Hacker News Reader

Comment by hellofunk | Hacker News Reader

Except they excluded the country with the highest English language proficiency on the continent of Europe, the Netherlands. I suspect there’s another reason.

View on HN

(Survey author) The Netherlands doesn't have a large population, so it's never going to show up as a large part of the results. For next time it would be interesting to also let you toggle a relative view of participation vs population though.

It’s a small country but with nearly half the population of Spain, and the most densely populated country in the world outside of Taiwan. Not to mention a massive development community (and one of the largest internet infrastructures in the world). So, more relevant than you’d think :)

Taiwan and The Netherlands are not even close to being the most densely populated countries in the world. Taiwan is 652/km² and Netherlands is 418/km². Compare that to Macau 20,286/km² or Singapore at 7,804/km².

But I agree that The Netherlands has a pretty big development community, and generally their English is fairly close to being native.

That’s interesting, I’ve never done the math myself but I’ve seen it mentioned in many places that those are the two most densely populated countries in the world. Maybe they are only looking at the density in urban areas and excluding agricultural areas?

Oh, I see now that the stats I frequently hear cited exclude small city-states, and have a smallish threshold of somewhere in the 10 to 20,000,000 range for the country population.

That’s still kinda surprising, compared to Singapore or Hong Kong, I never found Taipei or Amsterdam densely populated. But stats don’t lie.

Dutch homes are pretty small and packed tightly together.

They were probably excluding city-states like Singapore and Vatican City (Macau is probably excluded because it is neither in theory nor in function a country, but is a special administrative region of China.) Or setting a minimum size or population threshold that has a similar exclusive effect.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com