Live data from Hacker News

Poll: How old are you?

news.ycombinator.com

91–100 of 132 posts

Re: Poll: How old are you?

#92
post #89

Graph, updated every hour: http://koldfront.dk/misc/hn/age.png (until I kill the cronjob :-))

Great minds think alike! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=517447 (EDIT) I deleted my comment, because I like your chron idea much better (BTW, what'd you use for the scraping?) Here's the direct link. http://www.whattofix.com/images/HNUsersByAge.jpg Like I said in the original, glad to update it if anybody likes the 3-D that much better.

Cool! I didn't see yours before posting mine... (I get a 403 Forbidden currently?)

Re: Poll: How old are you?

#93
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great minds think alike! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=517447 (EDIT) I deleted my comment, because I like your chron idea much better (BTW, what'd you use for the scraping?) Here's the direct link. http://www.whattofix.com/images/HNUsersByAge.jpg Like I said in the original, glad to update it if anybody likes the 3-D that much better.

Cool! I didn't see yours before posting mine... (I get a 403 Forbidden currently?)

Yeah. You have to hit refresh to see the graph. It won't work if the referrer is an outside site. Had too many people lifting bandwidth and needed to stop it.

Re: Poll: How old are you?

#94
post #32

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.

"TI calculator" option missing.

Re: Poll: How old are you?

#95
post #16

Well it looks like your original conception was correct: 89.5% of users are younger than 40ish Under 15: 0% 15-20: 8.5% 20-25: 33% 25-30: 31% 30-35: 12% 35-40: 5% 40-45: 5% 50-55: .5% 55-60: .5% 60+: .5%

> 89.5% of users

Who participate in online polls on Sunday evenings and happened to see this one.

Re: Poll: How old are you?

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know man .. I'm coming up on 30 in August, and I'm not sure I feel that great about it .. the whole closer to 40 than 20 thing, without feeling like I've done enough that really matters yet ..

I'm 34 and I still haven't figured out what I want to be when I grow up! The graph definitely shows I'm over the hill and fast sliding down the back side. Bummer.

Re: Poll: How old are you?

#98
post #66
post #12

Here's a histogram of ages, as they appear right now in the poll. It seems they follow a poisson distribution peaking around 27. ------- --------------------------------------- ------------------------------------ ------------------ -------- ------ ----- - - -

Why would you call it poisson?

Because it looks like one (compared to Gaussian it's skewed):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_distribution

Re: Poll: How old are you?

#99
post #35

Someone better than me at math should say how many votes we need to have a 95% accuracy.

I couldn't find a figure on the number of registered HN users, so I used the recent number of daily unique IPs from http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html . That number is 22,000. For a confidence level of 95% with a confidence interval of 4%, we'd need 584 votes. I'd imagine there's a lot of science to polling which this calculation probably ignores.

For a confidence level of 95% with a confidence interval of 4%, we'd need 584 votes.

I'd imagine there's a lot of science to polling which this calculation probably ignores.

Yep, everything about being sure we have an unbiased sample, which is not likely for a question like this.

What does your calculation say about the grouping of the data into categories?

Post reply on HN