Population.io – The World Population Project | Hacker News Reader

Population.io – The World Population Project

population.io

99 pointstilt47 comments

It seems like there's a bug because "people older than you" is incrementing by 3 per second while "people younger than you" isn't.

Unless I misunderstand, how is the world generating additional instances of people older than me? That should be strictly decreasing.

Occams razor: You're moving backwards in time.

Not sure if that is the occam's razor for me...

I suspect that it's because you're on the young end of the user population. So most new birthdate entries precede yours. The site doesn't have a global birthdate database. It's building one ;)

Are you writing this comment from a moving vehicle?

Was that a special relativity joke?

At first I thought it was a crack about spelling or something. I like this better.

Why is it that so many sites (everything from flight booking to comment registration) have problems with February 29th? I'm disappointed that this site overlooked the most important day that only comes around every 4 years :(

"You are the NaN person alive on the planet."

Yes! I'm not a number!

Bottom of the page in the footer: "Add your Date of Death to your calendar".

Creepiest feature I've ever seen on a site. Interesting nonetheless.

"I should fire my secretary. They forgot to remind me I was supposed to die yesterday."

xkcd did it.

http://xkcd.com/1577/

Interesting dilemma: the country of my birth, USSR, no longer exists.

That shows how much design went into this project.

_ Do you think you belong to the young or old? You are the NaN person alive on the planet. This means that you are older than % of the world's population and older than 34% of all people in Lithuania. _

This sounds comical, but what does it mean?

It's a lesson on Javascript's insane type system viewed through the prism of your impending mortality.

That was actually quite depressing rather than fascinating.

Beautiful presentation of the data... I'd love to see the creators add additional species... Comparing human population graphs to nearly every other species on the planet makes for an interesting exercise - however unsurprising the results: https://wikipop.org/species/humans https://wikipop.org/species/rhinos Etc. Then in addition to estimations on human death dates they could add estimations on the date each species will go extinct.

Thanks for a great suggestion

Enter your gender, birthdate, and birth country into google analytics! No thanks.

I can guarantee they've figured that out already, but I'm going down fighting...

it's funny people older than me are growing every second and I got to ask what's the purpose of male/female option ? It's not affecting the result.

Are you collecting everyone's DoB ?

Maybe male/female makes a difference depending on other variables, like country

Just tried, it actually is affecting the result (try born in the US in the 1980s and toggle between the male & female).

The number of people older than you in decreasing but it is not yet as smooth as it should be. We will fix it. Thanks for noticing. Wolfgang

So how do these future dates take future health and medicine into consideration? I'm sure there's some model that people use.

I know some futurists predict preposterous worlds of custom-built DNA-based organ factories and tiny bioengineered machines that go around and zap cancer cells.

I'd presume that these models use a probability quotient on such a world and factor it in as a possibility?

If that's the case they should also factor the worse case scenarios such as nuclear apocalypse reducing everyone's life expectancy. And the possibility of that happening is still far from zero, even in 2015.

There's broadly two approaches actuaries use (I can't speak for this particular site which uses UN projections):

- One is to look at the average level of mortality improvements in the past at a population (or cohort) level and project those forwards. There are lots of models that do this, for example based on some combination of age, sex, year of birth and calendar year. You make the assumption that even though the specific advances in the past won't be repeated, future advances will follow a similar trend. The Lee-Carter model is an easy to understand example, although it's not particularly cutting edge.

- The other is to look at individual mortality factors (falling smoking levels cause less instances of cancer, etc) and project those forwards based on a mixture of historic advances and expert judgment. With these models you have to take into account that the people not dying of e.g. cancer are now at risk of dying from something else. These models are a lot harder to create because they rely a lot more on expertise. You also don't get information about the whole population, so you would end up using a combination of this with the first model.

Also, the site sounds like it is using period (i.e calendar year) life expectancy rather than cohort, so it might not be projecting ANY future improvements. I'd need to find their actual data source to be sure.

This is cool but I can't click on Taiwan.

You are older than NaN people on the planet.

The site ist broken for me. A click on "go" doesn't do anything. Tryed with firefox, dwb and midori on Linux. Neither does it work on Android and Opera with and without turbo and not with Chrome aswell.

There are no javascript errors in the console, only some css parsing errors.

The animation at the top seems like it just randomly names countries, there's no way that Kiribati or Kyrgyzstan is having a new baby more often than India or China.

"Add your Date of Death to your calendar"

That's creepy.

Looks like people in the US don't live past 85. Someone born in 1930 is not older than 100% of people in the united states.

Been watching it for 2 minutes now, and still no birth out of China or India, the two most populated nations in this world.

Is it built on d3.js or cusotm charting tool?

That animation with population count seems fake, no Indian or Chinese born in last 5 minutes I have been looking at it!

Agreed, it spits out 3 people at the same time and doesn't seem to resemble a Poisson process.

It's cool, but using the definite article "the" like this is disappointingly misleading.

Are they actually keeping track of multiple requests from same IP/Browser/etc...?

I really need to do something with my life.

Well, I'm the NaN person alive!

I think they have some debugging to do.

(To you non-computer programmers, that means "Not a Number")

The response I got was:

"Do you think you belong to the young or old? You are the NaN person alive on the planet. This means that you are older than % of the world's population and older than 80% of all people in Israel."

"We estimate you will live until age 66.8 years"

Do they seriously apply life expectancy at birth to people who was born 30 years ago and did not die yet? I would also say dated life expectancy at birth, data from five years ago probably.

Kind of okayish infographic, but data should come first.

As a fun game, try to click around finding the country with the worst life expectancy. Kazakstan was the worst I could come up with, but there's bound to be some place worse.

I found the US to have the lowest LE of all the western world countries I looked at. Italy was on the other end.

Awesome project.

May I suggest a complementary feature?

Turn the estimated date of death into a countdown timer of days one has to live before they kick the bucket.

How can the "people older than you" counter be increasing?

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