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Poll: What is your age?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Poll: What is your age?

#241

Post by ebbv »

alanctgardner2 wrote: post #223
ebbv wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether you're interested in the poll or not is no reason to vandalize it. 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.

The use of the word 'vandalize' is kind of interesting to me, because it's usually used in a physical context to mean destroying or damaging something of value. It's kind of like using 'steal' for IP infringement; there's the argument to be made that theft implies the loss of something for one party, as much as the gain for another. This isn't really vandalism, in the same way that downloading songs isn't theft. Neit…

Vandalize is totally appropriate. The value of the poll may be minimal but they are still destroying it.

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

Re: Poll: What is your age?

#243

Post by svachalek »

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...

The second part is true. The first part is partially negated through trickery; what is actually being studied is almost never what the respondents believe is being studied.

Re: Poll: What is your age?

#244

Post by gyardley »

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...

Here's the relevant article, 'The Weirdest People in the World?' Led to a ton of conversation about exactly what you're talking about:

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

Re: Poll: What is your age?

#245

Post by mnicole »

ebbv wrote: post #187
RobAley wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PG, have you considered that many (though granted not all) of the "junk" answers may due to the hacker mentality, people asking themselves questions like "what if I choose more than one option, will it let me?", "what if I 'accidentally' select the wrong answer, can I undo it?", "What if too many people give implausible answers, can it be corrected for or will the poll be junked?" and so on. Hackers - tinkers and the…

That sounds fine in theory but in reality anyone with a hacker mentality should see that the poll is obviously based on the honor system and is simply a series of options to upvote without actually attempting to ruin the results.

> in reality anyone with a hacker mentality should see that the poll is obviously based on the honor system

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.

Re: Poll: What is your age?

#246

Post by mschuster91 »

e12e wrote: post #222
Houshalter wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what OP was using, and someone else was suggesting to use a minimum font size instead. I wonder if there is a way to change the zoom level at the OS if everything is too small, not just the web browser, but that would defeat the purpose of having an hd screen. Also does the zoom level in your browser affect the resolution of videos/images? It seems like it would.

Most OS have the possibility to adjust screen dot pitch (ppi, pixels per inch). Using a "high resolution" display (like my 23"@2048x1152, or an Apple "retina" display). 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…

On Windows, devs rarely care about DPI issues, largely because they either never heard about the problems, thought "oh my GUI abstraction will take care of it" or think that the market share of non-standard DPI settings is too low.

Re: Poll: What is your age?

#248

Post by Jun8 »

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.

I've been here for some time and I usually agree/upvote pg's comments, not because of reverence to him or because I'm start-struck but because, well, the man is a well of wisdom (I regularly buy Hackers and Painters and give it away as presents to the young students I mentor. And OK, I may be a bit star-struck, too.)

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.

Re: Poll: What is your age?

#249

Post by alanctgardner2 »

ebbv wrote: post #241
alanctgardner2 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The use of the word 'vandalize' is kind of interesting to me, because it's usually used in a physical context to mean destroying or damaging something of value. It's kind of like using 'steal' for IP infringement; there's the argument to be made that theft implies the loss of something for one party, as much as the gain for another. This isn't really vandalism, in the same way that downloading songs isn't theft. Neit…

Vandalize is totally appropriate. The value of the poll may be minimal but they are still destroying it. This isn't nearly as interesting of a discussion as you think it is.

> 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.

Re: Poll: What is your age?

#250

Post by SpeakMouthWords »

Jun8 wrote: post #248
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.

I've been here for some time and I usually agree/upvote pg's comments, not because of reverence to him or because I'm start-struck but because, well, the man is a well of wisdom (I regularly buy Hackers and Painters and give it away as presents to the young students I mentor. And OK, I may be a bit star-struck, too.) This is his first comment I disagreed completely and downvoted. As a personal policy I downvote any c…

A similar solution would have been to not answer at all. Is there a non-tangential purpose served by answering "Do not wish to disclose" on a non-mandatory poll?
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