Show HN: The Sochi 2014 medal count ordered by population

Why is this labeled "ordered by population"? It's not, because if it were, China would be at the top. Wouldn't "medals per capita" be more accurate?

Great! Since http://www.medalspercapita.com/ is not updating any more I can use this site instead.

Any plans to sort by other items (GDP, etc.)?

Perhaps it would be more useful to have not the national total, but the population living within regions that have snow on the ground at least n days in the average year.

It's wrong even then. Look at Italy and US. Italy should be ranked higher than the US on this basis.

Well, that's just gay[1].

[1] Disclaimer: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Gay

You might find it interesting to read about small numbers and statistical comparisons, and how they don't work very well together. This is different topic than the strong law of small numbers, or survivorship bias aka the backbone of our financial system.

This brings up an interesting meta discussion of medal inflation. A simple wikipedia lookup and division shows 15K medals / 50 games is about 300 medals per game, but inflation has happened over the years so I think we'll have well over 300 medals this season.

This waters down the marketing message. There are 300 recent medal winning olympians, lets say they have a decade of marketing relevance, thats five sets of games, or 1500 medal winners. The entire NFL only has 1500 or so players, in comparison. I believe this waters down the usefulness of the olympics. If all the olympics had was the decathlon, that would mean something more than it currently means.

This is aside from the meta issue that's its basically a marketing and advertising trade show where as a side event some athletes perform. So the primary, important numbers are the dollar value of advertisements sold, sponsorships purchased, not some athletic achievement which was just a screensaver for the financial spreadsheet.