Comment by jakobnissen
1 day ago
This sounds horrifying. It’s one of those stories that makes me think in just how many ways our bodies or minds can break or malfunction in terrifying ways. Any one of us could, right now, carry a lethal tumor that hasn’t been discovered.
Best of luck to you, and get well. I’m glad it didn’t get even worse before it was treated.
CDC mortality tables [1] are kind of eye opening for those who don't realize how brief life is. Average age range on HN is probably in the 25-44 year old bracket. That bracket has an approximate mortality rate of 140/100k per year. HN has what, 5 million or so monthly users? So that means of all of 'us', it's expected that around 7,000 HN readers age 25-44, die each year. That's fairly close to 1 death per hour.
[1] - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/dvs/MortFinal2007_Worktable23r...
Your CDC figure is an average over all genders. Assuming hacker news readers are disproportionately men, the mortality rate is even higher, since men die younger than women on average.
On the other hand, my guess is that male HN readers are not a very representative sample in this respect. That is, they (we) are significantly less likely than average to engage in the type of risky behaviors that mostly explain the gender disparity.
4 replies →
Wow I need to stop browsing HN
Wow, it's crazy that some states have over 2x the mortality rate of others. Also pretty striking how quickly mortality increases with age even at "young" ages.
> HN has what, 5 million or so monthly users?
This seems remarkably high.
>it's expected that around 7,000 HN readers age 25-44, die each year
That's not true unless HN readers are a representative sample of the overall 25-44 population, which they aren't. Higher-income/SES is associated with a lower mortality rate than the overall population average.
These sort of factors all have a relatively small impact. For instance, to take it to the ridiculous extreme, billionaires live about 10 years longer than average. That sounds like a lot, but it's "only" about 10-15%. So instead of the conclusion being ~7000 dying each year, it might "only" be 6000 or whatever. It's largely inconsequential to the point. And as another point mentioned we're going to skew male which brings our life expectancy significantly lower, and probably goes a long way towards balancing out whatever socioeconomic advantage that may exist.
Whatever the exact number may be 7000 is going to be a pretty reasonable ballpark, and it's certainly orders of magnitude higher than most people would expect.
>That's not true unless HN readers are a representative sample of the overall 25-44 population, which they aren't. Higher-income/SES is associated with a lower mortality rate than the overall population average.
7K/year is for the healthy, affluent, tech-worker-heavy population already. For the general population, US, is ~ 12K/year.
Not that higher-income/SES is necessarily representative in a supposed 5m strong HN readership - it would be all kinds, from all around the world. SV startup / FAANG types are just a small slice.
When you look at how molecules like RNA work, and krebs cycle, and the billions of cells we are composed of, and so on, it always strikes me as astronomically lucky that we function at all. Like how can this assemblage of Rube Goldberg machines function for more than 1 seconds without catastrophically falling apart?
I think multicellular creatures on earth are just so complex they are basically ineffable.. We can understand certain general principles and statistical trends, but the entire system holistically is incomprehensible for a human level intelligence.
Kind of analogous to ML, we absolutely understand how each neuron works, we built them! But we often dont really understand how the resulting model works.