Hacker News Reader

Comment by atomic128 | Hacker News Reader

Empirical testing (for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33293522) has established that the people on Hacker News tend to be junior in their skills. Understanding this fact can help you understand why certain opinions and reactions are more likely here. Surprisingly, the more skilled individuals tend to be found on Reddit (same testing performed there).

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I’m not sure that’s evidence; I looked at that and saw it was written in Go and just didn’t bother. As someone with 40 years of coding experience and a fundamental dislike of Go, I didn’t feel the need to even try. So the numbers can easily be skewed, surely.

Only individuals who submitted multiple bad solutions before giving up were counted as failing. If you look but don't bother, or submit a single bad solution, you aren't counted. Thousands of individuals were tested on Hacker News and Reddit, and surprisingly, it's not even close: Reddit is where the hackers are. I mean, at the time of the testing, years ago.

That doesn’t change my point. It didn’t test every dev on all platforms, it tested a subset. That subset may well have different attributes to the ones that didn’t engage. So, it says nothing about the audience for the forums as a whole, just the few thousand that engaged.

Perhaps even, there could be fewer Go programmers here and some just took a stab at it even though they don’t know the language. So it could just select for which forum has the most Go programmers. Hardly rigourous.

So I’d take that with a pinch of salt personally

Agreed. But remember, this isn't the only time the population has been tested. This is just the test (from two years ago, in 2022) that I happen to have a link to.

The population hasn’t been tested. A subset has.

It's also fine to be an outlier. I've been programming for 24 years and have been hanging out on HackerNews on and off for 11. HN was way more relevant to me 11 years ago than it is now, and I don't think that's necessarily only because the subject matter changed, but probably also because I have.

How is that thing testing? Is it expecting a specific solution or actually running the code? I tried some solutions and it complained anyways

The way the site works is explained in the first puzzle, "Hack This Site". TLDR, it builds and runs your code against a test suite. If your solutions weren't accepted, it's because they're wrong.

Where is the data?

Yeah, this is useless.

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