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The Hacker Survey
- TallGuyShort 17y agoYou may want to specify the currency you're going to use for the income question. US dollars, I assume?
- tialys 17y agoThanks, I'll add that real quick. Thanks for taking it as well!
- DanielStraight 17y agoAlso, I don't know how many "childred" I have or how I can format a number like "1,000,000" without using symbols. ;)
- tialys 17y agoI've fired my copy editor and fixed the mistakes ;) Thanks!
- RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago23 minutes later and it still reads "childred". Mind you, I do dread a child, so maybe it's right ...
- dasil003 17y agoEraserhead fan?
- jacquesm 17y agoDon't dread them, they're ok, and quite amazing actually :)
- tialys 17y agoIt should say children now... I think there is a caching issue with google maybe?
- DanielStraight 17y agoThose responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked, have been sacked.
- PebblesRox 17y agoMøøse! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvIKL_pTZFE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvIKL_pTZFE)
- sammyo 17y agodn;dc
- RiderOfGiraffes 17y agoHow do I account for running two businesses in two different industries?
- dasil003 17y agowhich one do you most identify with?
- reconbot 17y agoI've got about 2 businesses and outside and within them probably 4 "jobs". I always put the one that I put the most hours in.
- nathanwdavis 17y agoYou know the answer to this question. Wow- it is so impressive that you run two businesses in two industries. You're my hero.
- RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago> You know the answer to this question. > Wow- it is so impressive that you run > two businesses in two industries. You're > my hero. Well, my sarcasm detector just got triggered, but I'll answer seriously anyway. How many times have you been trying to complete a form, only to discover that there aren't enough places for your phone number, or your name is too long to fit in the provided box, or the field for the address will only take 32 characters, etc. It's a pitfall that so many web sites fall into again and again - not anticipating the wide range of inputs that it will have to deal with. This is a major issue, and I don't think I've ever seen it covered properly in a college/school/university course. The OP is doing a project - it's maybe a good thing he sees this problem early and learns to deal with it. And I really don't see why you had to be so obnoxiously childish. Perhaps you could explain what you resent about my running two businesses in two different industries. After all, if you're an employer programmer you probably take home more money than I do.
- Derrek 17y agoI hope you share the results of this survey. I'd be very interested in knowing how it all shakes out.
- jacquesm 17y agohe says he will on http://davelyon.net/mldata.html http://davelyon.net/mldata.html
- Derrek 17y agoYeah, I saw the link but wanted to formally express my interest. I figured the OP might appreciate concrete feedback that people are interested.
- astine 17y agoDo we have an ETA on this link?
- tialys 17y agoI was planning to wait until the link drops off the front page since people are still taking the survey. I think I'll take the other posters advice however, and let everyone see the summary now.
- tialys 17y agoYes, the data will be available to the general public on my website, and if anyone wants to mirror it they may. I might hold on to the data overnight just to get a good story together, but other than that, I have every intention of sharing. I have no doubt there are people who could make a lot more of this data than I will. I'm excited to see the results.
- spydez 17y agoWhat's the difference between a corporation ("the term denotes a body corporate formed to conduct business" - Wikipedia) and a (large or small) business?
- JimmyL 17y agoI'd say that a "corporation" is a "large business" that has offices in more than one country and is traded on an exchange/has investors in some other way. Probably best answered by the poster, though.
- tialys 17y agoI guess I was trying to imply a huge business with suits and cube farms and offices around the world... think an international bank or similar.
- bajsejohannes 17y agoI would ask directly, then. For example "How many people work in your company?" or "In how many countries does your employer have offices?"
- sophacles 17y agoPlease add an academia option for employment. I work at a state school so I put government, but that feels wrong.
- hack_edu 17y agoSeconding 'academia' as a non-government item. Non-profit private academic institutions don't deserve the 'Corporation' classification either.
- nathanwdavis 17y agoIf your paycheck comes from a government organization, then you work for the government. If you were a software engineer for the government would you complain that you can't state that you work for a business?
- harry 17y agoSame here. Government feels weighty. Altho I do catch myself hacking something together with figurative duct-tape and grunting "good enough for government work."
- tialys 17y agoI feel it's too late to add an option like that, but I do regret not putting it in. I tried to be as broad as possible, but academia makes sense. Thanks!
- MaysonL 17y agoShould also have had retired as an option - I vacillated btw self- and un- employed.
- nazgulnarsil 17y agogovernment should feel wrong ;) why is it weird to say you work for the government if they sign your paycheck?
- sophacles 17y ago
- omouse 17y agoThis isn't the greatest survey in the world :/
- tialys 17y agoI worked on it for a few hours to get it down to some simple things that might co-relate to a persons income -- I only needed simple data to test on. I think it will still be interesting to analyze nonetheless. Perhaps in a few months we could put together a slightly better survey? My email is in my profile if you have suggestions, but with over 300 responses so far (WOW!) it'd be hard to change this current survey. I appreciate your feedback!
- whatusername 17y agoFor the next survey: country. and maybe a basic description of what you do (coder, founder, other tech role, etc)
- nico 17y agoYou should add country of residence, otherwise you might get distorted data. Income varies greatly from country to country. For example you might have someone with a lot of experience and education but low income in India, and then have someone with not as much education or experience but a lot higher income in the US.
- mitko 17y agoI think to perform the learning you need to have some property of a hacker that you will learn. Maybe you need also some non-hackers to fill your survey so that you can perform classification. Directly: How do you plan to use ML on this dataset? What will you learn?
- nebula 17y agoThe data being collected is purely demographic. And I don't think that the data set would be very big either. Around a thousand entries even if most of the HNers take interest? I am not able to imagine anything significant that can be done by using this data as training set in a machine learning algorithm. Is it possible for you to elaborate a little bit on what you intend to train your algorithms to achieve?
- tialys 17y agohttp://cs.nmu.edu/~mkowalcz/cs495/project1.html http://cs.nmu.edu/~mkowalcz/cs495/project1.html This is the actual assignment. The data set doesn't need to be huge, it's more about the ideas than refining the algorithms (so we can cover more ground). The more entries the better, and so far (in one hour) I've gotten 400. I suspect this may work out for (some) interesting data.
- parbo 17y agoYou should have included country as a field since income varies a lot between countries.
- mish 17y agoIt's a shame you didn't take the opportunity to gather ZIP codes. That would allow for some adjustment of your salary figures based on avg income modifiers for an area (hell, you could use the GS modifiers the Govt. uses even for ease-of-use). But this is a great idea, I commend you on the experiment!
- Raphael 17y agoHow would I go about styling a Google spreadsheet?
- 10ren 17y agoI had a play with the google survey (a nice viral touch of having a "Create your own form" link - simple and unobtrusive, but notable because there's so little other text). It's a very nice little app, you can view the responses right from the creation page (either with cute little pie-charts, or as a spreadsheet). But I agree there's a shameful bug in it for styling: when I click "Theme: Plain", I get a "Not Found Error 404" EDIT Here's google's help on it, but as I said, it's not working for me (though clearly it worked for the submitter's survey): http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=145737&hl=en http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=145737&#...
- 10ren 17y agoRequest: make the summary viewable now More Actions > Edit Confirmation > Let everyone see response summary Google's summary looks like this: http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewanalytics?formkey=dDBXako0djZqbTZXVzRaY0lHVHhSOGc6MA. http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewanalytics?formkey=dDBXako.... The form for that sample is here: http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dDBXako0djZqbTZXVzRaY0lHVHhSOGc6MA.. http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dDBXako0djZq...) And here's the response page: http://spreadsheets.google.com/formResponse?formkey=dDBXako0djZqbTZXVzRaY0lHVHhSOGc6MA. http://spreadsheets.google.com/formResponse?formkey=dDBXako0....
- tialys 17y agoI was not aware you could do that! Here's the link! http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewanalytics?formkey=dEhmQ0JYLXE2M2ZJU05jZU0xWHFBS0E6MA. http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewanalytics?formkey=dEhmQ0J....
- 10ren 17y agoThat's really cool, thanks. It would be cool if Google had an option for strictly numeric fields, and then auto-calc averages and distribution graphs etc. Without that restriction input, there is a curation problem, e.g. ages "19-30". But google doesn't make any money from this, so it's hard for them to iterate as quickly as (e.g.) one of us could. I guess the deeper problem is: is there a revenue model for simple survey generation? There's Wufoo http://wufoo.com/gallery/templates/surveys/business-demographic-survey/ http://wufoo.com/gallery/templates/surveys/business-demograp... (a YCer, no less). I'm sure they'd do a better job, but they won't let you get started without signing up. Google's little form tool is disrupting these guys, albeit at the very low end.
- nico 17y agoWow, are there actually females reading HN?
- concretecode 17y agoOK. You've gotten that out of your system. Now go read this: http://xkcd.com/322/ http://xkcd.com/322/ and go back to Reddit.
- araneae 17y agoAs of 9:55 EST, (# pre-highschoolers == # women == meaning of life), returns true.
- jlees 17y agoRunning a startup = small business rather than self employed, I guess, but possibly disproportionately high working hours and low income for the actual founders...