Poll: How old are you?

Interesting comparison from 1998:<p><a href="http://slashdot.org/poll/421/My-Age-is" rel="nofollow">http://slashdot.org/poll/421/My-Age-is</a><p>In 1998, 22% of respondents were ages 16-20, 53% were in their 20s, 15% in their 30s and 5% over 40.<p>As of this writing (and assuming that I did my arithmetic correctly), ~7% of respondents on this poll are ages 16-20, ~60% are in their 20s, ~25% in their 30s, and ~7% are over 40.<p>Obviously there are a lot of caveats here, but the slight increase in the overall age of techies between these two polls is nothing like you'd expect if everyone who started in their 20s in 1998 stuck around until today.<p>*edit: fixed arithmetic error. D'oh!

56-60 Senior Software Engineer, still enjoying coding, hacking and figuring things out. Don't spend much energy on the good ole days, whatever they were. Still prefer C over everything else. Question: What is the best programming language? Answer: Whatever the client was sold on at the trade show. Wrote a really nice bash shell web scraper yesterday. Amazing to still get so much mileage out of sed,awk,grep, and others. All I did was setup a windows share and mounted the filesystem in ubuntu. I like the idea that there are so any platforms around and no one way to do anything. Tonight Labview and robot vision to do line following.

All I know is that this post just made me feel a lot older. Good God, I'm a 'seasoned vet' at 40.

Funny pattern in responses. People on the younger side (&#60;25) tend to be eager to prove themselves by listing their accomplishments, and people on the older side (&#62;30) seem to be humble and self-deprecating, but still with that unmistakable hacker spirit.<p>I'm 28 myself, seems like 25-30 are the 'inbetweeners'.

Wow, I really expected the demographics to tilt towards my age group (early 30's). Looks like I was wrong.

11-20 seems like a pretty uninformative range, assuming you want to draw conclusions (maybe you don't!) from the results, as it is in this range that you experience the most noticeable increase in both maturity and knowledge.<p>11-15 and 16-20 would have been significantly more telling. (As an aside, this is especially strange considering ranges such as 41-45.)

Shout out to those &#62; 66, may your passion for "teh codez" never grow old.

45 and still love to code. I still feel like I'm 25. I attribute this to exercise, a sense of humor and beer. (not necessarily in that order)

I'm 23 and it seems to me that this poll is missing 21-25 group. Or I'm indeed blind, that's also possible.

I am 22 and still absorbing lisp, currently running through "ANSI Common Lisp" and learning how I can apply this language to potentially my own startup. Only been visiting ycombinator for a week now and I already love it! So much information that is useful. Finally registered today.

30, nearly starting to come down the other side of this curve

I'm 21 and will graduate with a degree in CS at the end of the year. I'm fairly new to the HN community (127 days to be exact!) and just wish I had found this a little earlier on in my college career.

Get off my lawn!

Although I'm 57 I might as well be 27 for the amount of time I've spend developing and building start-ups. I played saxophone professionally until I was 40, then gave it up as just too much work. I must be a glutton for punishment.

Is this the one time we old fogeys are allowed to complain that HN is getting more like Reddit every day? ;-)

51-55 Better than dead. Much.

Are there seriously 0-10 year old HN readers?

Will be this 39 in March this year and started a company. Planning to be a micropreneur and hopefully generate income from the company by 40. Self-sustaining by 41.

I'm 22, almost 23, and as such I am one of the young guys here. I've already done a lot at 22 years of age, but reading the posts here and seeing what some of the older people have accomplished is just simply amazing. It is always fantastic to read someone else's take on various different ideas especially those who are older than me.<p>I currently work at a small startup with people who have been in the game for a long time (I along with 1 other programmer are in our 20's the rest of the team is 40's or more) and it is an absolute blast learning new things at an extremely rapid pace.<p>It was after only 3 months at this small startup, in the middle of things (I'd done my own startup but this was when the ah ha moment happened) I realised that my passion was to be a part of a small team that changed the world, and not be stuck in a big corporation somewhere chugging away with no real way to differentiate myself from everyone else there.<p>That is why I am really happy to be a part of the HN community where I can learn more information, and hopefully someday soon in the near future I too will have a successful small business with millions of dollars in revenue.

Glad to see I'm in the majority. Sometimes I feel on the old side of the industry at 26.

I'm 20. I acquired a 4-year degree using black magic and work somewhere in Palo Alto.

I'll be 29 in a couple of months. Started programming in high school but didn't get really serious about it till college. Have been working professionally for 6 years. Overall I'm proud of what I've accomplished but after scouring this site for even my limited amount of time, I wonder if I've been slacking too much as I don't consider myself a senior developer. Some days I wonder if I'll feel like I'll ever reach that point, given just how much there is to know out there.

I think a second dimension on this discussion would be fascinating. "How old are you AND how old do you feel?" Although I'm not sure how to word that just right.<p>For instance, capturing situations like: Are you a 65 year old grandfather that feels younger through the interaction with the core crowd here? Are you a 12 year old aspiring hacker that seeks the maturity of the seemingly 20-something base contrary to the peers of their own age?

Why were you wondering about this in the SHOWER?!

I'd rather like to see pg answer what age demographics comprise YC's start-ups. That data would be awesome (and probably daunting).

FWIW:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=126923" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=126923</a><p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=342635" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=342635</a><p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=517039" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=517039</a>

21-25's death is poisoning results :)

I'm 15, seemingly a small minority.

19 years old. Currently working towards a bachelor's degree (I graduate in spring 2012 yay!). I'll be applying to PhD programs next semester and hopefully working at the boundaries of human knowledge will help me solve some cool problems :)

I'd have thought that more appropriate ranges might have been:<p><pre><code> 8-15 16-31 32-63 </code></pre> Which are a bit broad, but why not:<p><pre><code> 8-15 16-23 24-31 32-47 48-63 64-95 96-127 </code></pre> Or something like that :-)

I haven't tried, because I don't want to throw off the results, but it looks like you can vote more than once (only the arrow for your selection disappears). If that is the case, consider this a bug report.

It would be interesting to see how this curve developers over time. Is the audience getting older or are young people filling the ranks of older members that left the site?

Great to see some young folk lurking here. These whipper snappers will have a head-start over us 30/40/50 somethings.<p>TL/DR: "There was nothing like Hacker News in my day"

Waited until this morning to respond so I could answer 26-30. Wouldn't want to be counted with all those "early 20-somethings"

Hey Timothy, Emrah here. How did you set up this poll? I'd like to do one. (I answered both and found useful) Thank you:)

Bar chart of the results:<p><a href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/58785/2175588.PNG" rel="nofollow">http://dl.dropbox.com/u/58785/2175588.PNG</a>

Amazing to see there are 500+ ppl in the 20-30 range.<p>Curios If i could link a poll of how many are married in the respective agr groups ?

Interesting that there are 10 year olds.

18 years old and been working professionally for almost 3 years (since I was 16) :)

Turned 26 yesterday! Started work last week. In a whole new category now!

It just hit me that from last month I am in 26-30. And its scary.

Woohoo, another ten years, and then I'll be in about the center!

You can't be 20-26?

Would be great if someone made diagram out of this.

25 and not allowed to vote! DISCRIMINATION!

Interesting to see some young people here!

Where is 21-25?

Looks like we lost the 21-25 category.

I suddenly feel so old at 36<p>:-O

Seriously, anyone in the 0-10 range?

I'll be 17 in a couple of weeks.

It should look this perhaps:<p>0 - 8<p>8 - 16<p>16 - 32<p>32 - 64<p>64 - 128

53

Where is 21-25??? I'm 22.

What happened to 21-25?

Where is 21-25?

21-25 please?

22-25

I'm old :(

26-30

1977!!

37, here.

Very nice!

I'm also curious about the ratio of genders as well: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2175603" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2175603</a><p>Someone pointed out (in the gender poll) that HN allows more than 1 vote on a poll at a time so sorry for splitting it up! I had no idea.

I can't wait til I turn 66 knowing that by my next birthday I'll become 11 again. ;)

Almost 16 :)

im 20

32

Missing option: "I am eternal."

I'm 25 and I just upvoted everyone who had negative scores because they listed their age. :-)