Show HN: The Population Project • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: The Population Project

#21

Post by snapplebobapple » Thu, Aug 10, 2023, 12:15 AM UTC

saulpw wrote: post #4

This is 100% an ego project--count the number of "I" statements in your declaration above. Even in your stated reasons why you "struck gold" with this idea, the first three are solely about your effort and taste and resentment. The fourth is about your site "acknowledging the existence" of one billion unregistered people in the world. I'm sure their actual existence is already being acknowledged by others in their ow…

You miss the point of free markets. This is exactly the questionably useful ego driven nonsense that is most beneficial for self made rich people to engage in for two reasons: 1. We may be too dumb to see the value in this, in which case we win big time when something that appears stupid ends up useful. 2. Every dollar spent on this is a dollar unavailable for their trust fund kids and/or grandkids to do even more likely useless and/or harmful things with. Free markets create huge value for people who create goods and services that make others lives better to the point where it creates the secondary problem of trust fund kids who did not create anything having excess power from excess inherited wealth and doing excess harm with it due to incompetence. This is the least destructive way to dissipate that effect. (We cant just tax it away, people will hide it and also be disincentivized to create value because they risk losing control of it at death).

Note: i am not being a dick here on purpose. I am dealing with this exact problem myself and so have thought about it a lot.

Re: Show HN: The Population Project

#22

Post by bloak » Fri, Aug 11, 2023, 9:11 AM UTC

antoine_b wrote: post #12

bloak wrote: post #9

At some point you might want to consider "pivoting" to a gigantic database of all dead humans: there would be fewer data protection and privacy issues! I have sometimes wanted to trace people's ancestry, or, more often, the descendents (of the parents) of a person who died half a century ago. It's depressing how difficult it is to look these things up. Various companies try to sell access to public records, but I don…

Thank you for your comments. We're well aware of the pitfalls you're pointing. Some of them can be avoided now, others will need a dose of AI down the road. For now, we log the data when we find it. Mentioning the sources is a tricky issue. Our philosophy is to say as little or as much about everyone. Barack Obama's record is no more developed than yours. Linking a record to Wikipedia or to the list of Minnesota's se…

I didn't immediately understand the point you're making there because I don't think you'd ever need to use Wikipedia or a list of sex offenders as a source, but I think I see your point now: if for 98% of people the specified source is a government register of births then anyone who doesn't have that source mentioned will stick out and an astute reader will immediately infer that they were born in a place where the register of births is not easily accessible or they have changed their name or something like that. So mentioning the sources is, as you say, a tricky issue.

Re: Show HN: The Population Project

#23

Post by ildon » Sat, Aug 12, 2023, 7:31 AM UTC

antoine_b wrote: post #15

ildon wrote: post #5

Have you considered restrictions on personal data collection due to regulations such as the GDPR? I'm curious how you are dealing with those, especially having to track all countries of the world. Sorry if this is mentioned on the website, I've had a brief look and I might have missed it

Thank you for your remark. We try to address the issue in the Methodology section but it's a complex question. Roughly speaking, GDPR was passed to prevent merchants from contacting potential consumers without their consent. Well, we don't have anything to sell, we don't collect phone numbers or email addresses and we will never contact anybody.

Found it, thanks for the directions.

> Ours is that we perform a task in the public interest.

You really really want to change this. It will never hold. You need a legal basis for this condition (lett. e of art. 6). Not legal advice: a legitimate interest (lett. f, art. 6) looks more defendable

> We will erase any individual’s personal data at their request within 30 days, according to GDPR’s article 17.

30 days is a very long time

Also: I'm getting an internal server error, data collected: 0