>> Of course, in 2008, pure investment banks largely failed.
Each US state is about the size of a European country, sometimes with similar population. That's one of the things that always comes up in polls of what surprised Europeans about the US when they visited - just how big it is.
It's... still one country, though. And while I understand that Americans are very preoccupied with the difference between California and New Jersey, please understand that it's not that important (or obvious) to the rest of us.
Fun fact: there's a program in Japan that interviews and follows foreigners. One of the first questions is "where do you come from". Most Americans answer with a state name.
I've watched some YouTubers do that. For the people that say "United States," a common very follow-up question is "where in the United states"?
That tracks with my own personal experience internationally: if I just say "the US," people ask for more specifics. So I now just respond with more specificity to start.
Here's the thing: when I answer to such a question that I'm French, I also do get the followup question "where in France?". (although if the question is "where do you come from" rather than "where are you from", I now answer that I come from Japan, which gets WTF looks and different followup questions (but I only do that outside Japan, where I live))
My mistake, I see now the person I responded to may have meant that Americans say just the state. In the videos I've watched, and at least for myself, I usually hear it like you suggested: state + USA.
I suppose it's because the main issue is whether or not HN is "Silicon Valley", and so if you're in the UK (for example) you are not Silicon Valley regardless of if you are in NI, Scotland, Wales, or England.
Then make your own poll that is split up how you like it. I see no problem splitting up large countries in polls like this. If only this poll did more of it. I'm not sure you have the knowledge to speak for "the rest of us" about how polls should be split up.
China also has relatively few people that simultaneously speak English well enough to read/post here while also having easy access to VPNs. If I had to take a guess I would bet there are more people that are Chinese first generation emigrants that live outside of China on HN than there are Chinese citizens that live inside China on HN.
Pretty much anyone who speaks English well enough to read/post here would have easy access to a VPN. Firewall is easy to hop, you just need to know that you want to.
You mind sharing any of them if they are similar to Hacker News in terms of content, comments and audience? I love browsing websites in languages I don't yet understand fully.
Should have at least listed the Special Administrative Regions of China, Hong Kong and Macau which have their own passports and currencies. I'm not going to vote for China since I am not allowed to enter 95% of it without a visa.
Because the premise of the question was Silicon Valley, so they need a category that separates Silicon Valley away from as much as possible without making the list too long. So split every state out and then have every country after that as those are also "outside silicon valley". If it was just the US as a single option it would not actually fit the premise of the question.
This question feels primarily aimed at the US population, IMO.
This is the right answer, but it is not OPs fault, it is a typical custom of Americans. I saw it invariably happen while living in Europe and interacting with a highly international community (Americans were the only ones that answered "where are you from" with a state, everybody else, including Canadians, Indians, Russians, Mexicans, etc named their country)
Well, we have states that are almost 3 times as large as the entire UK. If the pollster listed every region the size of Wales, this would be a very long list
Outside the UK, "country" usually means "independent state".
The UK usage is more local than anything else, because if you're going to call Wales a country you'd really need to call things like Bavaria or Texas countries.
Do you mean to say that referring to countries as regions is incorrect? I thought “region” was a pretty generic term for geographic area, regardless of political boundaries
I like that list except Waterloo - I think if you're going to make a serious argument about Waterloo than Berkeley/Oakland would be a separate hub from Silicon Valley - and ditto for Worchester, Boston and Cambridge MA. Waterloo definitely has its own thing going on but it's pretty darn close to being an offshoot of Toronto at this point.
There are definitely people who commute all over the GTA, but I still feel like Waterloo Region is culturally distinct from Toronto proper— Google and Facebook are in Waterloo; there's the devices heritage from Blackberry and then later companies like Thalmic and Pebble; there's the robotics presence in Waterloo with Clearpath, Voyis, Avidbots, and Aeryon/FLIR; and finally there's networking companies like Blue Coat, Sandvine, and Arctic Wolf.
I guess I don't know as much about the Toronto scene, but based on the recruitment emails, it seems to be a lot more fintech, game/mobile dev, and big data analytics stuff.
No, it's not a brag— but they were all pretty influential and continue to cast a long shadow over the tech culture of the region. Particularly Blackberry, since it made a lot of staff very wealthy, who then went on to found, advise, invest-in, and work-for other companies using those skills.
It's not hard to look around Communitech and clearly see a bunch of startups still running essentially on BlackBerry money.
I think now a days most of those are in Calgary if we're being honest... they want an "independent western canada" which some how manages to ignore that British Columbia even exists.
Oh yeah definitely, I was half-kidding. Quebec and the rest of Canada have a lot of very significant differences. We are probably more divided right now than we've been ever since the last referendum.
An example I love to give is the holiday "Victoria day" in Canada which is called "Patriot's day" in Quebec, celebrating the attempted revolution in Quebec that were brutally put down by the English in 1837-1838.
By land area Canada is about 20 times as large as California, by culture I'd consider Canada to have a few much more distinct areas than California (comparing Toronto vs. Vancouver vs. Calgary the distinctions are pretty close to the range you'd get across the whole of California by my opinion - with Quebec being radically different... Quebec is less like Vancouver than Texas or Mississippi is like California). By population there's only a really narrow difference between the two - so I really don't agree with that assessment.
Also, as a former Vermonter please don't you dare call me a New Hampshirite - but for a survey like this you can probably lump everything from Philly to Bangor into one chunk.
Because the alternative to not dividing by states is have a monolithic US, vastly larger than all other geographic units.
Like, pick a threshold of size N. Start at the top, divide at countries, and the recursively keep dividing any given node until you have passed under the threshold N. California gets divided before Canada (and the UK).
At the time of commenting, US states have 3 of the top 5 positions (and the top 1). So it seems that a US state is roughly comparable to other countries in terms of HN readership.
I posted a script above to get a sorted rank. This other one gets you the aggregate numbers for US:
[...document.querySelectorAll('.fatitem table .athing')].map(el => [el.textContent.trim(), el.nextSibling.textContent.trim()]).reduce((a, [c,s]) => c.startsWith('US') ? a + parseInt(s) - 1 : a, 0)
As of this comment, there are around 10 times more votes for US than the second most voted country (Canada). A fourth of those US votes are for California. Meaning, there are twice as many votes for California as there are for Canada.
This suggests that Silicon Valley still represents a significant portion of the HN community.
Because everyone has heard of most the US’ states, but most people wouldn't have a clue where South Tyrol, or Chubut are.
Also, in IT or CS, a state like TX or CA are more prominent than any European one. CA is probably more important by itself than all of Europe. Even PA or GA are heavy hitters that would smoke most similarly sized EU countries.
> CA is probably more important by itself than all of Europe.
I recall reading (years ago) that "If California were an independent country, it would be the sixth-largest in the world"... Which would still (at least at the time) put it behind Germany. So, faaar from "more important by itself than all of Europe".
> Even PA or GA are heavy hitters that would smoke most similarly sized EU countries.
Given how wrong you are about California above, I very much doubt this one.
Sorry about that! This was an oversight on my part. In retrospect, I wish I had included separate entries for regions of UK, Canada, and others. I thought about adding new entries for them now, but it seems a bit too late since folks have already been voting.
Because American states are more significant than British regions. UC Berkeley alone has more Nobel laureates than Wales+Scotland+NorthernIreland. Think of it as Huffman coding on significance.
Some people in central Canada I have spoken with actually don't know that where I live is a Canadian province. They've never heard of it. Plus time zones too they said they thought it ended at Eastern time but there are two more time zones past that.
