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'm not over 80, and I didn't answer falsely. I DO however kind of wish the font size were larger. I guess I can make a custom stylesheet for that, though.
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…
I think you are missing the point that this poll is voluntary. So, the "Do not disclose" option is there -- just click on one of the many other links on HN today, or otherwise do something else with your time. There, you "did not disclose."
But that's not really the same at all. There is a huge difference between not voting and voting with "don't want to disclose". The former is unusable as a data point, while the latter is something that can be analyzed and discussed.
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 b…
They didn't just click in the 90 sections which, yes, were obviously not useful. They clicked everywhere else too, putting noise into the other fields.
I get to decide this isn't interesting because I'm half of the discussion. And I'm telling you, this is boring.
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.
AKA. you're breaking things because you can?
Yes, uhmm, no (I actually answered truthfully". "Because I can" seems to be pretty deeply ingrained in the hacker ethos of "analyzing, understanding, controlling" systems. Technically I'm the reason for my old schools digital policy. I couldn't find the student drives on the school computers, I looked for network drives, and somehow the teacher/admin drives showed up. I did report that in truely whitehat fashion, but if someone asked me why i was snooping around there, I could have given them the long answer "I was looking around here, and curious to see whether this and that worked", or just "Because I could". So "I was curious whether I could muddy up the data of the poll, and whether there'd be consequences or not" becomes "I broke things because I could"
In graphs: http://infogr.am/HN-age-poll-12515/ 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.git…
Nice graphs. It would be nice if the categories had the same colors across graphs, to enable comparisons.
The categories aren't the same across the polls, though.