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Comment by tompagenet2 | Hacker News Reader

Is this normalised at all? It always seems to look like a map of where cities are, although there are some interesting trends, especially if you pick surnames that have more recently become prevalent in a country.

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Might vary a lot based on the country and the name chosen.

Eg. Italy has only been a single state since the 1860s, and regional languages can surface a lot of differences. I entered my mom's southern Italian maiden name and got pretty high correlation to places where her dad's family had ties...

My surname is Polish, sort of, and it’s typically more associated with what was historically northeast Poland/Vilnius.

If you search my surname (Sielicki) you can see how there was a resettlement between the lands lost on the east and gained in the west after WWII.

Presumably not normalized—but I still can see the trends, e.g. of top two surnames in Ireland, one is more popular in south and the other in north.

Doesn't seem like it is, and the sibling xkcd is spot on. For rare surnames it's still possible to see trends, especially if you know the high-density areas. I tried some random surnames for Germany, and while Klein ("Small") is pretty popular, the Latin variant Minor has some obvious hotspot: https://www.kartezumnamen.eu/en/index.php?sur=minor

Also, TIL: "Ficken" (=to f...k) seems to be a (rare) surname in the northern parts of Lower Saxony.

https://xkcd.com/1138/

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