Most the time the average age cited for readers of this site seems to be 24. I don't know where that came from, but it seems to match what's stated or implied in a lot of comments.
I'm not that surprised , this is still a relatively new industry. Ask this question again in 20 years and I expect you will see a much higher mean/median. (48)
Some people suggested I should not included some of the options. But your questions are one of the reason why I chose to include options such as over 90. It would be really interesting to know the age of the oldest reader.
Why? Why fuck up the data like that? The thing with HN Polls is you've no way to create polls in which you can select only one option. All you can do is list the options you want included in the poll, nothing else.
On a side note, your personal website is fucking hilarious.
As I am writing this, there are 8 under 10 and 8 over 90. I think that's a good clue as to a 'margin of error' that should be applied to the results overall.
Edit: wow that went up fast. Now there are 20+ under 8/over 90... I guess whenever an option says "don't abuse this option" there are those who just can't resist.
Quantcast thinks [1] the top three age groups for this site are 35-44 (37%), 45-65 (24%), and 25-34 (15%). Of course, Quantcast also estimates the gender ratio at 53/47 M/F.
To be sure, Quantcast is measuring lurkers + members, whereas this poll is measuring members only. But, nevertheless, my gut feel is Quantcast is simply wrong.
It's interesting to compare the responses here to those. I especially like the "spike" in users over 60 that mysteriously showed up between then and now.
But not old enough to know that there are new users all the time? ( and maybe old users leave too ) The numbers are going to change every year, and it would be interesting to know how HN users are distributed in terms of age.
759 days ago, 1448 days ago and 1867 days ago, respectively.
I think it's OK to ask this question after 2 years. It's great to see how communities change over the years.
Yes, I know it's not scientific at all and does a poor job of reflecting real demographics. But, if you think there's value in asking, then there's value in comparing previous answers.
It is also interesting to see what the median age is. I think it is between 25-30 now where as it was between 30-35 before. The ratio of teenagers also seems to be decreasing.
Average account age (especially for people broken down by submitters with frequency, commenters with frequency, and quality commenters by frequency) would be MUCH more awesome than age, I think.
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.
17 - and I'd like to note that this is one of the few forums on which I can have that information public and still be able to participate in (mostly) civil public discourse, without put-downs, pats-on-the-head, or pandering. It's a breath of fresh air.
Only kidding, maturity varies wildly in online communities, I think age is very often not correlated.
Oftentimes I think that kind of patronising can be the result of jealousy. You know, youth is something you come to miss more than you think you would (31 here...)
It's not my real birthday, it's just the one I use on the net. Like waterlesscloud I hop it will break something somewhere. Or at least amuse a fellow engineer.
Somebody else however suggested using 31st december 1969. Now that's just evil...
If you convert this to Unix epoch time (Seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00), the result will be -1.
Which is problematic in several scenarios:
- Databases which store dates in integer fields and maybe don't handle negative values.
- Other overflows unhandled by date parsers
- Libraries, which use -1 as 'invalid'.
There are lots of people born before 1970 and any system processing birth dates as epoch times would fail immediately. I'd rather try Feb 29, 1899 or just some plain old SQL injection instead.
I don't know how accurate the results will be from this poll. I seriously doubt there are 36 users on HN over 90 (not entirely implausible, but most likely not the case). For anyone wondering I just turned 25, so in the 21 to 25 bracket and voted accordingly. Another fact worth pointing out is that you can vote more than once, so you can vote your real age and then vote on every other age to game the poll if you want too.
315 comments
[ 25.5 ms ] story [ 897 ms ] threadI.e. 16-20, 21-25, 26-30, 31-35
1309/89 == 15 to 1
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1571216
1377/72 == 19 to 1
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=591309
506/31 16 to 1
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2175603
466/35 == 13 to 1
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=749617 reply
1207 M / 73 F / 30 other
Here is the chart fdrom my recent poll:
http://hnlike.com/hncharts/chart/?id=5522156
sans Winklevii
http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#what_is
On a side note, your personal website is fucking hilarious.
Please put your reading glasses on and take the dummy out of your mouth, then re-read the poll text:
"Please be honest and click one answer only!"
Edit: wow that went up fast. Now there are 20+ under 8/over 90... I guess whenever an option says "don't abuse this option" there are those who just can't resist.
To be sure, Quantcast is measuring lurkers + members, whereas this poll is measuring members only. But, nevertheless, my gut feel is Quantcast is simply wrong.
[1] http://www.quantcast.com/news.ycombinator.com#!demo&anch...
I think it's OK to ask this question after 2 years. It's great to see how communities change over the years.
Yes, I know it's not scientific at all and does a poor job of reflecting real demographics. But, if you think there's value in asking, then there's value in comparing previous answers.
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.github.com/ricardobeat/5370218
I think its great that people of all ages can connect on HN through a common passion for technology.
Only kidding, maturity varies wildly in online communities, I think age is very often not correlated.
Oftentimes I think that kind of patronising can be the result of jealousy. You know, youth is something you come to miss more than you think you would (31 here...)
Somebody else however suggested using 31st december 1969. Now that's just evil...
Which is problematic in several scenarios: - Databases which store dates in integer fields and maybe don't handle negative values. - Other overflows unhandled by date parsers - Libraries, which use -1 as 'invalid'.