HN Explorer

Poll: What percentage of Hacker News users are programmers/hackers?

17 points by jmonegro ↗ HN
The name "Hacker News" alludes to a small community of hard-core hackers and programmers. However, 30,000 uniques a day is not small, and I know HN used to be called Startup News.

So, I was just curious to know how many HN users were actually hackers/programmers, and how many are more interested in the business and entrepreneurship side of HN.

13 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 41.4 ms ] thread
Sephr
Tip for formatting entries on Hacker News: Use two linebreaks, not a <p/> to start a new paragraph.

Tip for (X)HTML: <p> tags should be closed.

cia_plant
end tag is optional for <p> in HTML 4. http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/text.html#h-9.3.1
Sephr
Sorry, I meant that it is a best practice to close them anyways because an invalid HTML comment inserted into blog served as XHTML doesn't go.
nostrademons
The blog really ought to validating user input, because there are many things worse than unclosed <p>s that can happen if it doesn't.

Of course, "ought to" and "does" are two different things...

tokenadult
"I was just curious to know how many HN users were actually hackers/programmers, and how many are more interested int the business and entrepreneurship side of HN."

You won't find out by this kind of voluntary response poll. Just sayin'.

http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=194473&tsta...

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brianto2010
> So, I was just curious to know how many HN users were actually hackers/programmers, and how many are more interested int [sic] the business and entrepreneurship side of HN.

In that case, your poll options seem strange. For instance, a hacker can be interested in both coding and entrepreneurship. In this scenario, he or she will vote "I'm a hacker", which doesn't fully represent the person given your choices.

Try this:

  * Interested in hacking/programming
  * Interested in business/entrepreneurship
  * Interested in both
  * Interested in interesting stuff excluded from the list
jmonegro
Thanks, I added the "both" option.
netsp
I think the options are still a little off.

"I'm a.." & "I'm interested in.." are not really the same thing. Also, "I'm a hacker" or "I am more interested in the business and entrepreneurship side of HN," don't really cover all the options. You could be a non programmer interested mostly in programming. Many of the programming related articles here are relatively abstract & do not require an understanding of programming to read.

Another thin. 'Hacker' might not be the right word for your purpose. It implies all sorts of things.

colinplamondon
Turning vision into reality.

At this stage that means hacking away in vim, at later stages it's about business and marketing. Just depends on what needs to get done on a given day.