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Comment by thisandthat | Hacker News Reader

hooray go Seattle!

I'm loath to count anything on the Eastside as Seattle.

"10,000 year old stone tools found in Redmond" doesn't sound as good. They were probably just used by ancient Microsoft programmers in building a very early version of Windows, which is why this is on Hackernews at all.

Maybe they worked for Boeing?

Redmond...not Renton.

Windows 3.1?

No. Windows 3.1 just looks 10,000 years old, but it's actually quite recent.

haha. That was the joke I was trying to reference.

-> make reference to ancient looking ui, gets downvoted.

The article clearly says suburban Seattle.

Normally I would use "suburban X" to describe one of the more suburban parts of X, not a different, nearby city, which I would instead call "suburb of X". I guess maybe this is because I grew up in what was clearly the suburbs despite being legally part of the primary city of the region (Phoenix, which is more or less a suburb of itself).

The difference might not matter in places like where I'm from, where Phoenix blends into Glendale or Mesa or whatever. In Seattle it does feel more like two nearby cities than one mass of suburbs, though, since there's a big physical boundary (Lake Washington) between them.

Edit: Further muddying the waters, I kind of lump the Eastside into one "city" from a geographical perspective, though legally it's Bothell, Kenmore, Redmond, Bellevue, etc. I do think of Seattle as a separate thing.

Some parts of California make this easier by calling the county by the name of the biggest city. This makes local geographical references easier for non local audiences. Eg. The desalination project in Carlsbad -> San Diego County -> California -> United States. Even though Carlsbad isn't the city of San Diego, CNN might report that a desalination project is in progress in San Diego, and still be relatively accurate.

It seems that people do this in conversation by default already, even if the legal boundaries don't conveniently match with what they mean.

> Bothell

As a BHS graduate, this kind of got me. We are clearly "north" of the lake, and more apart of Everett than say Bellevue.

I'll have to plead ignorance, then! The only times I've gone to the northern cities on the Eastside are biking on the Burke, and since I'm not constantly checking a map it's not clear to me exactly where the boundaries are between Lake Forest Park, Kenmore, Bothell, etc.

As the roads go, Kenmore is just on the western side of the lake (its actually right above it, but there is a huge deadspace to the south of residences), you keep going that way and you are quickly in Seattle. If you go along the eastern side of the lake, you are basically in Kirkland which abuts Bellevue.

Bothell is basically equidistant from Seattle, Everett, and Bellevue (I was living in Snohomish County, so closer to Lynwood and Everett), basically under all those cities's influences.

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