes I count that as a plus. Anecdotally my impression is that the diversity of stories has increased; we seem to have a wider cross-section of interests than a year ago.

Post by acheron » Fri, Apr 12, 2013, 2:31 PM UTC

alan_cx wrote: post #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 ;)