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The most significant result of this poll is that HN now seems to be past the point where we can rely on an honor system to prevent users from giving junk answer
by pg 14y ago
The most significant result of this poll is that HN now seems to be past the point where we can rely on an honor system to prevent users from giving junk answers to polls. A few years ago we could. That's an unfortunate change.
However, it's an ill wind that blows no good. When I'm done reading applications, I'll add a little tweak to HN to make the fonts super big for all the users over 80.
- SCdF 14y agoMy thoughts exactly. That's a lot of <10 year olds...
- pg 14y agoI'll have to think of something extra for them too. Any ideas? Bear in mind that about half the users under 10 are also over 90, so whatever it is can't conflict with extra large fonts.
- barredo 14y agoput the nicks of the voters below each answer
- petercooper 14y agoOr when someone votes, it posts a comment in the thread with their vote/answer.
- nicholassmith 14y agoI like that idea, but there's plenty of people who use shell accounts and will still pick a ridiculous answer.
- pgbovine 14y agoextra bright colors; maybe some blink tags too.
- goosmurf 14y agoCare bears.
- wavesounds 14y agoTranslate everything to binary
- MichaelApproved 14y agoMany high contrasting colors. Children like different colors and it could help anyone reading that has poor eyesight.
- staunch 14y agoSadly, I think you're going to have to ban them. COPPA[1] makes it risky to have children under 13 on your web site without clear parental consent. ..you could let them send in a note from their parents to get unbanned :-) 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childrens_Online_Privacy_Protection_Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childrens_Online_Privacy_Protec...
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- Daniel_Newby 14y agoIf the First Amendment allows children to traffic in snuff films, Nazi regalia, bomb making manuals, Satanist tracts, classified nuclear information, and so forth while in a government school, it's safe to assume that COPPA is an unconstitutional prior restraint on free speech. I am astonished that the ACLU has not already handed the FTC their ass.
- icebraining 14y ago"The ACLU has long been strongly supportive of COPPA. It is an important first step on the road to universal baseline privacy protections that ensure that every American—young and old—has meaningful control over their personal information online. (...) The ACLU protects privacy and free speech simultaneously, and the two interests are rarely at cross-purposes. Right now, COPPA is a great law and it does both effectively." http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty-human-rights-free-speech/ftc-proposes-changes-privacy-law-collide-free http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty-human-rights...
- lifeisstillgood 14y agoWow. And I thought my school was rough.
- orenjacob 14y agoThere can be a very real issue if HN accounts have an age or birthdate associated with them which indicate that the user is under 13. In that situation where knowledge of age is in the hands of the website operator, the FTC has taken notice, and action. See Path's recent FTC COPPA ruling as an example. So, if HN internally keeps a reference from votes in the under-10 category of this poll to the accounts they came from, and if any of those people are under 13, there may be cause for real concern re: COPPA. There are sort of 3 ways to approach this safely... 1. don't ask, don't tell (eg: Google's main search page) 2. ask, and reject (eg: Facebook account signup) 3. ask, accept, and get consent (eg: some child focused sites) HN is pretty clearly not a child-oriented website, but if there is concrete knowledge of age, COPPA can apply.
- jonemo 14y agoLimit their HN access to 20 minutes per day. When I was that young my parents enforced a very strict time limit on daily media consumption.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- davidjohnstone 14y agoComic Sans was made for this.
- gailees 14y agoIt's really great to see how down to earth pg can be on here sometimes. Definitely great to be a part of a thriving community like HN, even though I've gotten on later than what may have been its golden age. Times like these are what really get me pumped about the great community I'm diving into surrounding tech.
- saulrh 14y agoHow about an animated hacker mascot that provides helpful tutorials for features, complete with colorful highlighting and font changes to indicate important UI elements?
- waterlesscloud 14y agoWe could call him Poochie.
- WiseWeasel 14y agoThere's even a helpful js library for this, previously featured on HN: https://www.smore.com/clippy-js https://www.smore.com/clippy-js
- cynwoody 14y ago>Bear in mind that about half the users under 10 are also over 90 It's called second childhood. May you someday be eligible, but yet escape achieving it. As for the fonts, you can be sure the octo- and nona- hackers will have long since implemented suitable user scripts.
- phryk 14y ago<blink> and <marquee>.
- jonahx 14y agoWow. Exactly what kind of pleasure does a person derive from giving false answers to the question "What's your age?" on an anonymous internet poll? I am not asking that facetiously -- I really am curious to know. Is this some people's of idea of "being bad"? "being funny"? Something like trolling, getting a rise out of people, etc -- I don't like it or agree with it, but I can comprehend it. In this case, no one is even going to see or know what you did. Is there some pleasure taken in knowing that people think the results are valid while you secretly know they aren't? Or was there an awareness that the moderators would see the bad results, be annoyed by them, and post about it?
- arh68 14y agoPleasure? That's not what comes to mind. I haven't answered the poll, but I did think about putting <10. Since you seem to comprehend the situation.. it's not about the readers or the moderators, it's more like a dialogue between me and the poll-creator: do you really think there are 10 year olds on the site? Why even make it a poll option? What a hilarious concept, 7 year olds browsing 'Hacker News' at what, 6 in the morning? I like my polls mostly Slashdot-style: you'd be crazy to take them as 'scientific' or 'accurate'. You put options out there, I'll entertain my sense of humor. If you've ever played Apples to Apples, you'll know which kind of player I am. The options I would've expected as more reasonable: <20, 20-35, 36-40, 41+. Then you would hope the results of the poll are interesting enough to talk about (otherwise, yes, you'll degenerate into humour).
- 1337biz 14y agoI is just my habit of creating some noise in any data collection effort. Based on the fact that pg is apparently digging through the results and trying to profile certain user behaviors it is somewhat proving the point. You never know who is going to fiddle with the data so you better noise it up.
- TeMPOraL 14y agoAKA. you're breaking things because you can?
- davidroberts 14y agoHow about lots of cat photos on the front page? I've heard that's very popular with the under 10 group.
- davvid 14y agoYoung children have an easier time reading low contrast text. Make them read light gray on gray.
- zikzikzik 14y agoPonies.
- Alex3917 14y agoWhenever they double click a word a dictionary should pop up, like on nytimes if they still do that.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- benjamincburns 14y agoHmm, maybe we need another poll to decide? :-)
- WiseWeasel 14y agoMake an announcement and color their names pink, so everyone knows they're dealing with under-10-year-olds when reading their comments. Or maybe a little dunce cap icon next to their name.
- crusso 14y agoCan you make polls like this and trollish comments into some kind of honey pot? I propose two HN sites based upon basically the same underlying data. A "good" one, and a phantom one. Users who get honey potted end up in a phantom mode where any moderation or posting actions that they take affect only the phantom HN that they view. Phantoms can see the posts and moderation results of good users, but good users can't see the posts and results of phantom users.
- S4M 14y agoHow do you know some people are lying here about their age?
- notimetorelax 14y agoFrom the other comment: > Bear in mind that about half the users under 10 are also over 90
- endianswap 14y agoMultiple answers, at least, would be my guess.
- TeMPOraL 14y agoYou could, in most cases, go from their e-mail or whatever data they put in their profile description back to their LinkedIn account, at which point you can get a pretty good estimate of their age (based on education and work history). In theory, you could even automate this. ;).
- gegenschall 14y agoPut a poll out there, give it at least one irrelevant/obviously inapt answer and people will click it. Not really an HN problem if you ask me...
- aptwebapps 14y agoThe Cowboy Neal option, in other words.
- aethr 14y agoAt first reading, I thought you were suggesting a poll that was the human version of a honeypot! Put up a poll with one obviously troll answer, and anyone who upvotes the troll answer gets hellbanned immediately. Obviously a heavy-handed approach, it just made me laugh thinking about it.
- MichaelApproved 14y ago> However, it's an ill wind that blows no good. I never heard that phrase so I looked it up. For anyone else that's interested: http://www.usingenglish.com/reference/idioms/it%27s+an+ill+wind+that+blows+no+good.html http://www.usingenglish.com/reference/idioms/it%27s+an+ill+w... "This is said when things have gone wrong; the idea being that when bad things happen, there can also be some positive results."
- mtdewcmu 14y agoI love a well-used idiom. It may have originated as a reference to sailing. http://www.answers.com/topic/it-s-an-ill-wind-that-blows-nobody-any-good http://www.answers.com/topic/it-s-an-ill-wind-that-blows-nob...
- officemonkey 14y agoYou're in for a treat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8a6xtg0auyk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8a6xtg0auyk
- ritchiea 14y agoIt's also an issue that you can give multiple answers to polls. I attempted it just to see if the poll enforced giving just one answer but now I've given multiple answers to this poll as an experiment.
- pointyhatuk 14y agoIt still looks roughly like a bell curve. I think the genuine answers are enough to extrapolate some information from this.
- mtdewcmu 14y agoThe OP was asking for it when he included 90+ as an answer, don't you think? If you throw out the outliers, it looks plausibly accurate.
- petercooper 14y agoExactly. A lot of us have been brought up on Slashdot polls where joke answers are the order of the day (I'd have voted for CowboyNeal if I could). If the top bracket had just been 50+, I imagine the responses would be a lot more realistic.
- RobAley 14y agoPG, have you considered that many (though granted not all) of the "junk" answers may due to the hacker mentality, people asking themselves questions like "what if I choose more than one option, will it let me?", "what if I 'accidentally' select the wrong answer, can I undo it?", "What if too many people give implausible answers, can it be corrected for or will the poll be junked?" and so on. Hackers - tinkers and the curious. Working in survey based stats all day, I can tell you that the easiest junk answers to filter out are the ones you're seeing at the moment. The plausible looking results you used to get aren't necessarily as good as you think they were.
- dhimes 14y agopg's point still stands. If I wanted to know that, I wouldn't screw up an existing poll but I would start one of my own for that purpose and invite folks to test it with me.
- ebbv 14y agoThat sounds fine in theory but in reality anyone with a hacker mentality should see that the poll is obviously based on the honor system and is simply a series of options to upvote without actually attempting to ruin the results.
- alanctgardner2 14y agoI present, No True Hacker (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman). Some hackers are interested in the results of the poll. Some resent any effort by anyone to collect their personal information. Some just wanted to click all the buttons, to see if they could. None of these are more or less valid than any other viewpoint, and it's silly to argue about what this portends for the HN community.
- ebbv 14y agoWhether you're interested in the poll or not is no reason to vandalize it. Being unwilling to share personal information is no reason to vandalize it. Wanting to "click all the buttons" is only a valid excuse if you are under the age of 8. What's silly is defending the dickheads who purposely ruin the poll.
- oulipo 14y agoThis is a problem with all web polls but this is absolutely not a problem here: you can measure quite precisely the amount of noise in the answers (seems to be about 20 to 50 fake results per age range) and deduce the approximate correct values for all ranges (assuming people that give wrong answers lie uniformly in the answers :)
- TeMPOraL 14y ago> assuming people that give wrong answers lie uniformly in the answers This assumption doesn't seem right, because age of HN users is not uniformly distributed, and we can assume (yes, I'm exchanging one assumption with another ;)) that people who lie won't pick their own age as a "lie". Therefore the biggest age group should be underrepresented, and the others, on average, overrepresented. :).
- Houshalter 14y agoAnd the joke answers are likely to get picked a lot more, like under 10 or over 90. So that doesn't give us any information as to how many answers are likely fake for the others, except that we can assume it's probably a lot less. On the other hand you can vote more than once for some reason, so some people could have just voted for every age. If you couldn't vote for more than one thing though, the obviously-untrue answers would filter out a lot of the noise. This makes me wonder about the polls that say 18% of Americans believe the Sun goes around the Earth. Is it really that high, or are polls inaccurate plus or minus 18%?
- lifeisstillgood 14y agoI recently signed onto Coursera and being US university derived, they took their honour system quite seriously - I had to read the "I promise not to cheat or publish answers" bit and click yes. Could I suggest pg drafts his own view of the HN honour system. If we agree we could make explicit what as a Brit is supposed to be implicitly understood by all good chaps anyhow. Yours Adrian Mole 13 3/4 years old
- mrcalzone 14y agoI attend a course at Coursera by Dan Ariely on Behavior Economics, and he talks about the effect of signing an honor code. Interestingly, his experiments showed that people stopped cheating when signing a honor-code, even if no such code really existed at their university. Being reminded of moral seems to be enough. [http://www.researchgate.net/publication/228263998_The_Dishonesty_of_Honest_People_A_Theory_of_Self-Concept_Maintenance/file/32bfe50eae8e0f1554.pdf http://www.researchgate.net/publication/228263998_The_Dishon...]
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- clicks 14y ago> When I'm done reading applications, I'll add a little tweak to HN to make the fonts super big for all the users over 80. I'm in my mid-20s, I did not vote dishonestly in this poll, but I wish you'll make the change for me anyway. The small font on a 1080p screen (13" screen) is practically unreadable for me. I have to zoom in about 150% to make out anything.
- radarsat1 14y agoSome browsers have a handy feature called "minimum font size." Firefox: http://i.imgur.com/m2doXpX.png http://i.imgur.com/m2doXpX.png Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/minimum-font/pofdgleodhojjnibdfnlapkadjepdnka?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/minimum-font/pofdg...
- Houshalter 14y agoThe images and everything else would still be unusually small though.
- D9u 14y agoSome of us old farts use Ctrl + to get around such issues.
- Houshalter 14y agoThat's what OP was using, and someone else was suggesting to use a minimum font size instead. I wonder if there is a way to change the zoom level at the OS if everything is too small, not just the web browser, but that would defeat the purpose of having an hd screen. Also does the zoom level in your browser affect the resolution of videos/images? It seems like it would.
- e12e 14y agoMost OS have the possibility to adjust screen dot pitch (ppi, pixels per inch). Using a "high resolution" display (like my 23"@2048x1152, or an Apple "retina" display). Technically, setting your font to be eg 14 points, should be an absolute size - the same font should be the same dimensions (in mm/inches) on all displays. Now, you probably hold your smartphone closer to your face than you sit to your 30" LCD screen -- so that might not really be what you want (same font size on your phone and on your desktop screen). Additionally this only works for scalable graphics -- which is why Apple went trough such hoops to make retina displays usable -- quadruple the dot pitch on screens, and all icons and bitmaps become miniatures. Personally I just use the browser zoom-function -- I find most sites use too small fonts, and end up with too wide text columns (which is somewhat alleviated by not browsing full screen, but in a "long" window). Anyway, the following might be of interest: Xorg, dpi: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xorg#Display_Size_and_DPI https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xorg#Display_Size_and_D... Windows (8) dpi/zoom: http://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3153/~/adjusting-windows-8-display-size%2Fscaling-for-high-dpi%2Fppi-monitors http://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3153/~/ad... Some notes from Microsoft on writing DPI-aware applications: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd464646(VS.85).aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd464646(VS.85).aspx
- davidroberts 14y agoAs long as you are tweaking things, could you add a confirmation option to the flag link? Its placement next to the comment link makes it all too easy to hit by accident on a smartphone screen by fat-fingered people like me.
- gailees 14y agoI second this one to the max!
- jrajav 14y agoYou should try Chrome or Opera mobile, they both have a fat-finger zoom when you tap ambiguously so you can confirm what you really wanted to do.
- fr0sty 14y agoOnce you "flag" an article the text changes to "unflag" and clicking again changes it back (at least for me). But downvotes are forever.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- lmm 14y agoIf HN is no longer entirely full of goody-two-shoes I count that as a plus. Anecdotally my impression is that the diversity of stories has increased; we seem to have a wider cross-section of interests than a year ago.
- mindcrime 14y agoAnecdotally my impression is that the diversity of stories has increased; we seem to have a wider cross-section of interests than a year ago. Yes, but that's not necessarily a Good Thing. What we're getting are more and more stories on the front-page that are things that you could read about on CNN, MSNBC, or see on ABC Nightly News. This is "Hacker News" not "World News Tonight".
- rdl 14y agoIn general I think people are more likely to lie on polls than before, but also have always been more tempted to lie on polls which make them offended or defensive, which age probably does. I'm curious if the take over 80 set are more likely people in their 30s-50s who find age polls somewhat offensive (or at least the implication), or people under 20, or whatever. Perceptions of age bias actually interest me more than age distribution on HN.
- mixedbit 14y agoIn general you shouldn't be able to associate results of such polls with users accounts. Any such data is a liability.
- blablabla123 14y agoIt may sound odd but according to this http://www.census.gov/prod/2011pubs/acs-17.pdf http://www.census.gov/prod/2011pubs/acs-17.pdf more than 0.5% of the U.S. population is over 90 in 2010. In the poll it is 1.7%. Maybe it's fake, maybe tech people stay longer online...
- WiseWeasel 14y agoLook at the curve though. Age should be a smooth bell curve, but here it spikes on the ends (even when accounting for the fact that the end choices potentially cover more than the 5 years covered by the other options), which is clear evidence of error.
- blablabla123 14y agoFor the whole population of a country it is probably fine to assume that curve form. The first time I had my own computer was at age 7 or 8 which was already highly unusual 20 years ago. But today this is less unusual, the availability of decent gear is more common for children. On the other hand, right now many 60+ year olds don't even use internet. Those who do might be bad-ass veterans that never lost interest... ;)
- trotsky 14y agoIf that font change comes with a proportional increase in the size of the voting arrows our younger brethren will be kicking themselves for their honest answer. On a serious note, I'm surprised to see you offering this specific post as a bellwether - by my memory we've seen basically identical versions of this at least a half a dozen times with similar results. It doesn't seem like there's a big gap between something like this and a "what's your favorite snack chip brand" to me. I really do appreciate the quality you've maintained by having an opinionated moderation system, but between this and a few other recent comments like "we're keeping track of the people who vote up these dumb comments and considering retroactive punishments [to the voters]" it's really kicked the open contempt for your users vibe up a good notch as compared to a year or two ago. That said, you can't argue with the results. The active story position penalties especially are spot on 9 times out of 10 and really improve things.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- skizm 14y agoUnder 10 year old users should have to have their parents "e-sign" a permission form before they are allowed to browse.
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y agoBefore they are allowed to comment, please. My 10-year-old self liked programming and perhaps would have found this site.
- sophacles 14y agoWhile the numbers indicated suggest that some people are lying, there are a couple "old guys" I know who would read this site. One is a professor emeritus at the university I work at, and he still keeps up with this stuff. Another is a guy who showed up at our local python user's group a few weeks ago. He's in his late 70s or early 80s and decided to pick up python as a retirement project. (It's kind of an inspiration, I would like to walk into a room of 'kids' in 2060 and say: teach me what you are doing). I've recommended this site to both of them.
- Jun8 14y agoI've been here for some time and I usually agree/upvote pg's comments, not because of reverence to him or because I'm start-struck but because, well, the man is a well of wisdom (I regularly buy Hackers and Painters and give it away as presents to the young students I mentor. And OK, I may be a bit star-struck, too.) This is his first comment I disagreed completely and downvoted. As a personal policy I downvote any comment here that gives the old "HN has deteriorated, it's going the way of X" hash without presenting any evidence other than gut feeling. Now, this being pg, it's true that his gut feeling about HN may trump yours or mine. Still, looking at the results of a personal poll and concluding that the HN honor system is broken is too strong a conclusion for me. When I'm asked a question about my gender/age/ethnicity, if I can get away with it (e.g. no possible jail time :-) I either choose "other/not want to disclose" or if that's not an option give wrong answers. My reasoning behind that, quaint as it may seem, is that these things shouldn't matter; it's generally wrongheaded to collect this information. Knowing the browser/editor/proglang/personal hero/etc that HN'ers think is the best is a nice poll. Asking about their age/gender/ethnicity is definitely, I think, not. Since there was no "Don't want to disclose" option here, I marked my age as "under 10" as a sort of protest against this poll. Stupid? Maybe. But it wasn't because I don't believe in the HN honor system.
- SpeakMouthWords 14y agoA similar solution would have been to not answer at all. Is there a non-tangential purpose served by answering "Do not wish to disclose" on a non-mandatory poll?
- eeeeaaii 14y agoI think you are missing the point that this poll is voluntary. So, the "Do not disclose" option is there -- just click on one of the many other links on HN today, or otherwise do something else with your time. There, you "did not disclose."
- sandyarmstrong 14y agoBut that's not really the same at all. There is a huge difference between not voting and voting with "don't want to disclose". The former is unusable as a data point, while the latter is something that can be analyzed and discussed.
- micampe 14y agoI ignored the poll but if it comes with a sane font size i'll go vote for over 90 right now.
- vorvzakone 14y agoThat's a pretty dramatic post just because 100-300 people said they were 10 or 90. Get over yourself.
- msellout 14y agoI'd forgotten the fonts were small, because I've had them magnified on this page for so long. I'm only old according to Peter Townshend.
- wambotron 14y agoI'm not over 80, and I didn't answer falsely. I DO however kind of wish the font size were larger. I guess I can make a custom stylesheet for that, though.
- MartinCron 14y agoit's an ill wind that blows no good Even if we can't count on the honor system, we can still count on occasional slivers of pure poetry. That's something.
- sukuriant 14y agoReddit, Something Awful and 4chan all have quite a bit of slivers of pure poetry within them. This forum was meant to be something different; and I think that's what pg is thinking about when he said that. This site will still have plenty of good discussion, just like those places, but the amount of bad discussion/trolling/useless information will be increasing
- Mz 14y agoI am only 47 (and, silly me, voted my actual age) but I got bifocals at age 30. At age 33, while being fitted for my second pair of bifocals, the fitter repeated over and over and over "God, you're YOUNG for having bifocals." Those of us with 80 year old eyes look forward to the site tweak.