Hacker News is 44% 18-24 year olds, 77% male

This poll from a year ago regarding age is probably more representative: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2175588" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2175588</a><p>Results pasted here:<p><pre><code> Age Points --- ------ 0-10 39 (0.6%) 11-15 32 (0.5%) 16-20 462 (7.5%) 21-25 1620 (26.4%) 26-30 1945 (31.6%) 31-35 1049 (17.1%) 36-40 488 (7.9%) 41-45 269 (4.4%) 46-50 117 (1.9%) 51-55 54 (0.9%) 56-60 35 (0.6%) 61-65 19 (0.3%) 66+ 19 (0.3%) </code></pre> edit: Found a male/female poll here from ~3 years ago: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=591309" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=591309</a>. Another age poll from ~3 years ago: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=517039" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=517039</a><p><pre><code> Gender Points ------ ------ Male 1375 (95%) Female 71 (5%)</code></pre>

Where is the information about the methodology of the survey?<p>The submitted article says the "survey" is based on DoubleClick Ad Planner,<p><a href="https://accounts.google.com/ServiceLogin?service=branding&#38;passive=1209600&#38;continue=https://www.google.com/adplanner/&#38;followup=https://www.google.com/adplanner/&#38;ltmpl=adplanner&#38;authuser=0" rel="nofollow">https://accounts.google.com/ServiceLogin?service=branding&#3...</a><p>a Google service, but it's not explained how DoubleClick knows about (for example) users who habitually block cookies and the like, and anyway how does DoubleClick match its data sources with the overall population that uses Hacker News? What is the evidence that the headline figure is anything other than a wild-ass guess?

Just how much of an outlier is a 61 year old male? No pixels on the graph for anyone over 54!<p>Learning new stuff, e.g. writing Android &#38; iOS apps, keeps the mind young, much like lifting weights and aerobics keeps the body young ...

This honestly makes me pretty curious. I thought the 25-34 range would be larger, especially compared to other sites that seem to have a much less professional atmosphere(Reddit, etc).<p>Hacker News certainly isn't some bastion of intelligent thought and discourse, but it's definitely above average in that, which makes me wonder if the 18-24 year olds are just keeping quiet in the comments, if they're really that smart, or if I'm actually a lot less mature/intelligent than I thought.

Wait wait wait. I (along with every single other female programmer I know) show up as a male on google's Ad Planner. If the only category they give you is "Computers &#38; Hardware", then you are assumed to be a man. Of course it is going to think most of hacker news is male.

I did my own little analysis of Hacker News readers based on the ~20,000 of you that visited my blog recently:<p><a href="http://www.dangrossman.info/2012/08/21/what-hacker-news-users-use/" rel="nofollow">http://www.dangrossman.info/2012/08/21/what-hacker-news-user...</a><p>Of course, I didn't survey people or have access to demographic profiles from other sites, so it's just a breakdown of systems. To summarize, the average HN reader runs Chrome 21 on a pre-Retina MacBook.

How does doubleclick have demographic data for HN? I would love to be able to see how doublieclick defines me demographically.

What I found most disturbing was that most people who visit Hi5 are people in the 25 - 34 age group. That was before I realised it is <i>not</i> a website dedicated to the Australian TV show for small children.

99.99999% of surveys upon social userbase outlets fashion towards 50% of all users being under 24 year's of age. My reasearch for this is based upon a finger in the air and no other hard facts beyond recalling a recent G+ survey.<p>Given this what % of user lie about there age (sexual equality has led males to stay 21 for longer), gender etc. What % keep it private. Do lurkers count and many other details that distract from the reliability % of any result.<p>You never know, maybe in 100 years or so people might look at % based surveys as people most look upon horoscopes today.<p>I would also perhaps argue that any age based grouping in anything other than age itself is ignoring the fact that some people do and can act older or younger than their actual age on many levels. It is perhaps the definition of the areana that the survey is based upon that should be weighted against the user. If somebody had written a program to analyis users posts to guage there age and gender to then come up with some %, then that would of been Hacker News.

I'm interested in what type of articles the 18-24 year olds submit/read versus other age groups. For instance, I'm in the 25-34 age range, and I almost never care about the JavaScript, CoffeeScript, or other client-side language articles. I tend to read the software methodology, software tool tips/tricks, and gee-wiz-look-how-fast-tech-is-moving articles.

I find it interesting that DoubleClick (Google) claims to have accurate data about HN's demographics when HN doesn't use ads or the DoubleClick network.<p>I've seen a few people mention "tracking cookies" that DoubleClick leaves on your machine. Without something on a HN page serving content from an ad network page, cookies won't work that way.

At first I thought this had to be flat out wrong.<p>Then I realized that the typical HN'er probably doesn't post many comments, and even fewer post comments which make me curious enough to look at their profile.<p>What tends to make me look at someone's profile is to see if there is a basis for their opinion in terms of experience. My image of an HN'er probably biased in favor of people who post good insightful comments and not necessarily someone who still just clicks on links.

I wonder how different the stats are for casual users (browsing headlines once or twice a month), people who read all the interesting links on the frontpage, those who read comments, those who sometimes comment, and those who routinely comment.<p>I can only thing of a few female commenters. zero on <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders</a> right?

Whats the accuracy of those numbers? In research, statistics are normally followed by a accuracy estimation.

How do these compare with the general world population with an internet connection?

Hacker News is 44% 18-24 year olds, 77% male<p>And they hate America and Jesus.

Orkut statistics are quite interesting - most of the people are 24-34, then 35-44 group is relatively small and 45-54 is much bigger.<p>I wonder how accurate this data is.

Hard to believe it. Younger than MySpace? And there are so many old people on Facebook?

Remember that any external analytics can only report on viewers, not members.

i think the survey result are amazing more and more young people getting interested in tech oriented website.<p>more older people moving towards social networking

So utterly against the stream...heh

That explains a lot.

That is a depressing statistic.

When it said 23% girls I knew that they based their information on crappy data that isn't representative.

Wow there's 13% girls on HN?

23% female?!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Don't care about demographics on HN