More like completely impossible for a 36 year old that doesn't have decades of previous cross country skiing or athletic experience. It is a hugely demanding physical sport and the difference between a top athlete and a proficient amateur is gigantic. He would be better off trying to get bobsled team in a tropical country off the ground and practice sprinting with a sled for a couple of years. You still won't stand a chance at winning but you might qualify.
Have the mods been editing titles to include the year of the article recently? I've noticed a lot more of the front page articles include the year in parentheses now.
It’s supposed to be standard HN practice for a poster or moderator to do so if the article isn’t from the current year. I’d guess you’ve noticed it because there are more such articles, not because there’s more moderation.
True, because it's based on their spyware-toolbar, so you only measure the people who are relatively clueless about their computer - but in absence of the 9gag-people citing their sources there's not much more to do.
I don't know how ranking.com generates the numbers, but in their ranking reddit.com is 11,763, 9gag is 11,768 and 4chan is 11,775 - all kinda identical.
Actually, 9gag does release their numbers, via Quantcast[0]. According to those, they have a long ways to catch up to Reddit, which even in 2010 [1] had more than double the visitors (3mm vs 8mm "people" monthly).
Incidentally, the 65mm visitors from that quote seems to have been actually referring to page views, of which Reddit had 429mm monthly in 2010.
The huge amount of tree cover in New Hampshire historically speaking is also a pretty recent event. 100+ years ago NH was mostly farmland with little to no tree cover.
Yeah it's a little complicated historically. We used to have a nice "old growth" forest, with big oak trees etc. Nothing like the amount of cover we have now, but a lot. Then the British took basically all of the nice oaks for ships, and farming and so on cleared a lot of the rest. ~100 years ago people started feeling nostalgic about all the trees (plus farming in the area plummeted when soldiers from the Civil War returned with stories of real topsoil! and land you didn't have to remove rocks from every spring!) and a reforestation effort started. Unfortunately there is also an infestation of bugs that eat the tips off of trees so now we're stuck with tons of crappy pines with a few oaks and maples finally showing up.
