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Comment by Systemic33 | Hacker News Reader

I'm quite surprised that there are that many Danish people on HN.

There are 2 on the list, and if it is from the leaderboard (which I presume it is) I'm one of them.

I think Denmark is quite an interesting case. Unknown to most people a lot of great technology is written by Danes (The V8 javascript engine in Google Chrome, Google maps, Google wave, Ruby on Rails, C#, Varnish, PHP, Turbo pascal, Delphi, C++, and probably more that I can't think of right now) yet we don't really have much to show for it in terms of entrepreneurial success, large technology companies or worldwide esteem. Obviously there are some fairly tech-savvy Danes around, so it would only be natural that a few of them hang out on HN.

Maybe we're just bad at marketing...

Well I never knew till the other day that Zendesk started off in Denmark. Also Podio. Probably by the time a Danish company becomes successful they've already moved part of their business to Silicon Valley and everyone thinks they are a US company, like I did with Zendesk.

That's probably a correct observation. DHH, Bjarne Stroustrup, Rasmus Lerdorff and Anders Hejlsberg all moved to the US.

Seems like all we have left is Poul Henninng Kamp (Varnish and BSD)

Lars Bak is still in Aarhus I believe, along with the core of the Google V8 team. Unity also still has most of its tech team in Copenhagen, but many people think it moved to SF, because it moved its marketing & headquarters to SF (bigger market, etc.).

The trend I see is

* native English-speaking countries: 69

* Germanic language countries: 4

* Asia: 4

* Romance language countries: 3

The breakdown between English-speaking countries shows no preference for any. The breakdown within the US shows San Francisco Bay Area disproportionately represented, followed by Seattle and Boston in a 2nd tier disproportionate by population. Capital cities are disproportionately represented within other English-speaking and Germanic language speaking countries.

"that many" = 2? Not exactly an adequate sample to draw general conclusions from.

Compared to population, and compared to other European countries. Denmark has 5M, compared to US 300M

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