Hacker News Reader

Comment by munk-a | Hacker News Reader

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

> 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'

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.

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.

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!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com