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Comment by ryanwaggoner | Hacker News Reader

Judging from the extremely low number of deaths per year from hang gliding (for example, 2 reported in 2003), my money is on this just being a troll. I hope that's the case anyway.

Source : http://www.ushpa.aero/safety/HG2003AccidentSummary.pdf

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Right... but then you have stories like this:

http://www.newschief.com/article/20091116/NEWS/911169996?Tit...

To be clear, I'm not making any insinuations and I really hope this is a troll

Here's a 113 day old Where's nickb thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=775507

Actually, there's several post like the above one. Here's all (recent) posts with nickb in title: http://searchyc.com/submissions/nickb

Nickb tells his background history here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=99966

The final link is also notable because it's immediately followed by a discussion about the HN "signal to noise ratio".

They seem to be the two most common topics here - are we becoming Reddit? and why isn't nickb around to help prevent it?

Perhaps the answer lies in some erlang source code?

Well, obviously some people do die, but I bet that it's a lot more likely that a troll would say someone died in a hang gliding accident than it would be for someone to actually do so. The perceived risk is probably much higher and it makes the story more interesting. If you want to believably report someone's death, say they were in a traffic fatality.

or nickb having a giggle with an alias account - harveyl

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