Hacker News Search

brackin 15y ago

Although many Europeans are at work and may not be on HN, I'd expect to see the most votes from Asia.

itmag 15y ago
"Although many Europeans are at work and may not be on HN" Uhm, that's exactly why I'm on HN.
- dum 15y ago
  I would say the same thing.
- anons2011 15y ago
  :) indeed.
- Right 15y ago
  +1
- kunley 15y ago
  OT, but frankly such attitude is recurring and I can't imagine how it is compatible with HN "ethos". If you're at work, be effective there or change the work. What's to be so proud in slacking during work hours? Would you want such people working in your startup?
  - juliendsv-mbm 15y ago
    I don't think reading some news after lunch, or while having your morning coffee, is that bad for your productivity ...
    - kunley 15y ago
      When someone claims that he's on HN "exactly because he's at work", it's not sounding like some innocent morning coffee break.
      - itmag 15y ago
        Your comment keeps getting up/down-voted like crazy, which seems to indicate that there is a strong and opinionated divide on the topic of proper work ethic. It would be a lot more interesting if people actually stated their arguments, though.
      - huxley 15y ago
        I don't know about anyone else, but I didn't sign up for any ethos and I don't like policing other people's "innocent coffee breaks" either. If we're now shunning people for not maximizing productivity, you can count me out.
  - freehunter 15y ago
    No one can work 100% all day every day. You get 4-5 hours of good, solid productivity before you burn out. Take a break every now and then, you'll live longer.
  - itmag 15y ago
    Different ways to look at work ethic: Mercenary (sneaky): "They're getting the exact amount of work from me that they manage to extract." Mercenary (quid pro quo): "They're getting what they're paying for. If they want increased work ethic, they have to increase their pay ethic." Mercenary (clever): "I will go above and beyond the call of duty in ways that get noticed by my boss." Work ethic (intrinsic/weberian): "Work in the sweat of thine brow from dusk till dawn. I sleep well at night knowing I always do my utmost for my company." Work ethic (LessWrong.com / game-theory): "It's utility-maximizing in the long-run to pre-commit to being the kind of person who has good work-ethic, even if there is no utility to be gained in a specific concrete situation." Work ethic (soldier): "I'm a professional, I get the job done." Hostile: "Fuck 'em!" Snake: "Fuck 'em! But pretend to like 'em so I get a raise." Survivalist: "Anxiety. Depression. Gastric upset. Make it through another day. They took my red stapler." Ruthless prioritizer: "It's really too bad that I'm slacking off at work. But time/energy is scarce and my own projects have to take precedence, sorry." Conscientious objector: "I'm not going to work hard for my company, 'cause they're at best neutral and at worst actively harming humanity." Attention-span challenged: "[refreshes Reddit]"
    - aurelianito 15y ago
      Wow! Great list!
      - itmag 15y ago
        I find that in a discussion it's best to avoid the trench warfare of "you vs me" and instead try to understand as many perspectives as possible. Intelligence: understanding a given perspective. Knowledge: knowing of many different perspectives. Wisdom: choosing the perspective that is most right under the circumstances.
  - wladimir 15y ago
    HN isn't that bad because you can read articles on how to improve your coding skills, learn about libraries that can help you be more productive by not reinventing the wheel, and so on. As long as it doesn't get in the way of work that has to be done, there's much worse ways of slacking off.
  - gbog 15y ago
    Most are not in startups I guess. For me it is the duty of your boss/company to give you enough interesting work that you don't even think about checking HN.

CWuestefeld 15y ago
One professor of statistics, who is a co-author of a highly regarded AP statistics textbook, has tried to popularize the phrase that "voluntary response data are worthless" to go along with the phrase "correlation does not imply causation." And look how successful the campaign to educate about correlation versus causation has been... Just as you note, people tend to believe whatever the heck they want to believe.
zerostar07 15y ago
Nobody argues that this is not scientific research, but that doesn't mean it's not interesting or useful. It also violates some of your expectations: the majority is not in the US, India is underrepresented despite English being their second language. And if i might add, despite their national focus on entrepreneurship, the UK numbers are low.
- tokenadult 15y ago
  It also violates some of your expectations: the majority is not in the US My tentatively expressed expectation was written in my post (grandparent to this post) as "So it wouldn't be any surprise if a plurality of participants on Hacker News live in the United States, and a majority live in countries where English is a routine language learned in secondary education." The word "plurality" does not mean the same thing as the word "majority." So far the poll results (which, for reasons I mentioned in the grandparent post, should not be taken as the last word on this issue) show the sum of "United States - NYC and SF area" and "(Rest of the) United States" comfortably outscoring any single country mentioned in the poll, which fits the definition of "plurality" for these purposes. But, yes, we have no idea where most HN participants live, and we have no idea who comes forward to answer yet another HN poll as contrasted with HN participants who use their HN time to discuss more verifiable factual issues.
- skoob 15y ago
  As I'm writing this the numbers are 2186 for the US vs 496 for the UK. The US population is almost five times the size of the UK, so the UK is actually overrepresented compared to the US.
- keys1234 15y ago
  Numbers for India is low because Indians are just waking up now =)
danmaz74 15y ago
You make a very articulate point, but let me disagree on this: It isn't true that a poll like this is "useless for modeling reality". It tells us the distribution of voluntarily given responses about the geographical distribution of registered users of HN who happened to see the poll and happened to want to answer. How does this correlate to the absolute geographical distribution of readers? Or of registered, but maybe inactive, users? That is difficult to guess. But the information from the poll is, for me, already very interesting. By the way, I'll add that even with polls you can always only measure voluntary responses, even if the sample is randomly extracted, and there is no way around this.
thurn 15y ago
They're still better than basing your opinions on anecdotal data. For example, I previously believed that the majority of HN users were in the Bay Area, mostly because it seems like users mention that they're there a lot. I was probably basing that opinion on less than a dozen data points.
- smackfu 15y ago
  Is it really better? You put a lot of anecdotes together in a non-proper sample, the result is still junk data.
j_baker 15y ago
Forgive me if this is a dumb question, but what is "voluntary response data"? Is the author arguing that the only statistically valid way to do a study is to put a gun to peoples' heads and demand that they take a survey? I can't think of many ethically sound ways to conduct a study without responses being voluntary.
- drewcrawford 15y ago
  Think about if the poll were (the horror!) political. The person who responds to that kind of poll is the intersection of: 1) An HN reader 2) Somebody who thinks politics on HN is a good idea 3) Somebody who is on HN / has free time TODAY, skewing the distribution in favor of certain verticals that are in a low point of their seasonal cycle or against startups in a coding marathon 4) Somebody who personally cares about politics sufficiently to have an opinion strong enough to want to be counted, this is likely to skew the distribution in favor of extremes In contrast, if pg picks 1000 random HN users and personally asks them the poll question via e-mail, some of these biases evaporate. And you lose the "interested bystander" effect whereby more interested people tend to want to take the poll, because the only way to take it is by personal invitation.
polemic 15y ago
The primary use of online polls, these days, appears to be for news websites to generate hooks for articles, leading to all sorts of spurious conclusions and misleading headlines. Oh wait...
davidhollander 15y ago
> because the data are voluntary response data and are useless for modeling reality Unless the reality you seek to model is regarding voluntary responders. Just pretend the OP said "those volunteering information to Hacker News (commentators)" instead of "Hacker News readers".

kingsley_20 15y ago

"We" don't need a startup visa, "the USA" might. I'd prefer that Indian entrepreneurs capitalized on the excellent opportunities available at home. I support the startup visa in the spirit of supporting choice, but I resent the implication that the whole world should send its talents to the valley.