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Comment by rdwallis | Hacker News Reader

Ok so this is my first post on hn to get so many downvotes. I'm sorry if this annoyed you. To me the continued use of northern seasons for global events is an actual problem. You're welcome to downvote me without giving reasons but I'd love to hear a reply that defends the practice.

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Hi, co-organizer here. I definitely hear you on this. I actually ran something called the “NOSQL Summer” a few years back and we ran into a similar question, so we created a bunch of “NOSQL Winter” aliases to cover people in the Southern hemisphere. We may do something like that for the SoS as well.

It’s hard to resist names with Summer in them, because it’s a handy trope with lots of positive connotations. Summer (no matter which months of the year it happens in) is a good time for passion projects and the like. Plus there is the trend established by the “Google Summer of Code”, “Rails Girls Summer of Code”, “Infinite Summer”, etc.

Thanks Tim, I know it wasn't malicious. The only reason I decided to make the point was because it is a trend. And because I think to half the world it's an invisible problem.

Only about 10% of the human population lives in the southern hemisphere. That doesn't necessarily justify it, but it's far from 50/50.

I am in the tropics on the equator and the concept of 4 seasons is meaningless here.

At least when I was in New Zealand I could just inverse the seasons to see what USA based companies and people were talking about when they referenced their seasons. Now I have to do a mental calculation (which is hard to remember, as as I said, you don't get seasons here at all) to work out time frames when people are talking about stuff like this.

A decent chunk of the population of the planet (most of it, I think?) lives around the equator

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