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Surely it's incorrect to make a blanket statement that voluntary response data is worthless. Worthless means there is zero information in the data, which would only be true in extreme cases.
No information is better than misinformation.
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So was my answer, but it was missing a smiley or two and the right tone, I guess. Tired/busy, as I said:-)
That is not what I meant. Your post is sarcastic and belittling. mixmax's post is curious and intriguing. When I said "just for giggles", I said it with curiosity in mind, not sarcasm. > " I'm too tired/busy. " I hope you feel better.
(Hypocritically I probably would have found it interesting at that age :D).
EDIT: Im 22 incidentally.
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Surely it's incorrect to make a blanket statement that voluntary response data is worthless. Worthless means there is zero information in the data, which would only be true in extreme cases.
It's effectively worthless because it needs to be qualified so heavily. Dropping the qualification (as will happen sometimes) makes it more like misinformation, which is worse than worthless, so it averages out to zero... "The median poll selection of a HN visitor who clicked on a poll which was on the front page on the following weekdays (and national holidays in the following countries:...) was..." etc. If the info…
Of course, you'd have to figure out how to define "regular HN users" and what would be a significant portion of them.
If this poll were to get that much response, it would also tell you something interesting: that HN users respond to polls in statistically significant numbers :)
So, voluntary response polls are not worthless if enough people voluntarily respond to them, but this is a tricky problem.
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That is not what I meant. Your post is sarcastic and belittling. mixmax's post is curious and intriguing. When I said "just for giggles", I said it with curiosity in mind, not sarcasm. > " I'm too tired/busy. " I hope you feel better.
Hey, I am definitely tired, but 'belittling'? Not at all what I was aiming for, sorry if you perceived it that way. It was just a random comment about the fact that people's 'computer age' might be determined by what sort of environment they started out with.
Sorry, then. I take back what I said earlier. Your first choice of 'abacus' sounded sarcastic to me. I guess I shouldn't judge so quickly.
In that sense, I think the idea of how someone got started in programming is an excellent poll topic.
EDIT: I was not trying to imply anything when I said "I hope you feel better". Please don't take it the wrong way.
Here's a histogram of ages, as they appear right now in the poll. It seems they follow a poisson distribution peaking around 27. ------- --------------------------------------- ------------------------------------ ------------------ -------- ------ ----- - - -
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It's effectively worthless because it needs to be qualified so heavily. Dropping the qualification (as will happen sometimes) makes it more like misinformation, which is worse than worthless, so it averages out to zero... "The median poll selection of a HN visitor who clicked on a poll which was on the front page on the following weekdays (and national holidays in the following countries:...) was..." etc. If the info…
So, doesn't that just mean that a statistically significant portion of the regular HN users would have to respond? Of course, you'd have to figure out how to define "regular HN users" and what would be a significant portion of them. If this poll were to get that much response, it would also tell you something interesting: that HN users respond to polls in statistically significant numbers :) So, voluntary response po…
No. If 50% of HN visitors voted but 99% of those over 40 didn't (due to whatever confounding factor you like - say embarrasment), you'd still wouldn't be able to extrapolate from the sample to the category of "HN visitors".
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First option is "under 15". From this you can infer pretty straight forwardly that the next option "15 - 20" means ">= 15 and 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 :-)
Also, I'm guessing until probably about age 45, people feel better about hitting the next age bracket so they'll mark the older one if there's any overlap.
Wonder how many know what that's from :-p
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.
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.