Poll: Did you know that HN allows you to make polls?
It isn't obvious, but it seems like you can!
The link to do so is here:
The link to do so is here:
Not being able to easily compare yourself to others certainly helps, even if it isn't perfect.
As a "clear" feature, you can always open that page in a new (background) tab, let it load so Reddit thinks you saw it, then close the tab without ever looking at the content. No idea if this works on new.reddit, but it's possible on old.reddit.
[M]ost online polls that use participants who volunteer to take part do not have a proven record of accuracy. There are at least two reasons for this. One is that not everyone in the U.S. uses the internet, and those who do not are demographically different from the rest of the public. Another reason is that people who volunteer for polls may be different from other people in ways that could make the poll unrepresentative. At worst, online polls can be seriously biased if people who hold a particular point of view are more motivated to participate than those with a different point of view.
https://www.pewresearch.org/2010/12/29/how-accurate-are-onli...
Rather than serve as accurate assessments of public opinion or beliefs, online polls at best surface sentiments and potential areas of interest. Some are mere amusements. Many serve a darker purpose of advocating for a specific cause or ideology (a "push poll" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_poll), fishing for either insights on how audiences might be manipulated through advertising or propaganda, or outright soliciting personal information that is of use in hacking into accounts by guessing passwords or so-called "security questions".
Consider as a worse case; there is a political question with a fairly clear reality ("the legislators should legislate the value of exp(1) to be 2.5 to make life easier"). The silent majority ignores the silly poll, and the lunatics who believe this is a good idea all put in a vote because they want to promote their mad cause.
The poll could therefore be biased to be exactly wrong. May as well call it invalid data and save the time thinking about it.
Polling for the value of e is rather like polling for the piloting of a jetliner. You could certainly do it. It would end rather badly in virtually all instances.
I only picked exp() as an example because it can't start a political argument.
Which again is a major point behind statistical data gathering methods and practices. Invalid methods -> invalid results. Regardless of intent.
(Though of course, those intent on deceiving can construct biased samples to drive their agenda.)
I'd take a properly randomised poll with 200 participants over a non-random one with two million any day of the week. At least if participation is truly randomised you can calculate the maximum possible extent of the error. With bias, who knows?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29757119
As household telephone service became near-universal, telephone surveys did become highly valuable and generally accurate in measuring public opinon. That's reversed over the past decade or so as both practices (refusal to pick up unknown calls) and service (landline service is at or below 20% in many parts of the US) have radically reformed.
Political pollsters have commented on this at length, and it's a major concern. See Nate Silver at https://fivethirtyeight.com among others.
If the sampling is biased, however, all bets are off.
A 100,000 observation poll has 100 times the costs of a 1,000 poll (data must be collected from 100,000 times more samples), but offers only 10x greater accuracy.
You'll find this mathematically in the definition of standard deviation, which divides by the square root of the sample size: sqrt(1000) ~= 31.6, sqrt(100000) ~= 316.
Larger random samples are useful where you're exploring many variables, or very small portions of the population. They afford greater precision. The accuracy however is dictated by the randomness.
I had a strong lesson in this a few years back when the question of active user participation in Google+ came up. I'd had one too many hand-wavey assertions that the site was far more active than was generally claimed in the press. I'd realised that G+ had a set of sitemaps files, and included in those were sitemaps of individual Google+ user profiles. Present on the web results for that URL was an indication of whether the profile had never posted publicly at all, or, if it had, what the most recent publicly-posted content was.
Each sitemap file had roughly 50,000 entries. There were something on the order of 40--50,000 profile sitemap files, about 25 GB in all.
I took a gamble and made the assumption (later tested and largely validated) that profiles listed within a given sitemap were themselves a random assortment. This checked out on any number of eyeball analysis (creation dates, user names, global regions, and activity status all seemed both random and uniform over a few tested files). So I selected one sitemap file (itself at random) and over the course of a few days using a pretty modest laptop and broadband connection pulled down and web-scraped some 50,000 entries. A simple pattern match told me whether or not the profile was active, and when.
Within the first 100 profiles viewed, the trend was very clear. Only about 9% of profiles seemed to have ever posted any content. That percentage varied between roughly 7--12% initially, but rapidly converged as my dataset grew.
I let the run continue regardless. I resampled my sample subsetting it variously ("Monte Carlo estimation") to see if the values varied (I believe either 60 or 100 record subsamples), and again, the same 7--12% or so was returned for each. Looking at recent activity (within the month during which the analysis was performed), was 0.3%. The analysis also revealed just how much the forced integration of YouTube and G+ had inflated G+ activity numbers (a bit over 1/3 of all most-recent activity).
This generated some blow-up on G+ among members there, and I got called a few things, as happens. Google themselves never formally responded (I did hear from a few Googlers who contested findings or methods.) A few months later, an Internet marketing group, Stone Temple Consulting, re-ran the analysis based on my methodology but on a 10x larger sample (500k profiles), selected from across a much larger set of the sitemaps. They fully confirmed my own headline numbers, though could (thanks to their larger sample) offer more precise insights on smaller groups within the overall population. I had absolutely no participation in the follow-up study, and was unaware of it until it was made public.
Stealth edit/update: Then as now, what annoyed me most about the whole episode was that Google were so obviously dissembling, making up numbers and/or outright lying about Google+ activity, and the press were largely lapping it up, when a very modest investment of time and effort would put paid to the lie. And after I'd done the analysis, armchair warriors continued whinging even as I'd fully documented methodology and tools used, enabling anyone to replicate and confirm or deny findings. Eric Enge of Stone Temple was the only one to do that. I don't generally hold marketers in high regard, but he earned respect from me in doing that.
https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq
https://blogs.perficient.com/2015/04/14/real-numbers-for-the...
(Stone Temples has since been aquired by Perficient.)
You mean by the square root of the sample, right?
Thanks.
See also “most of what you read on the Internet is written by insane people” on r/Slatestarcodex - https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...
Pew Research (and pretty much any other credible research institution or academic) are domain experts, understand sampling methodology, and the very-well-known biases which occur from biased and/or self-selecting samples.
Public polling can be exceedingly accurate based on surprisingly small samples (roughly 300 in most national political polls, for example, and even that is generous), so long as the sample is in fact truly random. Oh, and that the responses are not similarly filtered.
One of the most famous cases of a poll which failed due to sampling bias was in the 1948 US Presidential election, and resulted in the Chicago Tribune erroneous headline, "Dewey Defeats Truman". This was drilled hard in my own stats education several decades ago and remains a sharp lesson in the risks of biased sampling. For a good descrition of the error, see:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180823071102/https://textbook....
Pew was simply the first well-articulated reference I turned up. There are numerous others. You've offered nothing other than your uninformed opinion and casual insults and accusations. Please don't do that.
Quite a lot about a person on HN can be inferred from that person's comment history. Inferences could also be made from their IP address history if that is logged. Upvote, downvote, flagging, and vouching history if logged would also provide some information.
I wonder if there would be enough to correct for some of the biases?
This of course doesn’t mean all sources of bias are eliminated, but you also can’t eliminate all sources of bias in phone polling. Just like those taking polls on the internet, certain slices of the population that you can’t control for or don’t know about may be more or less willing to participate.
Sounds like you're one of those people
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...
I think that's great. Approval voting is awesome, and probably a better default for a lot of things anyways.
Even mundane things like "where do you want to eat lunch" with first-past-the-post you run the risk of selecting a place most people don't want to eat at because they split their vote between a bunch of options most people preferred. Really, you want people to distinguish between places they want to eat at and places they don't want to eat at, and the optimal thing is to select the one that the most people do want to eat at. That's basically how approval voting works.
If you have open ballots and either approval is a commitment to join or disapproval is a waiver of the right to join, approval is very good method for choosing group activities in a way it is not for most public elections, where there is no coherent meaning to the approval/disapproval divide so it ends up just being a very weird forced reduction in resolution of a preference ballot to two preference ranks. (The lack of coherent meaning between different ballots is a problem that most analysis ignores in basically all voting systems that aren’t either bullet ballots of full forced or unforced preference ballots; of popularly proposed alternative voting methods its a particular issue for those using approval or range/score ballots, or variations on either.)
If it's a three candidate election and there's one person you like, one person you don't, and one you're ambivalent about then it gets a little more complicated if you want to vote strategically. Generally, you'd vote yes to the first, no to the second, and for the third you can either vote for them or not based on whether you're more worried that your favorite candidate will lose or that your least favorite candidate will win.
Range voting is a bit more expressive because you can rank candidates on a scale of one to ten or whatever, but the problem with range voting in real elections is that voters have the most influence over the result when they only use maximum or minimum ratings, thus a minority of strategic voters can outvote a majority of honest voters. Approval voting solves that by forcing everyone to follow the strategic voting strategy.
STAR (Score Then Automatic Runoff) voting is another way to solve that problem. STAR voting works like range voting to select the top two candidates, then does a runoff between those top two after maximizing everyone's voting preferences. It's not perfect, but it's a way to allow people to express ratings that are more subtle than yes/no for each candidate while still giving people who vote honestly the same voting power in most situations as people who vote strategically.
https://electionscience.org/press-releases/st-louis-voters-u...
And computer simulations show that it does extremely well at measuring public support.
https://www.rangevoting.org/BayRegsFig
You're talking about how the _concept_ of approval makes you feel. But the _results_ you'll get with it are highly accurate/satisfying.
Perhaps a bit of that, and perhaps a bit of a non-existent marketplace
Except you. You know Ꙭ
Edit: I just realised, heh. You cheeky fella.
What I've done on reddit for throwaways is use 123123 as password so they can be reused. Not a one has gotten 'hacked' yet over months of use, I'm quite surprised tbh. Maybe I should publish the password on the relevant accounts once I decide to stop using them. Ideally there'd be a time factor before it changes hands to avoid confusion and editing old posts, but I would probably forget (hence the dummy password strategy).
Related: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/01/my_open_wirel... "It wasn't me officer" (of course IP logs... and not that I'd do anything illegal on reddit anyway no sir)
Turns out another user named "fordprefect" existed and had commented on a poll from 2009, which surprised the heck out of both of us.
¯\_ (ツ)_/¯
You're downvoted here because others disagree that someone that is greyed out must have said something very wrong or worthless, but that's not a very wrong or worthless opinion. Only naive, perhaps.
I try to use downvotes rarely, and only for "egregiously contravened community guidelines" not "expressed opinion I strongly disagree with"
Keep participating! Downvotes (and flags) are not generally a big deal if your overall contribution is positive
Or there was an attempt at irony by the downvoters. That sometimes happens. You discuss downvoting at your peril. <dons helmet>
The downvoting system is indeed pretty witty, in that few people can downvote, but a lot more can undo the downvotes. I can't downvote myself yet, but I do check downvoted comments and when I feel that it got downvoted by personal bias, I simply undo it.
And usually don't follow up on what happens next, so whether it gets downvoted again or not I wouldn't know. But then I don't care that much, in most cases.
But given the subject matter, I feel a reply is in order.
Question is if you want to make those.
Yeah your 1 score of post / comment doesn't give your karma, but it's still show your contribution as valuable.
We begin @dang, the HN collective, the illuminati that run the internet...
Nice.
If you hear some news, notice your immediate reaction. Everyone thinks the same thing, so dump that thought in the litter. Same for your second immediate reaction. The third or fourth reaction are maybe different enough to merit writing down.
What I found most disappointing is that while I am here most for software development topics I got my karma on economic, political, geographic, Europe vs. US etc. topics.
Maybe im missing out on being schooled on all my 'infantile, toxic' opinions but I like it better this was. Reddit, has a much stronger echo chamber as there's no way to not see constantly delayed prominently, blinking and screaming for your attention, that someone replied to you. Likely a mob here to attack your self worth just for the sake of hurting your feelings, usually provoked by any opinion that's even slightly outside/opposed to the subreddit-approved thought patterns. It trains you to be afraid to challenge the status quo (there are many people who seem to use reddit only to attack). I know HN is better than that but I cannot help feeling some anxiety after a couple specific comments from which I futilely attempted to defend myself with reason and caring conversation.
I learned my lesson
/s
When I send a story out for beta reading, I go through and fix all the major spelling and grammar mistakes first. I shouldn’t need to, but people get hung up on the spelling and don’t see the story.
It’s the same with rants. People see the anger and frustration and miss the argument being presented.
You can argue people should look past the emotion and consider the logic. I’d agree. And I do my best to do that myself. But the reality is many people won’t. I choose to be pragmatic and rewrite any rant more carefully so I’m heard. Or I delete it because it doesn’t add meaningfully to the conservation.
Also, some controversial topics are the result of irreconcilable beliefs. See any discussion of Apple. In those threads, people talk about things they value and other people don’t value those things. There are arguments and rants that don’t go anywhere as a result.
As a result of this observation, I approach communication deliberately. If I think a rant will be heard, I’ll let myself rant. If I don’t, I take time to think why I disagree and figure out how to phrase it in less aggressive language.
There are people who really dislike this approach for a variety of reasons. I enjoy talking to them because I don’t have to do this song and dance number.
TL;DR read the room and speak in a way you’ll be understood. :)
Either that or I've embraced cynicism and dark humor more than I should have. Probably both.
One good rule of thumb: people will respond to the weakest part of your argument. So instead of making it as long as possible, and addressing several unrelated points in an attempt to preempt all objections, it's best to cut out everything but the core of your message. The question I always ask myself whenever commenting here is, "is my comment strong enough?". If it isn't, I delete my comment. If there are weak parts, I prune them. It's better to leave an incomplete but strong comment, than a comment which tries to be complete but has several weak pieces.
Huh. I honestly hadn't thought of it in those terms. I usually arrive at the same result by gut feeling. This will save me a lot of time. Thanks!
It's not polite venacular, but it's inoffensive and common enough to have a movie with the name a few years ago ("Wog Boy"). I can't imagine the term you've equivolised being plastered on posters in theatres everywhere.
(Interestingly, you can vote for more than one response, e.g. both “Yes” and “No” which happens to be the correct answer for me.)
-- frustrated pollster with poor prognostications for options
Eg I could be off basis here but it seems like the norm in the Bay Area is comp approaching $1M. But if you look at this poll from 8 years ago, Bay Area comp of $300k+ is exceeding low.
Glad to know they are available and thanks for sharing.
Happy new year, BTW!
We have: Ask, Show, Jobs
I guess I should repost this as a Poll
A common mistake on a forum, that’s how you feed them for more and for everyone to deal with it. HN also rate-limits hot/deep discussions for them to not grow quickly, by removing the reply link for few minutes.
If someone misbehaved, it is wise to remain silent and trust the crowd.
Conversation here is steered and controlled aggressively on multiple levels in the name of quality control, including making it purposely easy for the crowd to censor anything they want, for any reason.
Think of it less as your local pub and more the water cooler at work, except HR posted a lengthy policy about water cooler conversations on the wall, which seems to get longer every week, and the boss is always glancing out of his office, and everything you say around that water cooler goes into your performance review. Also sometimes you'll find the water doesn't dispense but only for you, because apparently that's dependent upon a metric you weren't aware of and at some point you fell under the threshold and were never told but from now on you just have to stand there holding your empty cup like a shmuck.
I don't know what the "pub" equivalent of HN is. I don't think it exists and if it does it's probably already infested with incels and edgelord tools.