Show HN: Hacker News Map 2011
jmarbach.com
jmarbach.com
http://jmarbach.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Hacker-News-M...
(2.9MB)
Edit: jmarbach, thanks for making this! Also, apologies for the hits to your server.
Out of curiosity, why would you have a checkout process to simply download an image in the first place?
What a wonderful thing to make.
Thanks jmarbach!
ps: if anybody else wants to do cool visualizations like this here is a set of HN visitor ips: http://jacquesmattheij.com/hnips.txt
Yeah, I was amused to be able to point out "my" dot, though it would have been a lot easier with state borders (or even just the Great Lakes) drawn in.
I opened up the Google Map to check whether the dot around Central Asia could've been "mine". Zoomed out the Caspian sea, equaled it to size in the picture, then estimated the distance towards east... :)
Perhaps they are simply tech-curious or maybe they are about to prove to the world that you can launch a tech startup from anywhere! :)
I mean, it looks empty in California too. A heat map might've looked a bit different.
It's also striking that while France is virtually empty (except for Paris), its neighbouring northern and eastern countries are a stark contrast.
One possible reason for this is that using English is discouraged inside of France both as a culture and by all kinds of funny rules and regulations.
Another reason is that France had a headstart over the rest of the world with a system called MiniTel which gave pretty much one in three French households access to a service with a lot of the functionality of the early days of the net but on a system run by the French telecommunications monopolist. When the internet and the web became popular the French lagged behind because what they had was good enough to cause a lot of them to stick to what they had (a French system for the French available everywhere versus a system that was mostly geared towards the English language users). For the rest of Europe there was no such alternative (Local variations did exist but were not as successful and widely adopted as minitel was in France).
Finally, due to labor legislation France has one of the worst environments to do start-ups in.
Taken together that should explain some (but probably not all) of the reason why France with the exception of Paris is a little dark on that map compared to the rest of Europe.
One HN'er that I know lives in the South of France actually commutes to London for work, that's how anemic the tech scene in France outside of 'la banlieue' is (that's French for 'the suburbs' which they use to refer to suburbs in general but specifically to those surrounding Paris, inside that border is where most of the French tech scene is located).
Possibly someone from France can jump in here and give some more background and/or correct me if I'm wrong.
tl;dr : regulation: true but not that much. mintel: irrelevant now as its past problem. langage: very true, crititcs: missed but quite big.
Long version:
- regulation: yep france got many uselessly complex regulations. This slow you down in creating and running a business.
- minitel: the impact of this weird custom computer was big during the 90's. Its delayed the arrival of internet in french households. But all that is now way passed. for example: france got an internet bandwidth which is fast and cheap.
- cant speak english: i believe this one to be very true and true significant. French are well known to be crappy with foreign langage. Even in the computer industry, many french people got trouble even reading english. This impacts the ability to get information by reducing the scope of what you perceive. not sure how to formulate this. but this is big :)
- critics: i think you missed one tho: french people do love to criticize. this is deep in them, as if it was in their blood. This impacts entrepreneurship, because starting a business is very risky, and taking a risk is to lay oneself open to criticism. many "i told you so" kindof remarks.
ps: yes france is very centralized in paris. even if some delocalisation happens because employees are cheaper outside of paris.
That said - it's freaking awesome: I can confirm I'm the dot on the west of France :)
Some of the dots are in strange places. Like the 2 dots off the coast of Africa are in the middle of the ocean. The dot in Tunisia is in the desert.
edit: great work on the map!
The same applies for Russian Hackers.