

Show HN: Hacker News Map 2011 - jmarbach
http://jmarbach.com/hackernews/the-hacker-map

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DTrejo
Full size image without the checkout process:

[http://jmarbach.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Hacker-
News-M...](http://jmarbach.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Hacker-News-
Map-2011-John-Marbach.jpg)

(2.9MB)

Edit: jmarbach, thanks for making this! Also, apologies for the hits to your
server.

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jmarbach
You're welcome! For what its worth at this point, I was able to change the
checkout process. Free downloaders will now bypass the checkout page and go
directly to the download page.

~~~
mthoms
Excellent work, thanks for doing this.

Out of curiosity, why would you have a checkout process to simply download an
image in the first place?

~~~
jmarbach
I'm a marketing type guy, so I'm very focused on gathering as much user data
possible for anything I create. Sort of the "If you can't measure it, then it
doesn't exist." philosophy. By adding a checkout process, I can gauge an
approximation on the number of downloads.

~~~
jacquesm
Don't you have serverlogs/analytics for that?

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jmarbach
The server logs might indicate how many times the image was loaded, however
they do not reveal the number of attempted downloads.

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jacquesm
So who is visiting HN from the center of Siberia? It's funny how people from
remote areas will be able to identify 'their' dot.

What a wonderful thing to make.

Thanks jmarbach!

ps: if anybody else wants to do cool visualizations like this here is a set of
HN visitor ips: <http://jacquesmattheij.com/hnips.txt>

~~~
kd0amg
_It's funny how people from remote areas will be able to identify 'their'
dot._

Yeah, I was amused to be able to point out "my" dot, though it would have been
a lot easier with state borders (or even just the Great Lakes) drawn in.

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askar_yu
Borders would great indeed.

I opened up the Google Map to check whether the dot around Central Asia
could've been "mine". Zoomed out the Caspian sea, equaled it to size in the
picture, then estimated the distance towards east... :)

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techiferous
Apparently there is someone on Hacker News from Churchill, Manitoba
(population 923). <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churchill,_Manitoba>

Perhaps they are simply tech-curious or maybe they are about to prove to the
world that you can launch a tech startup from anywhere! :)

~~~
peregrine
Or they are here for the great articles and comment. :)

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benologist
I can see me (possibly twice) in Central America. The only entrepreneurs you
find online in this part of the world are on Kiva heh.

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baguasquirrel
Is France more concentrated than the UK or the low-lying countries are? Why so
empty there?

I mean, it looks empty in California too. A heat map might've looked a bit
different.

~~~
jacquesm
That's actually a really good question. France is relatively isolated when it
comes to participating in the international technology scene. There are a few
very large French technology companies but for the most part it seems to me
(that's not proof) as though France is an island.

One possible reason for this is that using English is discouraged inside of
France both as a culture and by all kinds of funny rules and regulations.

Another reason is that France had a headstart over the rest of the world with
a system called MiniTel which gave pretty much one in three French households
access to a service with a lot of the functionality of the early days of the
net but on a system run by the French telecommunications monopolist. When the
internet and the web became popular the French lagged behind because what they
had was good enough to cause a lot of them to stick to what they had (a French
system for the French available everywhere versus a system that was mostly
geared towards the English language users). For the rest of Europe there was
no such alternative (Local variations did exist but were not as successful and
widely adopted as minitel was in France).

Finally, due to labor legislation France has one of the worst environments to
do start-ups in.

Taken together that should explain some (but probably not all) of the reason
why France with the exception of Paris is a little dark on that map compared
to the rest of Europe.

One HN'er that I know lives in the South of France actually commutes to London
for work, that's how anemic the tech scene in France outside of 'la banlieue'
is (that's French for 'the suburbs' which they use to refer to suburbs in
general but specifically to those surrounding Paris, inside that border is
where most of the French tech scene is located).

Possibly someone from France can jump in here and give some more background
and/or correct me if I'm wrong.

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jerome_etienne
here is comments for a french startuper. You give several reasons:

tl;dr : regulation: true but not that much. mintel: irrelevant now as its past
problem. langage: very true, crititcs: missed but quite big.

Long version:

\- regulation: yep france got many uselessly complex regulations. This slow
you down in creating and running a business.

\- minitel: the impact of this weird custom computer was big during the 90's.
Its delayed the arrival of internet in french households. But all that is now
way passed. for example: france got an internet bandwidth which is fast and
cheap.

\- cant speak english: i believe this one to be very true and true
significant. French are well known to be crappy with foreign langage. Even in
the computer industry, many french people got trouble even reading english.
This impacts the ability to get information by reducing the scope of what you
perceive. not sure how to formulate this. but this is big :)

\- critics: i think you missed one tho: french people do love to criticize.
this is deep in them, as if it was in their blood. This impacts
entrepreneurship, because starting a business is very risky, and taking a risk
is to lay oneself open to criticism. many "i told you so" kindof remarks.

ps: yes france is very centralized in paris. even if some delocalisation
happens because employees are cheaper outside of paris.

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BlazingFrog
I'm amazed at Germany's dots. The whole country seems covered with them when
the rest of Europe (save for the UK maybe) is sparsely represented.

~~~
ugh
Mostly the densely populated areas in the west along the Rhine, though. There
aren’t many dots in the southeast (except around Munich), in the middle (where
I’m from) and in the east (except Berlin). If you zoom in
(<http://www.zeemaps.com/map?group=180379>) you see that the dots in Europe
are (unsurprisingly) much denser in the UK, but Germany might take the second
place in Europe, even taking population in account. (The Netherlands and
Belgium also look busy, maybe they are taking the second pace in Europe after
the UK.)

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davidmathers
Two things I wasn't expecting: Argentina vs Brazil & Spain vs Portugal. What's
up with Portugal? And I didn't think France vs Germany/UK would be so drastic.
Amazing.

Some of the dots are in strange places. Like the 2 dots off the coast of
Africa are in the middle of the ocean. The dot in Tunisia is in the desert.

~~~
drp
That particular spot in the ocean off the coast of Africa, south of Ghana and
west of Gabon, is latitude 0, longitude 0.

~~~
jacquesm
Good Catch, I think you've caught a data cleaning bug, the geo ip location
service used to make the map probably returns '0,0' for IPs that it does not
have a location for.

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jcfrei
just bought one... been looking for a replacement for my big calendar ever
since new year.

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shimi
Israel is looking very busy

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mnutt
Very nice looking map. I wish CloudMade would let you use patterns like the
diagonal one you have for the water, because it would make for a very nice
looking real-time traffic visualization map.

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drake2010
Russia's absence is quite surprising. I would've thought more people visited
from that part of the world. Maybe it's the language barrier

edit: great work on the map!

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toadi
It's not especially the language barrier. But they have their own communities.
I live in Belgium and my wife is Russian. For her western friends she uses
Facebook, for her Russian Friends she uses the the known Russian clones.

The same applies for Russian Hackers.

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younata
Thanks for the new background.

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ElbertF
Cool, only a couple of dots around Geelong, Australia. One of them must be me.

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olalonde
The dot next to Hudson Bay (North of Canada) => rofl. Who is this? :D

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pgbovine
cool, it would be interesting to mine that raw data and look for correlations
with other geo-related data. ideas?

~~~
jmarbach
Here is the raw data that my designer used:
<http://www.zeemaps.com/map?group=180379>

