

Hacking Small Town America - dcaldwell
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/05/hacking-small-town-america-the-unexploited-market-of-tyler-texas/238584/

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lysol
I can't bring myself to take this person seriously. As someone who grew up in
a real small town, hearing some guy worry about having to make sacrifices in a
small city of 100,000 people just seems so silly. Things like "There might not
be a Subway within walking distance from my house".

Proximity to other cities is also a big factor. I line in a city of 28k
people, and the closest real city is 2 hours away. This place he's moving to
is a mere 40 miles from Ft. Worth, TX, a city of over 700k people.

Ultimately it just sounds like a guy who thinks he's "roughing it" by driving
his motor home to campground with electricity and running water.

~~~
techsupporter
Minor note: Tyler is 100 miles east of Dallas. There's a distance marker at US
69 and I-20 that says "Dallas - 100" that I've seen about that many times so
it stands out. :) To compare, there are about 40 miles between the city
centers of Dallas and Fort Worth, or Fort Worth and Denton.

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anamax
Sure, maybe the polling place info may not be online, but I'll bet that the
polling places haven't moved for years and that folks don't have problems
finding them.

as to "), but no one seems to have done any analysis of it (disappointing
since the town has four colleges)." - what is the benefit of said analysis?

>I expect to spend a great deal of time actively disagreeing with people. ...
> The list goes on. Tyler has information that could be freed. Tyler has
government that could be opened. ... > Instead I'm going to hack Tyler to be
what I need it to be.

Ah yes, the big city kid is going to teach the yokels how to do things.

If Tyler is at all typical, it's about 100x as open as Chicago.

If the author wants Chicago, he should stay there.

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vandalizeit
"I'm going to do my best to live without being a consumer of gasoline, just as
I did in Chicago."

Good luck with this. I don't think he realizes how pedestrian unfriendly
cities in the Southwest are. He'll quickly realize a trip to pick up groceries
will take 2 hours via bus, and he'll be forced to walk without sidewalks in
105 degree heat to the bus stop while everyone else drives by in
airconditioned cars looking upon him like he is homeless.

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mlinksva
<https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Tyler,_Texas> is in east
Texas. Big stretch to call that Southwest.

Also at 100k people it isn't exactly "small town America" as the article
claims.

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techsupporter
Tyler is the county seat of Smith County; that's why it has 100,000 people.
For comparison, the Tyler/Longview (nearest city of size that isn't a suburb
of the other) area has about 415,000 people. The population of the next-
nearest major area in Texas? Dallas/Fort Worth at 6.6 million people. The
question of what makes up "small town America" is somewhat fuzzy, but Tyler,
compared to an 70 minute drive (not at all unreasonable for a state the size
of Texas) west, fits the bill.

The other point from anamax about the city slicker teaching the yokels how it
should be done is very apt. There is a reason why hackers gravitate towards
Silicon Valley: people like to be with other people who are doing the same
thing. Tyler is by no means dumb. As the author--who admittedly also posted
here that he didn't want to debate the article--points out, there are two
universities (University of Texas-affiliated, I might add) and two junior
colleges. The area is also home to pipe and robotics companies. It is also
very insular, especially when it comes to "being shown how things are done"
because the Dallas area has been the older, wiser brother to Tyler for
decades.

Oh, and "nothing about local politics?" I guess the reporting from KLTV, the
oldest television station in Tyler, doesn't count.[1]

1 - <http://www.kltv.com/category/74361/politics>

~~~
pnathan
Erm, 100K is not small town America.

I grew up outside of a town with 5K people; it was the largest town in a
50-mile radius.

Small towns have under 1K people, at least where I come from.

~~~
semanticist
I live in Scotland, where the entire country has less people than Dallas/Fort-
Worth - and even here 1k people isn't a 'small town', it's a village.

The town I grew up in had a population of ~35k, and it was definitely a 'small
town'.

These things are all relative to your local norms, but I think demanding that
'small towns' have at most four people and a lame horse is excessive.

~~~
somabc
It has an urban population of 96,900 that is fairly large by Scottish
Standards. Inverness and Stirling have ~70,000 each and they are cities.

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thingie
In Europe (at least continental), there is a clear distinction between
"village" and "town", because historically, "town" was a legal status granted
by the king or church (city would be perhaps the town where the archbishop
would have his seat), but it wasn't necessarily distinguished so much by its
size, they'd be all very small.

Personally, I'd but the line between "town" and "city" to having some kind of
rapid rail transit. (That'd mean, for example, that in the country where I
live is just one city.)

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staringmonkey
@all I'm the author of the post (@onyxfish). I'm not even remotely interested
in debating its merits here. You all seem well-equipped to form your own
judgements. However, for the sake of clarity, I wrote a __blog__ post that got
__aggregated__ by The Atlantic. The original post is at
<http://hacktyler.com>. It wasn't written for anyone but those who know me,
but people liked it so its become public. Think what you will.

~~~
bproper
What did the Atlantic offer you. Just a platform to republish and reach a
wider audience?

~~~
staringmonkey
Yes.

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zohaibr
All his assumptions from the blog posts seems to be based on what he found
online. Wait till he goes there!

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ahi
I know Tyler, Texas only as the home of the United States District Court for
the Eastern District of Texas, where all the patent trolls take their cases. I
always just assumed it was because the jury pool were morons. Which isn't
fair, kind of like this article.

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yason
Offtopic, but for some reason I wanted to take a closer look at Tyler, Texas.
Loaded it up in Google Earth's streetview and "drove" around a bit.

Where is the city centre of Tyler?

I started around where Google placed the "Tyler, Texas" sign but the area
looked like some rundown neighbourhoods that you could expect to find at the
far edges of a big city.

~~~
Jebdm
I'm from Tyler. There's not really a "city center". There is a downtown area,
which is where Google drops you, but the surrounding area is mixed; some of it
is fairly nice, and some of it is a bit run down (as you say). The downtown
area mostly hosts legal stuff—courts, lawyers' offices, city government, etc.

South Tyler is generally considered to be somewhat nicer than the downtown
area (which is further north). For instance, one of the nicer neighborhoods in
Tyler is Holytree, which is off of Grande near its intersection with South
Broadway. There are also some nice areas around the southern parts of Paluxy,
which runs roughly parallel to Broadway. A lot of the nicer areas, though, are
not actually within Tyler itself, but in the surrounding suburbs.

~~~
yason
Thanks, I'll "drive" some more! ;)

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bugsy
What ever happened to The Atlantic’s attention to detail? Articles don’t use
balanced quotes, have ‘--’ rather than ‘–’ emdashes, and now sound like a
teenager's angry blog with opening lines such as “things are fucked up”
referring to one’s private life.

~~~
defroost
He is obviously not particularly thrilled with getting divorced and having to
move from a city that he is fond of, to a smaller, less interesting location,
so I think we can cut him some slack. This subject didn't seem to require that
he write in the style of John Updike, after all.

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kongqiu
Looking forward to seeing what he accomplishes. What are some of the better
"hack gov data" orgs or apps?

I know of the Sunlight Foundation and OpenSecrets -- what else?

