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Comment by mothsonasloth | Hacker News Reader

Why does America get states and UK doesn't get England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland?

>> 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.

China and India has a bigger population, and China has a similar landmass as the US yet is just one option in this poll.

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.

It's 04:33 in the morning in China (in one of the timezones at least), makes sense.

China uses one timezone as far as I understand, so it's 5am for all of China atm.

China is currently has 7 points, 19 hours later. India is 72, Russia is 23, Vietnam 7, UK is 242. hmmm

People in India are asleep right now.

Is HN even accessible behind the great firewall?

HN has been blocked for more than a year now.

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.

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.

No choices for Hong Kong or Macao.

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.

Not that weird. There are much more popular local websites in Russia at least.

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.

habr.com (habr.com/ru has much more content than English version).

By that logic China or Russia should also be listed with each single province or state

... especially India

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...

lol, there are barely 60 people from India.

Yep. Russia's largest federal subject (Yakutiya) is a third the size of the entire US, and it's one of 85 subjects)

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.

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.

The same can be said for England vs UK (or London vs England for that matter). I say that as an expat in London…

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.

In that case, may the poll should have been binary ? edit: typo

Actually, that's probably the reason - the poll was by binarynate not uknate.

I don't see how this poll determines this. I'm in LA but not silicon valley and had to pick California.

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.

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.

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.

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))

This isn't an experience unique to people from the US (see other comments). Would you consider saying "State Name, USA"?

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.

Indeed, that's what I meant. And for less known states, that's usually followed by an awkward silence until they do say US.

Big, but relatively unpopulated. Even California would rank together with Poland.

If you’re going by geographic area Australia should definitely be split up by state.

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.

OP wanted to prove that HN isn't Silicon Valley-centric and instead showed their bias toward US-centrism :)

The more pervasive bias is to think countries are the best way to carve reality at its joints.

Well I'm US:California, but definitely not SV.

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)

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

Wales and Scotland are countries...

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

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.

To be fair, there’s a lot of Texans who would like to call Texas a country as well.

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".

Canada has one a territory out of three and that one territory is 20% bigger than Alaska. And only 36,000 people live there.

Also - Canada is a monolith, at least break out Quebec!

Now now... You'd just be pandering to the separatists.

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.

Sad no one remembers that Newfoundland was the most recently sovereign polity.

No kidding, why is that guy trying to split Quebec from Canada? :(

Isn’t it… already the case? Culturally speaking, it looks and feel like a separate state. At least that’s the impression I got.

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.

Seconded! Toronto, Waterloo, Ottawa, Montreal, Calgary, Vancouver are all large and distinct tech hubs.

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.

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.

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.

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

Wouldn't brag about these to be honnest.

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.

Canada is smaller than California.

And larger than all the remaining 49 states. Why divide by states then?

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).

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.

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

Cornfields and tundra don't post on HN much.

Now now, we also have forests and lakes.

And so many mosquitos - we've got an entire province solely inhabited by mosquitos (within a margin of error) that we call Manitoba!

Thank you for stopping at Bangor, parts of Maine south of there are Northern Massachusetts!

> 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.

Sounds hard, but just keep on truckin'

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.

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.

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.

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”.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

Nope, the US should be a single option.

Just poll for countries.

The question was whether HN = Silicon Valley. Just poll for "Silicon Valley" and "not Silicon Valley."

Regions aren't defined by their cities.

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.

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.

Maybe the author looked at the UK and thought "Look at the state of that!"

Yeah and I'm totally missing Norrland in Sweden. Bummer ..

And someone has added imaginary places like Finland, as a joke.

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.

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.

I bet that if you tried to invent a language for this "Finland" thing, it would look like total gibberish!

カナカッキタカナシ

There is no down vote, IDK how Austrians will vote.

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