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Comment by sigil | Hacker News Reader

There were similar polls in 2013. We could compare against those to measure tech dispersal over the last decade!

- "Poll: Where are you currently living?" (Countries, 2013) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6582647

- "Poll: If you're in the US, What State Do You Live In?" (US states, 2013) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5222370

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That might measure HN moving to a wider audience rather than the original audience physically moving.

The community is clearly a lot different than in it was 2013. I would guess a relatively larger portion of people outside of the Bay Area is part of that.

For sure, this would only be a rough measure of tech dispersal itself, not a longitudinal study of HN users. The latter is interesting to us HN old timers, but the former is a consequential thing for the whole world.

I'd like to see these votes divided by the total population of each place

Every geographic survey is just a population heat map result or something

https://xkcd.com/1138/

If the goal of the poll is to determine where HN users/the tech industry is concentrated, whether the overall population in those areas is high or not doesn't really matter.

Sure, if that's the goal. What if my goal was to understand just how over-represented English-speaking regions of the world were in the HN demographics? Nothing wrong with having multiple goals

And population IQ.

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