HN Explorer

Poll: Where do you live?

986 points by binarynate ↗ HN
I read a tweet that referred to HN as "Silicon Valley", which struck me as odd because I suspect most HN users, like me, are located elsewhere. This piqued my curiosity about where HN users are located, so if you don't mind me asking, where do you live?

Edit: Sorry about the randomized ordering (I forgot HN does that for polls). Thanks ahead of time for using cmd+f or the equivalent to find and vote for your state or country. Also, each US state is included as "US: {state name}".

562 comments

[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 363 ms ] thread
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Elof
US: California
echelon
California doesn't have to be the center for tech anymore as the world has shifted to a distributed workforce.

The US doesn't, for that matter, and you can tell it's happening due to all of the new international investments.

Edit with some sources:

https://news.crunchbase.com/news/europe-vc-funding-unicorns-...

https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Market-Spotlight/Venture-c...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-24/startup-f...

vecinu
> you can tell it's happening due to all of the new international investments.

Any sources? Last data I saw showed VC investment in SV eclipses anything around Europe or Asia. There's just a lot more money, especially money with a serious risk appetite, in the US, than elsewhere.

dec0dedab0de
I have heard the hypothesis that the main reason Silicon Valley was able to grow is because non compete clauses are invalid in California. So people can start a side business competing with their employer, and only risk being fired (as long as they dont steal IP) They could also freely hop from company to company without waiting in between.
not2b
Yes, it's argued here that this is how Silicon Valley won out over the Boston area (DEC, Pr1me, Wang, MIT, so many other great universities):

https://www.vox.com/new-money/2017/2/13/14580874/google-self...

adventured
The more liberal atmosphere around non-competes surely played a role. Silicon Valley was also ideal because the land was inexpensive in the early days, compared to most metro area real-estate, the weather was vastly superior to East Coast cities like Boston and NY, and the culture on the East Coast was stuffy, slow and rigid (whereas there was excitement to going west, blazing a new trail; the culture of California was very different from the East Coast). Having the old corporate giants on the East Coast was oppressive and antithesis to the birth of something like Silicon Valley. SV was the new world, they built it up from farm land.

Given the context, it doesn't matter if Boston has nice universities: they become poaching grounds for Silicon Valley in that respect. The Yankees don't care if their minor league teams are in Tampa or Atlanta, they're taking the talent regardless of where it's at. The talent will almost always happily move for the right price and or opportunity.

not2b
The "silicon" in Silicon Valley got its real start with the "Traitorous Eight", who had the audacity to leave an employer and go immediately into direct competition with that employer. Not sure what role state laws played in making it possible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight

not2b
California doesn't completely prevent companies from limiting side businesses, they might be able to claim your work depending on your employer agreement and how similar it is to what your company does. But they can't keep you from working in the same field if you quit.
austincheney
That’s nice in theory and likely a factor over some areas. The primary differentiator is a culture of local access to VC funding. It explains both the timeline and geographic distribution.
twblalock
The concentration of VC funding didn't happen before the local tech companies. It happened because of the local tech companies.
adventured
It happened simultaneously, they required eachother in lockstep.

Shockley was the spark that set SV on fire (not HP). By chance he ended up in the SV area, moving from New Jersey to Mountain View because his ill mother lived in Palo Alto. Beckman Instruments provided the capital for Shockley to start his company, which led to Fairchild (also formed by outside capital) and off it went.

Those companies would not have existed without the venture capital that made them possible. Shockley was not going to bootstrap his company, and the traitorous eight were similarly not going to leave without significant financial support courtesy of Fairchild Camera.

twblalock
That's all different in character from modern VC in the valley though. People were not forming firms with the intention of seeking out tech startup investments in a systematic way like they do today. A unique culture has emerged since then.

When the traitorous eight left Shockley, what they did would have been career suicide on the east coast. Now it is encouraged in Silicon Valley corporate culture.

kd5bjo
I always understood it to be rooted in raw materials: The silica mines were there, which attracted semiconductor fabs, which attracted hardware companies, which attracted software companies, etc.
Elof
It also has some world class universities, fantastic weather, and is surrounded by beautiful nature
FanaHOVA
Bay Area is still by far the center of the tech world. Maybe in 10-20 years that will change if like you said people move out and the network effects vanish, but I don't see any signs of that happening. Unlike what you might read people say on Twitter, plenty of talent is still here, and there's a lot of people moving back after having left during COVID.
ShakataGaNai
As someone who lives in California (SF Bay Area), I'm excited about this. It's good that we distribute things a little more, not just in the USA but in the world. Some places will always favor (culturally speaking) the entrepreneur/tech startup more than others, but it's good for that to work its way out to others.
tluyben2
Not sure if this post still ranks in the morning as it's evening in the EU so probably not many people will answer, while the Americas will. I know there are a lot of people from the EU here.
capableweb
Yeah, would depend on how long it'll be featured on the frontpage page indeed. I know people who only check the /best page once a week or something like that too who would probably miss this unless a ton of people upvote it.

Or maybe we can ask @dang to give it a "jobstory" treatment so it keeps around the frontpage for longer?

belval
I mean dang could probably just tell us the actual geo breakdown of users...
young_unixer
And if someone knows a little bit of statistics and someone else knows a little bit about browsing patterns relative to timezones around the world, then we can correct for front page decay.
rkuykendall-com
Well it's only 3 hours old and it's currently #14 on /best, so there is probably a good chance everyone will see it.
marapuru
Chiming in here from the Netherlands at 12 in the night. My guess would be most people check HN during business hours and on weekdays. Based on that guess, my next guess would be that Europe is underrepresented in this poll :-)
Sharlin
Chiming in from Finland at 1:42 AM. But I may be an outlier :D
rkuykendall-com
Yes, but on /best, which is pretty stable over a few days, it is now #4
qnsi
Im off to a party, see you later HN
tluyben2
I remember vaguely being young and friday nights meaning something different than other nights... Meanwhile I'm (in Portugal) trying to fix a dependent type tutorial that bit rotted.
dgellow
Idris?
tluyben2
No, I use Idris (2) quite a bit and am quite advanced at dependent types, however I was looking to go further and found [0] and a course using it, but that course uses a 4-5 year old version which has a lot of issues so I am fixing those. I already gave up running the project on a m1 (not really worth solving that issue as I have a x86 Linux machine anyway) so now I just puzzling to get all the stuff from the course to work.

[0] https://github.com/siddhartha-gadgil/ProvingGround

jll29
Don't know about other parts of PT, but Lisbon has too great a night life to spend Friday night debugging :)
paxys
Especially considering most of the world would have already signed off for the weekend by now.
tremon
Also, it's friday evening now in Europe. I usually don't read HN in the weekends, only during defocus time at work.
echelon
Also it was posted in the afternoon for those on the US East coast. (A Friday afternoon!)

Unless this sits near the top of HN for a week, it's very likely to be skewed.

ImaCake
I’m reading this at 7am from Perth. On a Saturday, so I imagine Australian engagement might be low for the next few hours still.
yreg
We will need to do another one in other timezones
LAC-Tech
I mean we're geographically dispersed. But if you had to pick our capital, it would be silicon valley, surely.

(Living in a village in rural NZ here)

aunty_helen
Says the Ranfurlian coming from a country that has a geographic center as its capital instead of the most populous city -.-
pmkiwi
To be totally fair, the capital should be Nelson which is the true geographic center of NZ!
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101008
I hope there is someone who knows how to code in this community to parse the results and do a nice visualization. I have a cousin who knows about computers, if noone knows here how to do it, I can ask him to try. He always helps me with my printer.
stronglikedan
I'll try to whip up an Excel macro over the weekend, but I can't promise anything.
ShakataGaNai
Excel Macro's... What does a virus have to do with visualizations?! /s
cerved
It IS only VIRAL if you make it from clicks on the emails!!

ALWAYS make clicks with the RIGHT to be SAFE from VIRALS

l0b0
Ask codegolf.stackexchange.com, there's probably a Mathematica one-liner to display a globe with colour-coded areas.
abdusco
I never understood the purpose of languages with unicode operators that can supposedly express a 30 line script in like 2 symbols.

Are they purpose built on the spot for CodeGolf?

lgeorget
Not on the spot, a condition for the answer to be accepted is that the language must exist before the challenge, but yes, many languages exist only just for the purpose of golfing. Mathematica is a legitimate language though, it just is the case that some operations are surprisingly compact.
e12e
If ask for a "histogram" of the data, did I just write a 30 line script as a single word?
airstrike
Someone should actually post it there and then post the question here...
emacs28
I think I can help, I've been learning how to make bar graphs from tables in microsoft word
aksss
I have a cousin twice removed who knows FoxPro and could do this.
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Crosseye_Jack
Can he help stop my Microwave from blinking 12:00 all the time?
iechoz6H
Could you ask him about random list generation too? And whether or not order influences outcomes? Thanks
barbazoo
This made me almost spit out my tea, well done :)
geocrasher
Just do it in Bash, of course! Take the poll andcopy/paste it directly into a file called 'hnpoll', then run

   sed -e ':a;N;$!ba;s/\n/ /g' -e 's/points/,/g' -e 's/point/ ,/g' -e  's/,/\n/g' hnpoll | awk '{ print $2 " "$1 }'  | sort -n | grep ^[0-9] | tail -n 20
12 Finland

12 Serbia

13 Norway

13 Romania

15 Belgium

15 Israel

15 Spain

16 Austria

19 Switzerland

20 Italy

21 India

22 Australia

22 Denmark

26 Brazil

26 Poland

35 Netherlands

36 Sweden

41 France

124 Germany

132 Canada

See- easy!

And if you want the US states, even easier:

    grep US -A1  hnpoll  | sed  -e ':a;N;$!ba;s/\n/ /g' -e 's/points/,/g' -e 's/point/ ,/g' -e 's/,/\n/g' -e '/^$/d' | sort -r |cut -d: -f2 | awk '{ print $2" "$1 }' | sort -n | tail -n 20
15 Arizona

16 Michigan

16 Minnesota

16 Ohio

16 Wisconsin

17 Maryland

18 Georgia

25 Florida

28 Jersey

31 Virginia

32 Pennsylvania

35 Oregon

39 Carolina

42 Illinois

47 Massachusetts

51 Colorado

59 Texas

103 Washington

110 New York

265 California

And people say Bash is a terrible language...

BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE!

Get the total number of US results:

   echo $(grep US -A1  hnpoll  | sed  -e ':a;N;$!ba;s/\n/ /g' -e 's/points/,/g' -e 's/point/ ,/g' -e 's/,/\n/g' -e '/^$/d' | sort -r |cut -d: -f2 | awk '{ print $2 }' | sort -n | grep ^[0-9] | paste -sd+ - | bc)" United States"
943 United States

Combine them a bit...

   sed -e ':a;N;$!ba;s/\n/ /g' -e 's/points/,/g' -e 's/point/ ,/g' -e  's/,/\n/g' hnpoll | awk '{ print $2 " "$1 }'  | sort -n | grep ^[0-9] | tail -n 20; echo $(grep US -A1  hnpoll  | sed  -e ':a;N;$!ba;s/\n/ /g' -e 's/points/,/g' -e 's/point/ ,/g' -e 's/,/\n/g' -e '/^$/d' | sort -r |cut -d: -f2 | awk '{ print $2 }' | sort -n | grep ^[0-9] | paste -sd+ - | bc)" United States"
12 Finland

12 Serbia

3 Norway

13 Romania

15 Belgium

15 Israel

15 Spain

16 Austria

19 Switzerland

20 Italy

21 India

22 Australia

22 Denmark

26 Brazil

26 Poland

35 Netherlands

36 Sweden

41 France

124 Germany

132 Canada

943 United States

Zenbit_UX
I'm currently working on a vue + vuex server side rendered PWA with client side hydration.i found the perfect UI component library which only adds ~3mb of overhead,which went paired with Chart.js and of course wrapped with VueCharts.js should be able to query a graphql endpoint to process the results and display in the browser. What do you all think of kubernetes, overkill?
aerovistae
I thought it was serious until I got to the 3mb part, that was where the tone became clear.

It's funny because I found the first sentence so upsetting. "With client-side hydration" -- I was just thinking to myself god these stupid buzzwords, what does that even mean, just another recycled concept with a new web 3.0 name.

e12e
Client side hydration might be the waterboarding of data visualization.
eyelidlessness
Client-side hydration has been a term of art since component-based web apps have been built with the same code on the server and client. It’s not some new buzzword. It’s an exceedingly common term and has been a major focus in the space for years.

But loljs or whatever plays well so go for it.

riidom
I prefer the printed version from parent poster, thanks
ProZsolt
Kubrernetes is an old thechnology. It should be serverless!
jcun4128
Add haproxy on it
TranquilMarmot
Don't forget to put it behind Cloudflare, too, wouldn't want it to go down from too much traffic
whalesalad
have you considered the blockchain? and/or at least consider adding a language that is not Java, but runs on the JVM.
Aeolun
I hear JavaScript is the new hotness.
elpakal
I don’t know I feel like gRPC did you know it’s used at Google?
igetspam
This comment should come with a trigger warning.
bityard
This is literally the best comment I've ever read on this site.
101008
Thank you so much. I can sell you the NFT of this comment if you want. Or you can sell it to me I guess.
rubabredwan
https://wheredohnuserslive.vercel.app/

Visualized it by countries and us states. Should update every 30 seconds.

Yajirobe
The US map is bigger than the rest of the world
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binarynate
That's awesome! Thank you for making this map.
mordae
Please fix Czechia vs. Czech Republic mismatch. And Macedonia vs. North Macedonia.

Also, per-capita hacker density would be cool as well.

tempestn
Should make this a top level comment so it can get voted to the top.

Edit: appears you did already!

mihaic
The questions now is where are people from that wouldn't answer this? I'm sure the lurker factor is different per location.
rytill
There must be another category "voter" in between commenter and lurker.

Content creator > Commenter > Voter > Lurker

I wonder what percentage of users vote frequently but don't comment.

Anthony-G
I like the concept of voters being an intermediate category between producers/writers and consumers/readers. However, I’d argue that, on Hacker News, the commenters are the actual “content creators” of the HN “community”. It’s easy to submit a URL while it takes substantially more effort (time and thought) to make a useful contribution to an interesting discussion (though submitters are necessary to kick-start the discussions).
gojomo
Indeed, it could be interesting to make a heatmap based on explicit responses, then another based on HN's internal IP logs (w/ the clunky geo IP deductions that can be made from that), to see if there's any areas of large divergence – then hypothesize if those are more due to:

- selective propensity-to-respond-to-poll

- misleading geo IP data

- other software-agents/traffic-drivers/usage-differences (eg: some areas/cultures skim headlines once a day, others get deep in the comments)

mothsonasloth
Why does America get states and UK doesn't get England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland?
poniko
Yeah and I'm totally missing Norrland in Sweden. Bummer ..
Hokusai
And someone has added imaginary places like Finland, as a joke.
dghughes
Some people in central Canada I have spoken with actually don't know that where I live is a Canadian province. They've never heard of it. Plus time zones too they said they thought it ended at Eastern time but there are two more time zones past that.
tagoregrtst
What! There’s only 10 provinces!

And I prefer to say it’s one and half time zones past EST ;) gotta respect that half hour time slot. I just love Newfies.

Toutouxc
I bet that if you tried to invent a language for this "Finland" thing, it would look like total gibberish!
Fuhrer01
There is no down vote, IDK how Austrians will vote.
munk-a
Also - Canada is a monolith, at least break out Quebec!
schlopper
Now now... You'd just be pandering to the separatists.
munk-a
I think now a days most of those are in Calgary if we're being honest... they want an "independent western canada" which some how manages to ignore that British Columbia even exists.
Apocryphon
Sad no one remembers that Newfoundland was the most recently sovereign polity.
belval
No kidding, why is that guy trying to split Quebec from Canada? :(
908B64B197
Isn’t it… already the case? Culturally speaking, it looks and feel like a separate state. At least that’s the impression I got.
belval
Oh yeah definitely, I was half-kidding. Quebec and the rest of Canada have a lot of very significant differences. We are probably more divided right now than we've been ever since the last referendum.

An example I love to give is the holiday "Victoria day" in Canada which is called "Patriot's day" in Quebec, celebrating the attempted revolution in Quebec that were brutally put down by the English in 1837-1838.

monkeybutton
Seconded! Toronto, Waterloo, Ottawa, Montreal, Calgary, Vancouver are all large and distinct tech hubs.
munk-a
I like that list except Waterloo - I think if you're going to make a serious argument about Waterloo than Berkeley/Oakland would be a separate hub from Silicon Valley - and ditto for Worchester, Boston and Cambridge MA. Waterloo definitely has its own thing going on but it's pretty darn close to being an offshoot of Toronto at this point.
monkeybutton
Well I don't personally have a horse in that race. I'd definitely be interested in seeing the results for a regional Canadian poll though.
mikepurvis
There are definitely people who commute all over the GTA, but I still feel like Waterloo Region is culturally distinct from Toronto proper— Google and Facebook are in Waterloo; there's the devices heritage from Blackberry and then later companies like Thalmic and Pebble; there's the robotics presence in Waterloo with Clearpath, Voyis, Avidbots, and Aeryon/FLIR; and finally there's networking companies like Blue Coat, Sandvine, and Arctic Wolf.

I guess I don't know as much about the Toronto scene, but based on the recruitment emails, it seems to be a lot more fintech, game/mobile dev, and big data analytics stuff.

908B64B197
> there's the devices heritage from Blackberry and then later companies like Thalmic and Pebble

Wouldn't brag about these to be honnest.

mikepurvis
No, it's not a brag— but they were all pretty influential and continue to cast a long shadow over the tech culture of the region. Particularly Blackberry, since it made a lot of staff very wealthy, who then went on to found, advise, invest-in, and work-for other companies using those skills.

It's not hard to look around Communitech and clearly see a bunch of startups still running essentially on BlackBerry money.

jessriedel
Canada is smaller than California.
jeromegv
And larger than all the remaining 49 states. Why divide by states then?
jessriedel
Because the alternative to not dividing by states is have a monolithic US, vastly larger than all other geographic units.

Like, pick a threshold of size N. Start at the top, divide at countries, and the recursively keep dividing any given node until you have passed under the threshold N. California gets divided before Canada (and the UK).

munk-a
By land area Canada is about 20 times as large as California, by culture I'd consider Canada to have a few much more distinct areas than California (comparing Toronto vs. Vancouver vs. Calgary the distinctions are pretty close to the range you'd get across the whole of California by my opinion - with Quebec being radically different... Quebec is less like Vancouver than Texas or Mississippi is like California). By population there's only a really narrow difference between the two - so I really don't agree with that assessment.

Also, as a former Vermonter please don't you dare call me a New Hampshirite - but for a survey like this you can probably lump everything from Philly to Bangor into one chunk.

stackedinserter
> By land area Canada is about 20 times as large as California

Cornfields and tundra don't post on HN much.

belval
Now now, we also have forests and lakes.
munk-a
And so many mosquitos - we've got an entire province solely inhabited by mosquitos (within a margin of error) that we call Manitoba!
dadro
Thank you for stopping at Bangor, parts of Maine south of there are Northern Massachusetts!
czbond
> Canada is a monolith

Canada must be separated into 100 different pointless micro services each with a different docker configuration created by the summer C.S. intern.

HN joke.

Apocryphon
Sounds hard, but just keep on truckin'
capableweb
OP wanted to prove that HN isn't Silicon Valley-centric and instead showed their bias toward US-centrism :)
jessriedel
The more pervasive bias is to think countries are the best way to carve reality at its joints.
aidenn0
Well I'm US:California, but definitely not SV.
xtracto
This is the right answer, but it is not OPs fault, it is a typical custom of Americans. I saw it invariably happen while living in Europe and interacting with a highly international community (Americans were the only ones that answered "where are you from" with a state, everybody else, including Canadians, Indians, Russians, Mexicans, etc named their country)
andrewxdiamond
Well, we have states that are almost 3 times as large as the entire UK. If the pollster listed every region the size of Wales, this would be a very long list
mjmasn
Wales and Scotland are countries...
andrewxdiamond
Do you mean to say that referring to countries as regions is incorrect? I thought “region” was a pretty generic term for geographic area, regardless of political boundaries
LAC-Tech
Outside the UK, "country" usually means "independent state".

The UK usage is more local than anything else, because if you're going to call Wales a country you'd really need to call things like Bavaria or Texas countries.

andrewxdiamond
To be fair, there’s a lot of Texans who would like to call Texas a country as well.
LAC-Tech
Right and you've illustrated my point - outside the UK country means "independent state".

Inside the UK it seems to mean "Independent state + Wales + Scotland".

dghughes
Canada has one a territory out of three and that one territory is 20% bigger than Alaska. And only 36,000 people live there.
tmalsburg2
If the US as a whole was a single option, we would not be able to tell whether the people who vote for it are in Silicon Valley or not.
agilob
It's like on the reddit wars:

- Americans = stupid, can't tell where Lithuania is

- Americans respond: name all states!

- Europeans respond: name all regions of all European countries

You're right, regions like London, Bristol, Berlin, Paris, Madrid, Bracelona, Frankfurt, Munich, Warsaw, Cracov, Wroclaw should have separate options

croes
Nope, the US should be a single option.

Just poll for countries.

legerdemain
The question was whether HN = Silicon Valley. Just poll for "Silicon Valley" and "not Silicon Valley."
mlindner
Regions aren't defined by their cities.
phkahler
>> Of course, in 2008, pure investment banks largely failed.

Each US state is about the size of a European country, sometimes with similar population. That's one of the things that always comes up in polls of what surprised Europeans about the US when they visited - just how big it is.

capableweb
China and India has a bigger population, and China has a similar landmass as the US yet is just one option in this poll.
tasuki
On the other hand, as of right now, China has 1 point and India 9. That combined is less than Poland, which has 15.

It makes sense to have finer granularity for the poll options people will actually choose.

capableweb
It's 04:33 in the morning in China (in one of the timezones at least), makes sense.
Jcampuzano2
China uses one timezone as far as I understand, so it's 5am for all of China atm.
numpad0
China is currently has 7 points, 19 hours later. India is 72, Russia is 23, Vietnam 7, UK is 242. hmmm
jogjayr
People in India are asleep right now.
Macha
Is HN even accessible behind the great firewall?
perlwle
HN has been blocked for more than a year now.
mlindner
China also has relatively few people that simultaneously speak English well enough to read/post here while also having easy access to VPNs. If I had to take a guess I would bet there are more people that are Chinese first generation emigrants that live outside of China on HN than there are Chinese citizens that live inside China on HN.
presentation
Pretty much anyone who speaks English well enough to read/post here would have easy access to a VPN. Firewall is easy to hop, you just need to know that you want to.
muzani
There's less people from China and say, Russia, on this site than Minnesota. I think it's a bit weird but the detail works.
sedan_baklazhan
Not that weird. There are much more popular local websites in Russia at least.
capableweb
You mind sharing any of them if they are similar to Hacker News in terms of content, comments and audience? I love browsing websites in languages I don't yet understand fully.
sedan_baklazhan
habr.com (habr.com/ru has much more content than English version).
croes
By that logic China or Russia should also be listed with each single province or state
blueflow
... especially India
vetinari
Both Russia and India are federal countries, just like USA, so might be a good idea.

But where to draw the line? Switzerland is also federation...

Fuhrer01
lol, there are barely 60 people from India.
tazjin
Yep. Russia's largest federal subject (Yakutiya) is a third the size of the entire US, and it's one of 85 subjects)
robjan
Should have at least listed the Special Administrative Regions of China, Hong Kong and Macau which have their own passports and currencies. I'm not going to vote for China since I am not allowed to enter 95% of it without a visa.
rvense
It's... still one country, though. And while I understand that Americans are very preoccupied with the difference between California and New Jersey, please understand that it's not that important (or obvious) to the rest of us.
qeternity
The same can be said for England vs UK (or London vs England for that matter). I say that as an expat in London…
rossdavidh
I suppose it's because the main issue is whether or not HN is "Silicon Valley", and so if you're in the UK (for example) you are not Silicon Valley regardless of if you are in NI, Scotland, Wales, or England.
aziaziazi
In that case, may the poll should have been binary ? edit: typo
IncRnd
Actually, that's probably the reason - the poll was by binarynate not uknate.
bcrosby95
I don't see how this poll determines this. I'm in LA but not silicon valley and had to pick California.
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spiderice
Then make your own poll that is split up how you like it. I see no problem splitting up large countries in polls like this. If only this poll did more of it. I'm not sure you have the knowledge to speak for "the rest of us" about how polls should be split up.
glandium
Fun fact: there's a program in Japan that interviews and follows foreigners. One of the first questions is "where do you come from". Most Americans answer with a state name.
ceras
I've watched some YouTubers do that. For the people that say "United States," a common very follow-up question is "where in the United states"?

That tracks with my own personal experience internationally: if I just say "the US," people ask for more specifics. So I now just respond with more specificity to start.

glandium
Here's the thing: when I answer to such a question that I'm French, I also do get the followup question "where in France?". (although if the question is "where do you come from" rather than "where are you from", I now answer that I come from Japan, which gets WTF looks and different followup questions (but I only do that outside Japan, where I live))
austinjp
This isn't an experience unique to people from the US (see other comments). Would you consider saying "State Name, USA"?
ceras
My mistake, I see now the person I responded to may have meant that Americans say just the state. In the videos I've watched, and at least for myself, I usually hear it like you suggested: state + USA.
glandium
Indeed, that's what I meant. And for less known states, that's usually followed by an awkward silence until they do say US.
vetinari
Big, but relatively unpopulated. Even California would rank together with Poland.
dools
If you’re going by geographic area Australia should definitely be split up by state.
dahfizz
At the time of commenting, US states have 3 of the top 5 positions (and the top 1). So it seems that a US state is roughly comparable to other countries in terms of HN readership.
mlindner
Because the premise of the question was Silicon Valley, so they need a category that separates Silicon Valley away from as much as possible without making the list too long. So split every state out and then have every country after that as those are also "outside silicon valley". If it was just the US as a single option it would not actually fit the premise of the question.

This question feels primarily aimed at the US population, IMO.

Crosseye_Jack
I’m sure Boris promised this in the Brexit Manifesto along with Blue Passports…

Someone get him on the phone, oh wait, it’s past 5pm on a Friday evening, he is probably at a “work event”.

lhorie
I posted a script above to get a sorted rank. This other one gets you the aggregate numbers for US:

    [...document.querySelectorAll('.fatitem table .athing')].map(el => [el.textContent.trim(), el.nextSibling.textContent.trim()]).reduce((a, [c,s]) => c.startsWith('US') ? a + parseInt(s) - 1 : a, 0)
As of this comment, there are around 10 times more votes for US than the second most voted country (Canada). A fourth of those US votes are for California. Meaning, there are twice as many votes for California as there are for Canada.

This suggests that Silicon Valley still represents a significant portion of the HN community.

onion2k
Maybe the author looked at the UK and thought "Look at the state of that!"
binarynate
Sorry about that! This was an oversight on my part. In retrospect, I wish I had included separate entries for regions of UK, Canada, and others. I thought about adding new entries for them now, but it seems a bit too late since folks have already been voting.
LAC-Tech
I mean by that logic India is the most hard done by here - (perhaps) the worlds most populated country reduced to a single data point.
tagoregrtst
Because everyone has heard of most the US’ states, but most people wouldn't have a clue where South Tyrol, or Chubut are.

Also, in IT or CS, a state like TX or CA are more prominent than any European one. CA is probably more important by itself than all of Europe. Even PA or GA are heavy hitters that would smoke most similarly sized EU countries.

CRConrad
> CA is probably more important by itself than all of Europe.

I recall reading (years ago) that "If California were an independent country, it would be the sixth-largest in the world"... Which would still (at least at the time) put it behind Germany. So, faaar from "more important by itself than all of Europe".

> Even PA or GA are heavy hitters that would smoke most similarly sized EU countries.

Given how wrong you are about California above, I very much doubt this one.

renewiltord
Because American states are more significant than British regions. UC Berkeley alone has more Nobel laureates than Wales+Scotland+NorthernIreland. Think of it as Huffman coding on significance.
the_duke
Too many options. I'd have found a continent poll more interesting, I bet many will just not bother scrolling.
cobbaut
Scrolling? You do know about / right? Just type /Belg (or Ctrl-f) to find Belgium.
j_4
Well, I did ctrl+f but this is actually the first time I'm hearing about / for quick search, haha. Thanks!
hycaria
Which browser?
Avshalom
Firefox.

it used to actually default to quick searching anything you typed (with / quick searching only links) but now you have to fiddle with an option for that.

ETA: in the spirit of the thread: I'm in Albuquerque, New Mexico, US. Which I've said before.

jakub_g
There's also ' (apostrophe) for "quick find, in hyperlinks only". I sorely miss it when using Chrome.
Avshalom
Firefox's quickfind behavior is a solid 25-30% of why I never switched to chrome.
rascul
It's unfortunate when web sites hijack the slash key for their own uses (github gets me with this every time).
Avshalom
github hijacks so many keys, can't stand it.
the_duke
Well,sure,I use Vimium anyway. But we shall see.
gruturo
Is that really a concern? Surely the HN audience knows how to use the Find option in their browser.

But if it makes you feel better, I'm sure someone will whip up a regex or perl oneliner to get to the row data and then sort/aggregate it in 20 different ways, or color a heatmap, or in any style of chart you prefer.

anthelios
We could ask dang if he can share some stats if he’s allowed to. It’s an interesting question!
capableweb
Don't think there is any way of getting the stats on where people live automatically. At most they would probably be able to get most commonly used locations, as a IP belongs to a location, but that doesn't mean that the user lives there (or even that the user is physically around there [VPNs], but probably usually right).
hammock
IP data would be close enough to the actual aggregate proportions
hunter321
Given how many people browse HN at work it would be super skewed.
bradlys
Correct. You'd get a lot of people who suddenly seem to live in Columbus, Ohio or other random non-tech spots within USA due to AWS VPN and other such things.
bcon
I wish analytics had an 'audience view' to help communities understand themselves.
gwbas1c
IMO, it's worth breaking CA up in the survey. At a minimum, Northern and Southern.

Califorina at times is like many states. Living in the Northeastern US, "California" is kind of like combining New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine into a single state.

a_chris
Yeah, why not split north Italy and south Italy then?
xtracto
And Mexico, there are at least 3 main regions: Northern Mexico (with cities like Tijuana, Monterrey, Chihuahua, Juarez, etc), Central Mexico (Mexico City, Guadalajara, Leon) and Southern Mexico (Yucatan, Quintana Roo, Campeche, Chiapas, etc).
lhorie
Pasting this in dev console will give you a quick and dirty rundown. It sorts locations by points.

    [...document.querySelectorAll('.fatitem table .athing')].map(el => [el.textContent.trim(), el.nextSibling.textContent.trim()]).sort(([,a], [,b]) => parseInt(b) - parseInt(a)).map(a => a.join(' - '))
As of this post, California is leading, followed by other places w/ large tech hubs (Germany, UK, Canada, NY, Washington)
toqy
This is begging for a console.table

     console.table([...document.querySelectorAll('.fatitem table .athing')].map(el => [el.textContent.trim(), el.nextSibling.textContent.trim()]).sort(([,a], [,b]) => parseInt(b) - parseInt(a)))
runjake
Neat!

Noob question: is there a similar way to dump it to JSON, instead of a table?

chair6
Just replace console.table with JSON.stringify for the quick-and-easy dump of exactly the same data as is in the table...

JSON.stringify([...document.querySelectorAll('.fatitem table .athing')].map(el => [el.textContent.trim(), el.nextSibling.textContent.trim()]).sort(([,a], [,b]) => parseInt(b) - parseInt(a)))

AntonyGarand
Replace `console.table` with `JSON.stringify`:

JSON.stringify([...document.querySelectorAll('.fatitem table .athing')].map(el => [el.textContent.trim(), el.nextSibling.textContent.trim()]).sort(([,a], [,b]) => parseInt(b) - parseInt(a)))

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
gkfasdfasdf
Current top 10:

  'US: California' '79 points'
  'Canada' '48 points'
  'US: Washington' '39 points'
  'US: New York' '36 points'
  'Germany' '35 points'
  'United Kingdom' '34 points'
  'US: Massachusetts' '19 points'
  'Netherlands' '18 points'
  'US: Colorado' '17 points'
  'Sweden' '16 points'
Colorado #9? Really?
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
TulliusCicero
Denver and Boulder have a good amount of tech. A bit surprised it comes out ahead of Texas though.

Also the UK and Germany being about the same is interesting. Germany does have a slightly larger population, but of course the UK is natively English speaking.

hwc
Texas is without power at the moment.
capableweb
Thought you were joking at first, how can an entire state be without power? But seems you're right, how the hell does that happen in a first-world country?

Tried to access some dashboards that are supposed to show some data, but not sure if I can't access it because I'm not in the US/Texas or if it's down as well (because they don't have power?)

- https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards

- https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/gridconditions

- https://www.ercot.com/gridinfo

Says "This request was blocked by the security rules" so I'm assuming it's the former.

[dead] dhosek
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
vel0city
ERCOT doesn't do power delivery, you wouldn't see how many people are without power by checking out ERCOT. You would want to look at one of the several power delivery companies, such as Oncor.

https://stormcenter.oncor.com/

They show 7,073 customers affected by outages out of 3,835,901 customers served. That's 0.18% of customers affected.

Texas-New Mexico Power is another power delivery company in Texas.

https://www.tnmp.com/power-outage-map

They are showing 1,195 customers affected. They serve ~400k customers. So ~0.3% of customers are without power for that company.

Austin Energy is another power company in Texas, they serve pretty much the entire city of Austin so ~1M customers. They are reporting 24 affected customers. So 0.0024% of customers affected.

https://outagemap.austinenergy.com/external/default.html

The above poster is not right, and neither are you for suggesting some massive amount of the state is without power.

capableweb
Thank you, that oncor website seems to be available to me. I was browsing around some news article that seemed to echo the same sentiment, tried to access the source data myself and couldn't, so made an assumption. That was an error on my part and I'm sorry for that. Thank you for providing a better source that seems accessible worldwide.
vel0city
> so made an assumption

You shared lies and slandered a state suggesting its a third world country based on false data.

runako
To be fair, our power grid does have a tendency to fail regularly across the US. Texas last year, California's rolling blackouts, NY blackouts, etc. There's a reason that upper-middle-class homeowners have been buying Generac generators en masse.
vel0city
Power grids tend to fail just about everywhere that experiences extreme weather. Its not necessarily a US-only thing. Its just that the US experiences a pretty large share of extreme weather compared to most of the developed world. Far more tornadoes, hurricanes, wildfires, etc. affect the US than say, Europe.
runako
California's rolling blackouts were not the result of any particularly extreme (for California!) weather. Similarly, hurricanes are not new to most of the hurricane-afflicted parts of the country. Wildfires have been a force in the US for a long time, and the West has experienced seasonal wildfires for decades.

The difference is the US doesn't generally build or maintain infrastructure in a fashion commensurate with the extant risks here (which are different than those of e.g. Germany). Obviously, it is possible to keep a grid running when it is extremely cold outside, see the Nordics and Russia, for example. The US just makes systematic choices not to build & maintain to that standard.

vel0city
What kind of similar weather risks do the Nordic countries or Germany experience that would be an equivalent to the tornadoes, hurricanes, and wildfires the US experiences on a very regular basis? I truly don't know what kind of similar risks they face and would like to rectify my ignorance.
vel0city
Less than 1% of people in Texas lost power from this storm, and most who did lose power lost power for only a few hours tops. More people lost power in Ohio and Tennessee from this storm than people in Texas.

Only two people in my network of people I know lost power in Texas, one of which was a coworker's neighbor because said coworker's tree dropped a branch on the neighbor's overhead power delivery line.

bdcravens
Actually our grid has held up pretty well this time around.
yurishimo
It also didn't get nearly as cold as last year, and not for as long. Plus, the providers ramped up production the first evening to the point where wholesale rates were negative to incentivize more usage.

Another week+ of 0 degrees would likely have not been as smooth...

Rebelgecko
My parents house in California had no electricity for over a week (Christmas through New Year's, and it was sporadic until about Jan 8). I think the state is still doing fine as a tech hub.
kelnos
I think the point is that if a large portion of Texas currently didn't have power (which seems to not be the case, but whatever), then they might be under-represented in this poll because I imagine fewer people in place without power would be browsing HN than usual.
afr0ck
It's funny how the UK and Germany are growing with the same rate. I checked 10 minutes later and they were 56/57, then I did it again few minutes later and they were 67/68.
bdcravens
As I type this Texas is at 35 votes; looks like 5th behind California, Canada, Germany, and the UK
lordnacho
All the relevant people in Germany as well the rest of the continent speak English pretty well.
TulliusCicero
I think that’s overselling it slightly. Yeah most techies in Germany are proficient or better in English, but that’s still gonna lead to less English website usage than a natively English speaking population.
nicholasjarnold
There is an admittedly surprising amount of tech work here (CO). I moved here from Chicago nearly a decade ago for a startup job (not telecommunications, ad tech or government related), and have found that the marketplace for tech jobs has grown heavily since then.

Also, given the new(ish) move to remote work that many firms nationally have begun to embrace there is also a strong showing here of people that work in Colorado, but for firms located elsewhere. This is my personal current situation, and I work with a guy who is moving here from the midwest in a couple months to work 100% remote. It's more and more common.

Mc91
I know a programmer who moved to Colorado, mainly because he likes to be able to go out on hikes and that sort of thing.
maxverse
I lived in Boulder for 2 years, and it's not just that there are gorgeous places to explore in CO - there's a culture of adventure and exploration here; everyone is much more likely to finish work early and go hiking, or take a snowboarding break in the middle of the day. It's encouraging and awesome.
wongarsu
As percent of total responses, as of right now:

    'US: California', '10.87%'
    'Canada', '5.79%'
    'United Kingdom', '4.51%'
    'US: Washington', '4.45%'
    'Germany', '4.45%'
    'US: New York', '4.32%'
    'US: Colorado', '2.10%'
    'US: Texas', '1.97%'
    'US: Massachusetts', '1.84%'
    'France', '1.78%'
The US in total makes up 49% of responses so far (even though it is nearly 10pm in most of Europe)

Edit: quick and dirty one-liner to get the full table with relative values:

    data = [...document.querySelectorAll('.fatitem table .athing')].map(el => [el.textContent.trim(), el.nextSibling.textContent.trim()]).sort(([,a], [,b]) => parseInt(b) - parseInt(a)); total = data.map(a => parseInt(a[1])-1).reduce((a,b) => a+b, 0); console.table(data.map(a => [a[0], ((parseInt(a[1])-1)/total*100).toFixed(2) + "%"])); us = data.filter(a => a[0].startsWith("US:")).map(a => parseInt(a[1])-1).reduce((a,b) => a+b, 0); `US makes up ${(us/total*100).toFixed(2)}% of ${total} responses`
Edit2: made one-liner even dirtier to account for counts starting at 1
young_unixer
It would be cool to see it relative to the population of the country.
lhorie
Be mindful that the dataset is 1-indexed (i.e. zero votes equal a score of 1), so your script is probably a bit skewed towards non-US.
wongarsu
Good catch. Accounting for that brings the US up from currently 50.2% to 52.8%. It also brings California up from 11.75% to 12.86%. I updated my code above to account for that (having to fight the urge to refactor it to be more sensible)
e12e
Is there are reasonable way to do this on a mobile browser?
wongarsu
Maybe rewriting it as a bookmarklet that displays the results on the page?

Anyways, here's the current result in a pastebin: https://pastebin.com/fR89qMKk

gabrielsroka
I posted these:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30213991

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30215244

Edit (this version subtracts 1 to see the real score and pops open in a new window):

  javascript:open().document.write('<meta name=viewport content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0"><table>' + [...document.querySelectorAll('.fatitem table .athing')].map(el => ({place: el.textContent.trim(), score: parseInt(el.nextSibling.textContent) - 1})).sort((a, b) => b.score - a.score || a.place.localeCompare(b.place)).map(e => `<tr><td>${e.place}<td align=right>${e.score}`).join('') + '</table>')
icco
TIL about console.table. Thanks for sharing!
rakkhi
Can't we just aggregate all of the US or worth splitting out cities/states/provinces for other countries also.. Think it makes the point of even this forum being US centric
smt88
This forum is run by a US company and was originally made for their US portfolio.

Large US states are more populous than most countries, and the US tech industry is orders of magnitude larger than most countries'.

If US weren't broken out, it would be a huge outlier at the top and wouldn't be nearly as interesting.

I don't know of any other country that would make the chart that much more interesting by being broken up.

starwind
Google and Amazon have a pretty big showing in Denver/Boulder area and Apple's expanding an engineering office here.

Denver's also a big telecommunications and defense hub. Both industries employ armies of developers

gabrielsroka
More efficient, uses integers, and sortable in the table:

   console.table([...document.querySelectorAll('.fatitem table .athing')].map(el => ({place: el.textContent.trim(), score: parseInt(el.nextSibling.textContent)})).sort((a, b) => b.score - a.score))
gabrielsroka
with tie breakers

     console.table([...document.querySelectorAll('.fatitem table .athing')].map(el => ({place: el.textContent.trim(), score: parseInt(el.nextSibling.textContent)})).sort((a, b) => b.score - a.score || a.place.localeCompare(b.place)))
newaccount74
I wanted a total for the US:

    console.table([...document.querySelectorAll('.fatitem table .athing')].map(el => [el.textContent.replace(/:.*/,'').trim(), parseInt(el.nextSibling.textContent.trim())]).reduce((d, [k,v]) => {d[k]=v + (d[k] || 0); return d}, {}))
I can't figure out how to sort that, though...
binarynate
I created a page with the current results that includes a total for the US:

https://nate.org/hacker-news-location-poll

Larrikin
Percentage next to totals would make this perfect
binarynate
Good idea—I just added a percentage column, as well as a row at the bottom for the total count
shafkathullah
Just click on 'Value' in console to sort by value
gabrielsroka
If you're on a mobile browser, paste this into the address bar:

    javascript:document.write('<table>' + [...document.querySelectorAll('.fatitem table .athing')].map(el => ({place: el.textContent.trim(), score: parseInt(el.nextSibling.textContent)})).sort((a, b) => b.score - a.score || a.place.localeCompare(b.place)).map(e => `<tr><td>${e.place}<td align=right>${e.score}`).join('') + '</table>')
cardamomo
That doesn't seem to work on Firefox for Android, sadly
gabrielsroka
Sometimes the browser will remove the leading 'javascript'. In that case, type it back in.
gabrielsroka
It doesn't seem to be supported. Ironic that the bookmarklet was invented by them.

It works on Chrome for Android.

zander312
this is fricking awesome!! thanks!!
culi
Now we need to divide the votes by the population of each place
jeromegv
Yes, hilarious to see "South Dakota" as a specific region, but Canada as a whole.
doodlebugging
This reminds me of a visit to a store in the DFW area (Texas) called "World Market". They sell all kinds of things from all over the world that you would have a hard time finding anywhere else including food, furnishings, decorations, knick-knacks, gee-gaws, and other shit, etc.

Employees there that I talked with had never noticed that for everything sourced outside Africa the outline and flag of that nation was displayed but for everything from Africa there was only an outline of Africa labeled as "Africa".

Geography is so important especially today with the ability to connect to anyone, anywhere in near real time.

geocrasher
The answers to the poll are so the OP knows where we are from.

The questions in the poll are so we know where the OP is from.

adamrezich
I know right? East River SD and West River SD are practically different countries.
protomyth
Truthfully, it should have been West and East Dakota, not North and South.

Happy to see both Dakotas have votes.

Andrew_nenakhov
One must adjust for the fact that it is a very late evening or deep night on the other side of the planet, and the poll might sink from the front page by the time everyone wakes up back here.
awb
Would be interesting to see it expressed as a % of population as well to see HN density, as well as quantity.
lolinder
I didn't get the data to do this globally, but here it is for the US (data from https://api.census.gov/data/2021/pep/population?get=POP_2021...*):

    const totalPop = {"Oklahoma":3986639,"Nebraska":1963692,"Hawaii":1441553,"South Dakota":895376,"Tennessee":6975218,"Nevada":3143991,"New Mexico":2115877,"Iowa":3193079,"Kansas":2934582,"District of Columbia":670050,"Texas":29527941,"Missouri":6168187,"Arkansas":3025891,"Michigan":10050811,"New Hampshire":1388992,"North Carolina":10551162,"Ohio":11780017,"South Carolina":5190705,"Wyoming":578803,"California":39237836,"North Dakota":774948,"Louisiana":4624047,"Maryland":6165129,"Delaware":1003384,"Pennsylvania":12964056,"Georgia":10799566,"Oregon":4246155,"Minnesota":5707390,"Colorado":5812069,"New Jersey":9267130,"Kentucky":4509394,"Washington":7738692,"Maine":1372247,"Vermont":645570,"Idaho":1900923,"Indiana":6805985,"Montana":1104271,"New York":19835913,"Puerto Rico":3263584,"Connecticut":3605597,"Florida":21781128,"Virginia":8642274,"Massachusetts":6984723,"Illinois":12671469,"Mississippi":2949965,"Arizona":7276316,"Utah":3337975,"Wisconsin":5895908,"Alabama":5039877,"West Virginia":1782959,"Rhode Island":1095610,"Alaska":732673};
    console.table(
      [...document.querySelectorAll('.fatitem table .athing')]
      .map(el => ({place: el.textContent.trim(), score: parseInt(el.nextSibling.textContent)}))
      .filter(el => el.place.includes("US:"))
      .map(el => ({...el, place: el.place.replace("US: ", "")}))
      .map(el => ({...el, totalPop: totalPop[el.place]}))
      .filter(el => el.totalPop != undefined)
      .map(el => ({...el, density: el.score / el.totalPop}))
      .sort((a, b) => b.density - a.density)
    )
davidkuennen
With US combined:

console.table(Object.entries([...document.querySelectorAll('.fatitem table .athing')].map(el => [el.textContent.trim(), el.nextSibling.textContent.trim()]).reduce((rv, [a,b]) => {var key = a.split(": ")[0]; rv[key] = rv[key] || 0; rv[key] += parseInt(b); return rv;}, {})).sort(([,a], [,b]) => parseInt(b) - parseInt(a)))

  'US' 959
  'Canada' 114
  'United Kingdom' 96
  'Germany' 96
  'France' 35
  'Netherlands' 30
  'Sweden' 30
  'Poland' 24
  'Brazil' 24
  'Denmark' 19
  'Switzerland' 18
bsimpson
So you're saying I should have checked the comments before opening the console?

$$('.score').map(node => [node.parentElement.parentElement.parentElement.previousSibling.innerText?.trim(), parseInt(node.innerText)]).sort(([,scoreA], [,scoreB]) => scoreB - scoreA)

Archelaos
I think for a ranking the data should be normalized by population. If I calculate it for seven leading regions manually, the current numbers are as follows:

  US: California  535 / 39.51 Mil. = 13.54 / Mil.
  Canada          244 / 38.01 Mil. =  6.42 / Mil.
  Germany         232 / 83.24 Mil. =  2.79 / Mil.
  UK              220 / 67.22 Mil. =  3.27 / Mil.
  US: New York    206 / 39.52 Mil. =  5.21 / Mil.
  US: Washington  199 /  7.71 Mil. = 25.81 / Mil.
  US: Texas       122 / 29.15 Mil. =  4.19 / Mil.
There might even be some hidden champions in the lower absolute numbers.
eriksjolund
Nordic countries also get high numbers:

  Sweden  74 / 10.35 Mil. = 7.15 / Mil.
  Denmark 40 /  5.83 Mil. = 6.86 / Mil.
  Finland 33 /  5.53 Mil. = 5.97 / Mil.
  Norway  31 /  5.38 Mil. = 5.76 / Mil.
but nothing beats

  Vatican City 6 / 825 = 7273 / Mil.
Archelaos
I had always suspected the Jesuits behind HN.
ChrisMarshallNY
I noticed that every single country/state, has at least one vote.

Just for Ss & Gs, you should add "Greenland," and "Antarctica."

capableweb
That's because of the architecture of HN (and indirectly Arc I'd presume) where every created `item` (stories, comments, individual poll-items) starts with 1 point by default, as the author surely would have upvoted it anyways.
madcaptenor
So to correctly interpret the results one has to subtract 1 vote from each?
ChrisMarshallNY
Except that the author obviously ticks one. Not sure if they are allowed to, or be satisfied with 1 of everything...
capableweb
One or more (me and I'm sure others too, live in multiple countries). You're allowed to vote in your own polls as far as I know.
atlasunshrugged
Is Washington the State or DC?
asveikau
There appear to be entries for both.
atlasunshrugged
Ah thanks, I was looking up DC - did not think to do "District of Columbia"
dumbfounder
Me too. Don't you love it when you come to a dropdown form and they simply forget DC altogether? That's my fav.
TulliusCicero
The state. DC is listed as District of Columbia.

That area's confusing though, since the metro encompasses both DC proper and then multiple states.

gojomo
A useful poll!

But the very-literal should be reminded: the linguistic mechanisms of synechdoche & metonymy often result in a fuzzy use of parts, or regions, or emblematic examples, or associated items to mean some other closely-related more-amorphous entity.

For example, "the White House" for the entire elected president's policy team, no matter which part (or if it's operating from some other place). "Wall Street" for finance, even that outside of New York. Someone's "good eye" to mean their entire skills of evaluation (of detail, aesthetics, potential, etc).

And of course 'Silicon Valley' for, depending on context:

• a narrow geographical region around the south SF Bay

• dominant industries in that region, especially computer/infotech

• the whole SF Bay Area, or even Calfornia - at least to the extent there's some (possibly thin/alleged) connections to tech or the SF bay

• all computer/infotech companies everywhere, with weak but not absolutely-required implication of some connection (HQ/roots/investors) to above

• mindsets highly associated with the any of the above

These shifting boundaries based on context/intent annoy people who prefer precision, but are inherent to terms used this way.

ImaCake
My anecdata, as an outsider who is a researcher, is that silicon valley is either the south SF bay area or the mindset. I certainly mean the latter when describing HN to others.
Aperocky
Well there's at least 7 user who lives in North Korea, so people are taking it with the seriousness.

Otherwise, out of 1000 people, there'd be at least 200 that are from North Korea, maybe another 100 that lives in Antarctica.

posix_compliant
I'm fascinated by this comment, and I'm trying to figure out why. I think it's that the author makes good points about an interesting topic, uses correct english, and even draws upon relevant examples; yet, somehow the post has an overall feeling of clunkiness.

The author starts off with "But the very-literal should be reminded". Already any readers have to implicitly know that "the very-literal" refers to the specific group of individuals who have read the original post and also have a tendency to take things literally. It's not incorrect english, but since the word "literal" is more commonly used as an adjective, it does take a beat to realize that it serving to create a plural noun as part of "the very-literal". Again, not crazy strange, but it's a language device that is more commonly seen in other contexts rather than on Hacker News.

The reader might now be expecting the author to describe what specifically shouldn't be taken literally, but instead author continues with "the linguistic mechanisms of synechdoche & metonymy". I think it's a big leap to expect the reader to know: a) what a "linguistic mechanism" is, ie, how does it differ from a phrase? b) what "synechdoche" is c) what "metonymy" is

So now not only is the reader still in the dark about what they shouldn't be taking literally, but now they are likely grappling with trying to understand these definitions unless they are in the likely minority of people who already understand all of these.

The author continues: "often result in a fuzzy use of parts, or regions, or emblematic examples, or associated items to mean some other closely-related more-amorphous entity." To me, this just reads as a poor redefinition of the previously mentioned terms. It's like saying "when words are used non-literally, it results in the non-literal use of words". It's not WRONG, per se, but it just leaves the reader more confused about what ultimate point the author is trying to make.

To the author's credit, this sentence is immediately followed up with two good examples of synechdoche; however, unless the reader previously understood its definition the ultimate point of these examples is lost. On the other hand if the reader did previously understand the definition of synechdoche, then these examples only further the previous redefinition. At this point, the reader still hasn't been told what they aren't supposed to be taking literally.

Finally, the author mentions "Silicon Valley", and it becomes more clear the the crux of this comment is regarding its definition. More examples are provided regarding the specifics of how "Silicon Valley" could be non-literally interpreted -- which is probably the gist of what the author was trying to convey in the first place, but it was buried 88 words into the comment.

All in all, this comment could be distilled down to: "Silicon Valley shouldn't be interpreted literally; it can be interpreted a few ways, here are some examples."

jeliotj
US: Montana
mlindner
You pick by upvoting your choice in the poll.
sigil
There were similar polls in 2013. We could compare against those to measure tech dispersal over the last decade!

- "Poll: Where are you currently living?" (Countries, 2013) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6582647

- "Poll: If you're in the US, What State Do You Live In?" (US states, 2013) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5222370

culi
I'd like to see these votes divided by the total population of each place
paxys
If the goal of the poll is to determine where HN users/the tech industry is concentrated, whether the overall population in those areas is high or not doesn't really matter.
culi
Sure, if that's the goal. What if my goal was to understand just how over-represented English-speaking regions of the world were in the HN demographics? Nothing wrong with having multiple goals
wyager
That might measure HN moving to a wider audience rather than the original audience physically moving.

The community is clearly a lot different than in it was 2013. I would guess a relatively larger portion of people outside of the Bay Area is part of that.

sigil
For sure, this would only be a rough measure of tech dispersal itself, not a longitudinal study of HN users. The latter is interesting to us HN old timers, but the former is a consequential thing for the whole world.
agilob
Nice of you to distinguish Georgia and US Georgia ;)
madcaptenor
Glad I saw this when I searched for Georgia, as someone who lives in US Georgia.
binarysolo
This thread would be way more useful if one of the HN mods were willing to share (a maybe obfuscated) traffic snapshot of the site.

As it stands we're gonna get: who on HN bothers to comment on a poll. :)

dotancohen
..and is browsing HN while the poll is active. Right now Israel is in Shabbat and many people won't be anywhere near a computer. And I suppose that India is sleeping!
MaxLeiter
This makes me want to create a house-swap service for HN users. Take a two week vacation in someones home (and them in yours) with the social contract established by your HN profiles
tluyben2
Yep, that's a great idea. That and house rental with the trust because HN; you can stay anonymous (as far as your profile would be anonymous) until both sides say yes (based on comments + karma).
message
I imagine drama if shit hits the fan…
1_player
With the assumption that HN-goers are more trustworthy than average.

I will make no guarantee to be a trustworthy person.

MaxLeiter
no such assumption, just view a persons profile and decide if you trust them. Some (like me) use our real identities, so it should be possible to get a sense of us. People have varying comfort levels, but I don't see how the average HNer would be worse than the average AirBNBer