1. No comparison to base rate. 5% shouldn’t make us believe they’re early in their journey. You haven’t given any observations about experience and the rate of error fixing.
2. Ignored sample bias. <5% of the users who submit to your site that you can track to HN solve the problem. That is very different from “<5% of HN readers”.
This seems like unnecessary tone-policing. I said exactly what I think is incorrect in their comment and why, without any judgements about them.
If anything, my downvote comment was too childish. I was put-off by their line about not downvoting because it was “empirical”. Seemed to insinuate anyone who disagreed was just going against the facts.
Edit: oh, didn’t realize I was replying to you again.
It is a bit of a fair point though: you're only measuring "the success of people from HN who engage with your game", so it's not sound to draw conclusions about "the population of all HN users". Even if it is true that HN has a junior-skew, it wouldn't mean there is necessarily "somewhere else" -- lobste.rs aside, the eternal september effect (or other things) could be enough to keep the demographic population skewed junior.
I've been programming for about 15-20 years, and using HN since 2007 or 2008 or so. I opened your site while reading the voxel thread, and was a little baffled about what I was encountering -- "why am I suddenly reading buggy go code? I thought this was an example of a spacial curve!" -- so, I went to check out your other posts to figure out what your deal is, and here we are.
I don't know Go, and I don't really want to "play a programming game" right now. Your code seemed a little obtuse and intimidating -- long bitmasks and combinations of xors and abstract names -- no thanks! There's a bug in there? How surprising!
I do lots of programming at work and in my spare time, and to a degree, I just can't be arsed when someone jumps out of the woodwork with "a bug" that it isn't going to mean anything to fix, so I moved on. I'm an experienced programmer who you likely aren't measuring.
So I saw your comment here, and my first thought was: well, that's a big (logic) bug in the reasoning of a person who made a game of fixing bugs! Kinda tasty irony, and totally fair game for the poster above to call out, in my opinion.
(anyway, after all this, I am a little bit more interested to go try out the above-mentioned challenge. It's a neat idea for a game, and you seem to have put a lot of work into it. Best of luck!)
1. No comparison to base rate. 5% shouldn’t make us believe they’re early in their journey. You haven’t given any observations about experience and the rate of error fixing.
2. Ignored sample bias. <5% of the users who submit to your site that you can track to HN solve the problem. That is very different from “<5% of HN readers”.