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Comment by d3nj4l | Hacker News Reader

I think the title should include "India", since I don't know if everybody is expected to know that Chennai is in India.

I did include the word India when I submitted it, but somehow it is gone now...

May have been cut off if it was at the end. Perhaps change to "in India" from "near Chennai"

FYI, it's usually worth checking the headline that shows up after submission. Sometimes things get altered (sometimes capitalization is changed, words may be removed, etc.). Often the alterations are fine, but sometimes they change it in more ways than you expected. If you edit the submission within the first hour (?) the edited title should remain (unless a moderator comes by later and changes it again).

“Hey Siri, where is Chennai”

The article also covers it immediately.

>90% of the people who read the headline won’t click... if you want to inform those >90% of people of a pertenant fact (Apple is starting to produce iPhone 11s in India), make the headline say it.

(Only reading the headline isn’t laziness... that’s like saying browsing library bookshelves without reading each book cover-to-cover as you go is laziness...)

No, the analogy doesn’t hold because it takes hours to read a book.

If you care that much, you can look up the information within seconds.

Apple even has this nice feature where you click on a word and it lets you look it up immediately.

Telling me that it’s in Chennai, gives me much more information than simply saying India because I know where Chennai is located

And even if I didn’t know, i appreciate the more specific information in the title, which implies the missing information.

Now that the title says India, I need to exert more effort to find the city.

So, does anyone feel like an Ugly American yet?

“Don’t tell me it’s in Milan, tell me it’s in Italy”

The analogy holds because it’s a mere difference in degree, not in quality. I picked the analogy to exaggerate the degree in order to more clearly illustrate the quality.

Although at least this headline is fully honest and not misleading, so kudos there.

Just curious, did you know?

I'm Indian, so yeah!

I think you might be surprised by how many HN readers (including non-Indians) know that Chennai is in India. I'm going down the list of largest Indian cities and it's not until #7 or #8, Ahmedabad and Pune, where we reach cities that I think a good number of people might not know a lot about.

So give us more credit! :)

Would you say the same about much smaller cities like Paris or Berlin?

Of course not. Obviously, how well-known a city is to a certain population doesn't depend on its size. There are a dozen cities in China more populous than NYC, but I doubt you could name them all.

There are two: Shanghai and Beijing. I would have guessed more too, but apparently not.

There's more than two. New York has about ~8 million pop. From the top of my head I can at least tell you that Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and Chongqing have over 10 million residents but there's probably more.

I think you may have pulled up NYC's metro area population and compared it to the urban population of Chinese cities. The metro population of large Chinese cities is in the 20-40 million.

It's kind of a question of where you draw the boundaries. Chongqing counts ~30M because its administrative area is the size of Austria. The UN World Urbanization Prospects project [0] tries to establish comparability between nations, and came up with a top 10 of:

1. Tokyo - 37M

2. Delhi - 29M

3. Shanghai - 26M

4. São Paulo - 22M

5. Mexico City - 22M

6. Cairo - 20M

7. Mumbai - 20M

8. Beijing - 20M

9. Dhaka - 20M

10. Osaka - 19M

NYC is next at #11 with 19M.

However, if you count strictly by "city proper" (as defined by a very wide range of administrative agglomerations), there are indeed THIRTEEN cities in China larger than NYC. I'm not sure this is a hugely useful metric, however, as economically-relevant city boundaries aren't truly represented by administrative lines of control.

[0]: https://population.un.org/wup/Publications/Files/WUP2018-Hig...

Metro area population is a better comparison though because city political boundaries are arbitrary and vary greatly city to city and country to country. The political boundaries in the US are much older than in China, for example, so they correspond a lot less well to where population centers actually ended up being, especially post-automobile when suburbanization allowed people to easily live outside the existing boundaries of a city's limit. And then, crucially, the city's limit was then never redrawn to accurately reflect all the people actually making up a part of that city's economy. Pull up a map of China from 1930 and it's completely different from today, whereas a map of the Northeast US from 1930 is nigh indistinguishable from today.

Just to be pedantic, if you think about Paris intra-muros, yes it's smaller but still the same order of magnitude. If you think about Paris with the suburb, it's actually about the same.

But the main thing : Paris is much more famous than Chennai.

Wait until you find out the population of Geneva :-) Or Sparta, for that matter.

No, those have much better marketing.

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