Poll: Where do you work (geographically)? | Hacker News Reader

Poll: Where do you work (geographically)?

67 pointsmbm92 comments

Inspired by general confusion.

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Other suggestions for where do you work polls:

* Where do you work (temporally)?

* Where do you work (spiritually)?

* Where do you work (existentially)?

...and my personal favorite:

* Where do you work (programmatically)?

Good chunks of Scandinavia would consider themselves solidly part of 'Western Europe' and with 'Mid-Atlantic US' qualifying for a category it's surprising that the United Kingdom wouldn't rate a mention, I'd wager there are far more people from there active on HN than you might suspect.

Wait, what's "Mid-Atlantic US"? You have to split your time equally between New York and London?

It refers to the Atlantic Seaboard, so it's not "Mid(dle of the) Atlantic (Ocean)," it's "Mid(dle of the) Atlantic Seaboard."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_states

Yes, in fact western europe tops the list with ~90 points and the day just started over here. I have the feeling that the american internet userbase seems so much overrepresented on the interwebs just because it's very loud.

EDIT: ops, I misread. I thought the thread was started 22 hours ago, not two. USA still has to wake up then.

I think people tend to forget how large Europe is in total (larger than the United States), the size of the population (731 million) and how large the economy of the region is.

In spite of that HN is very US centric and I fully expect the situation to be reversed by 5 PM GMT.

Well that's exactly the point I was trying to make: HN (and reddit and many others) look extremely US centric but I'd love to see access log, for I think Europeans may not be so few after all, just extremely more silent.

The similar Slashdot poll a week or so ago ('What would you prefer to be paid in? Dollars / pounds / euros / etc etc') saw a similar effect: pounds had a huge lead for most of the UK day until the US woke up and hammered the 'dollars' button :)

9:37 GMT

313 USA 424 Europe

I'll be interested to see how many people work within 100 metres of San Francisco.

"metres"? Seems like an odd measure from the distance from a city. Perhaps km or miles?

Also, I suppose Denver falls under "Other US"? Seems like several disparate geographic areas are getting lumped together. Additionally, I think that "Great Lakes" is a subset of "Midwest" (Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, West Penn) and "New England" (East Penn, New York). I do understand wanting to separate out Chicago, though. Might I suggest "California, Northwest, Southwest, Central, Midwest, Southeast, Northeast"?

Well, it says "100m"

100m seems to be a good filter to toss out the many Silicon Valley people who work in the hope canyons of the suburban office parks

Yep "100m" must mean metres. C'mon we're all engineers here, we know the metric system and SI. "mi" is mile.

I thought it meant 100 miles. 100 meters is about the length of a football field.

According to WikiPedia a football field varies in length between 135 and 185 metres:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_Australian_football#Fie...

I'm almost dead center of the city, but I'm on the 35th floor, so no dice for me.

Hey, there's South and Central America. Where do you think Brazil is for example? Don't you think Mexico has enough population to worth a mention? No mention of Africa either?

It seems we don't have too many brazilians around here, our developers don't like to share information and knowledge :(

Sharing or receiving? I'm Brazilian and even though I don't have much to share, I'm here to grab some knowledge.

This isn't a very good poll because the groups are different things and sizes. Why don't you just do it by State/Province?

For example. I live in Toronto so I'm going to Select the Great Lakes, so are people in Waterloo, Buffalo, etc, etc all at the city level. On the other hand, you've lumped a bunch of countries together in Eastern Europe.

Also 100m is confusing because it refers to both metres and miles. I assume in your context you meant miles but lots of people with science backgrounds would assume metres.

You're right, all of North and South America aside from specific areas of the US are missing.

Really? The closest category for Canada is "Other"?

Yeah, "Great Lakes" is a region, but Canada isn't?! Lame. And there should be "Canada West" and "Canada East".

I agree. Since when was Great Lakes a region? Most people call it the Midwest.

If you work in a lake you'd probably appreciate this option.

I actually worked in a Lake for about 3 years. A great lake too! (Huron).

Luxury! I would have loved to have worked in a lake, I used to work in a shoebox by the side of the road!

I guess some will say you have to add Quebec

4 people from canada here, eh?

(replace 4 with parent's upvotes at time of reading so joke becomes timeless)

Canada is an honourary member of Western Europe.

Don't worry, with the current state of affairs in the US, we should probably be happy they don't know we exist.

Here's the locations of ~1600 members, http://hackernewsers.com/pages/map.html

US has about 6x as many users compared to the next largest, UK.

New Zealand.

Sometimes we get lumped in with Australia. Sometimes the region is called Oceania or Australasia (the origin of both these terms baffles me). I checked "other".

Ticked other, Auckland New Zealand.

Yep Other and NZ here too.

Yup ticked other, Auckland NZ here.

Australasia is a region of Oceania. There's a good graphic at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Oceanias_Regions.png

I suggest a "where are you?" poll based on http://xkcd.com/850/.

You forgot "Texas."

You forgot Poland, also.

I would include that within Southwest US.

FYI, I made a map gadget for Wave (which now works in Shared Spaces) that visualizes where people are coming from. It uses a naive but functional clustering algorithm to show density bubbles. You can try it out in this space: http://sharedspaces.googlelabs.com/V02zVAFPz8 (You will have to login with your Google, Twitter, or Yahoo cred though.)

http://www.hackernewsers.com/ seems to have some information also.

Cape Town, South Africa. (Just got my H-1B this morning, and off to "Within 100m radius of San Francisco", though.)

I'm from Jozi. What business are you building?

I voted for "Other Europe", since Slovenia is neither Western or Eastern Europe. It's somewhere in the middle :)

Is it Southern Europe? It's right next to Italy, but doesn't extend so far south, and is barely a Mediterranean country. In any case, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece are what I'd call 'Southern Europe' more than west or east, although I'd say west if I had to pick one.

We always had the problem of putting Slovenia in one of the slots. If you ask me it's in Central Europe, but historically we ware always put in the Eastern part (but that probably has more to do with politics than geography).

Have the same issue with Poland. We need this damn Central Europe category so we can escape the dreaded "Eastern Europe" badge... And since we are in no way Western, Central is the only way. </sarcasm>

No, we don't need any new categories http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Europe_subregion_map_UN_ge...

Unless we speak colloquially, then there's an infinite number of groups to qualify. The OP should use some reference to choose categories ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2147290 ), his are a bit strange and subjective.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Europe

It has no official significance, just a common term, and your link proves my point. I'm from Poland and by Larousse we're not central, by Brittanica we are.

For this survey it would be nice if we had a finer granularity. It would be interesting to see where the most HN users sit in Europe. Western, eastern and "other" Europe for a population of 700+ million people is rather sub optimal.

Compare that to the amount of options for the US with its 220 mio population.

I'd propose a schema like this: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Europe_subregion_map_...

WTF is "other Europe"? Malta? Israel?

the colonies maybe? or if you can't decide if you're eastern or western europe?

Russia maybe? Of course, if you're in Moscow or St Pete's then you're 'other Europe' otherwise you're just 'Asia'.

Maybe a code name for central Europe. Which he sadly forgot.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Europe

What's wrong with using UN's geoscheme http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:United_Nations_geographica... instead of inventing your own categories?

That the UN doesn't break down the United States in to high-tech regions. So 'North America' would lump together 9 regions in the list above each with a different taste.

The poll is basically a US centric poll with the rest of the world thrown in as an afterthought, unfortunately that's a pretty accurate representation of the way many tech people see the world.

This actually causes a feedback mechanism that now means that being located 'in the valley' translates in to a very real competitive edge.

Wait, for me there's nothing wrong in narrowing specific regions (such as US or even silicon valley), but the rest (like dividing Europe into west, east and other) leads to confusion, not to mention that forgetting South America is pure ignorance.

> unfortunately that's a pretty accurate representation of the way many tech people see the world.

True that.

That map shows Siberia and Russian Far East as "Eastern Europe" wtf? is the Kamchatka Peninsula part of Europe according to the UN?

Europe is traditionally divided from Asia at the Ural Mountains: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe

It's administrative borders. Russia is considered a European country.

i don't quite get the europe categories. define "eastern europe". and "other europe"? what about "central europe" where i live?

Yet another enormously USA-centric poll.

Khao Lak, Thailand for another ~12 hours, then boring Palo Alto or San Francisco. :)

You're going to be in Thailand for 12 more hours and you're reading HN? I'd be using what time I had!

Enh, I got burned out on Thailand months ago -- I was living there most of Q3 and Q4 2010. But I actually was mainly using HN on an iPad or iPhone while sitting on the beach, or at a restaurant, or going to/from dive boats, so it wasn't as bad as it could have been.

Lilongwe, Malawi, Africa

You have Los Angeles and Seattle in the same region? Seriously?

It is odd that the Middle East is mentioned but not South America... or maybe HN thought WTH we will assume it is "US Other" lol

This poll is probably going to be influenced heavily by the moment is was asked, c. 8:00 in the morning in western Europe.

Hahaha, awesome, Australia made the list :D (seems odd, but I'll take it ;)

Johannesburg - South Africa

Wow, surprising to see someone from South Africa. Not too many coders here. I am close to you at Durban right now. Originally from India. Here for onsite work. :)

Me too. What are you working on?

I am an iPhone Developer here.

Any Detroiters out there

Brazil here, in fact in a city called Campinas.

Glad to have some other brazilians around, I used to live in Campinas also but now live in Joao Pessoa.

Latin America

South Africa

Pittsburgh, PA, USA.

Gunma, Japan for me.

Istanbul, Turkiye

Linköping, Sweden

impressed by the number of Europeans here

Antwerp!

Go Belgium !

Boo-yah! First aussie :)

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