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Comment by laurent123456 | Hacker News Reader

Does anybody know how he actually knows the age of the SO members? He wrote "I call the statistic the Expectd Age because it is calculated using Expected Value from statistics" but that doesn't mean much to me.

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It's explained higher up on the page:

"I mined the Stack Overflow (and related sites) data dumps to extract the social networking accounts of the top users. Each list includes only the users who have social networking links in their profile ..."

Would be interesting to know how he did it in detail.

Twitter does not contain age, neither does LinkedIn (or at least not show it) And in facebook you need to jump through loops like user_birthday and friends_birthday[1]. I don't know how to get the birthday of 3rd parties.

[1] https://developers.facebook.com/tools/explorer?method=GET...

You can input your age on a Stack Exchange profile.

ok that was too easy.

Hm. I would guess younger people are more likely to have their age on their fb profile - to make this more than just a random collection of data, you'd need to check that as well. Also, is there a correlation between age and whether you include your social networking profile on your stack overflow profile in the first place?

I think that's an issue in his study. It means that the age is restricted to the age range of Facebook users (and maybe to the younger FB users, who are more likely to give their date of birth).

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