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Which countries are mentioned the most on Hacker News?
- wmboy 11y agoNo mentions of New Zealand? :(
- merb 11y agoActually he talks about "popularity" however without knowing how many people are posting here from japan, this says nothing at all. Also as soon as you don't analyze the posts you don't know if it's popularity or not since you don't analyze the content. Maybe they talk about "I dislike something in Japan"? statistics only make sense when you have a bigger picture, everything else is just guessing how it could be and not how it is.
- sgdesign 11y agoI think the post makes it pretty clear that it's about how popular stories about various countries are, it's not trying to establish a popularity ranking of the countries themselves.
- itcrowd 11y agoI wonder how well this corresponds to the classic Heatmap xkcd comic; i.e. is the distribution of mentions not just a proxy measure for the geographical location of HN users..? Surely, you're more likely to submit a post about your home country since you can relate to that. https://xkcd.com/1138/ https://xkcd.com/1138/
- mahranch 11y agoBut would that really work in this case? China is the number 2 mentioned country and while I don't have any demographic information, I find it hard to believe that there would be that many Chinese on HN. Well, not just any Chinese, but Chinese nationalists (people who still feel like China is "home")? I guess it's possible it could be the work of their "reputation management" online guerrilla tactics. Though, the people engaging in that work generally aren't even Chinese, they're usually subcontractors paid by the Chinese to promote a "positive China" (in my experience, promoting a positive China usually means downplaying or mitigating whatever bad news has come out that day, or if nothing is going on, Japan bashing is on the docket). For whatever reason, people are under the false assumption that China only tries to manipulate public opinion and spread propaganda domestically. This couldn't be further from the truth. I remember Digg.com having to sue and fight to get the Chinese to stop gaming their system (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Water_Army#Legal_problems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Water_Army#Legal_prob...) People know that the U.S government does it, but they either forget or ignore the fact that other countries do it too. Maybe they just underestimate the scope, or are wholly ignorant of it because they believe they haven't encountered such propaganda before (believing something like that would be "obvious"). But it isn't. Hell, RussiaToday (RT.com) exists almost exclusively for this purpose (to spread russia's narrative of world events). China has their own government ran/directed version as well, Xinhua.com. You see these two websites submitted in excess to reddit and other social media sites. And do you know what's so great about reddit and HN to a person looking to spread or push an ideology or narrative? The points. They can keep track of what works, what doesn't, how well it works, and they can keep track of their employees. They can see how well each employee is doing at their job. It provides a measurement for them. A quantifiable piece of information to gauge the value of their work. Something they can bring to their bosses. I know I'm getting off topic here but I'm actually (surprisingly) not surprised India is so high if xkcd's premise holds. While I don't see many Chinese commentors, I do see loads of highly intelligent Indians here. I met one last year on HN who I had do some freelance work for me.
- izacus 11y agoUhm, the article talks about mentions OF a country, not nationalities of commenters. So your posts point is somewhat strange - you just generated several mentions of "China" yourself and you're not (I'm guessing) Chinese, neither is your post propaganda or promotes "positive China". Did you perhaps misunderstand the original article?
- itcrowd 11y ago> But would that really work in this case? China is the number 2 mentioned country and while I don't have any demographic information, I find it hard to believe that there would be that many Chinese on HN. I follow you up to this point (although I don't necessarily agree) > Well, not just any Chinese, but Chinese nationalists Why would you have to be a nationalist to post about China? In fact, you could submit a "China is bad" post. Everything after this point seems to miss my point completely. Also, a sister comment didn't read the part of the submission where it stated that "This only counts news stories posted, not comments."
- mahranch 11y ago> Why would you have to be a nationalist to post about China? Because the guy I replied to said: "Surely, you're more likely to submit a post about your home country" I'm an American but my grandparents are from Ireland. I personally feel no connection to Ireland nor do I have any idea what's going on over there. It's any other country as far as I'm concerned. I wouldn't post news about the country to HN. However, if I did, I would be a Irish Nationalist. Feeling any sort of loyalty to a country (whatever the reason or justification) is nationalism. It's literally the definition of the word. > "This only counts news stories posted, not comments." I'm not sure that distinction matters for my comment. It may for the study, but my comment was a bit of a tangent anyways.
- mjn 11y agoRegarding demographic information, I canvassed the top 100 HN users by karma in 2013, and at least at that time, the vast majority were from anglophone countries: http://www.kmjn.org/notes/hacker_news_posters.html http://www.kmjn.org/notes/hacker_news_posters.html
- progrocks9 11y agoI've done something similar with programming languages, and that comic got me thinking a lot :) By the way if anyone want to check it and have some feedback would be cool. http://nkittsteiner.github.io http://nkittsteiner.github.io
- codeshaman 11y ago#51-#54 have practically the same combination of colors on the flags...
- anaolykarpov 11y agoAlmost, because Belgium has black while the rest have blue
- alphabravodelta 11y agoCount for country Georgia is wrong, because it's associated to U.S state Georgia. I wonder how its possible to distinguish these two.
- bemmu 11y agoI suspect there are some other homonyms in there as well. Luckily most country names are not used that much for other meanings.
- beshrkayali 11y ago"Jordan" is. Most of these posts are about Michael Jordan, not the country Jordan. That messes up the entire analysis/rating.
- nl 11y agoMichael Jordan is a homonym as well. Apparently there was some basketballer with the same name as the famous AI researcher[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_I._Jordan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_I._Jordan
- gambiting 11y agoIf it counts adjectives, then "polish" is used very frequently even if you are not talking about Poland.
- gambiting 11y agoIf it counts adjectives, then "polish" is used very frequently even if you are not talking about Poland.
- daniehej 11y agoJordan is very high on the list as well, but the results mostly show people with that name
- zura 11y ago"country", "Europe",... words should be detected nearby, I believe.
- ekianjo 11y agoAverage score is a very poor measure. Because averages get pulled down heavily by extremes. Not a proper way to analyze such series.
- sgdesign 11y agoYou should write your own post! I'd be curious to see score compared to country population.
- pavlov 11y agoAt least Finland isn't a poor second to Belgium [1] in this ranking. [1] http://www.montypython.net/scripts/finland.php http://www.montypython.net/scripts/finland.php
- infinidim 11y agoSuomi mainittu
- SRSposter 11y agosuck it, Österland
- creshal 11y agoThank you for your valuable contribution, Piefke.
- amasad 11y agoJordan's results are wrong because it's counting things like "Michael Jordan" etc.
- ommunist 11y agoNo wonder its American-centric. Is statistics for the USSR and Russia aggregated as single line for "Russia"? These are two different countries.
- onion2k 11y agoThe USSR collapsed in 1991.
- ommunist 11y agoThe USSR is sort of Atlantis. It collapsed, but it gave birth to human travel in space and other useful gigs. And it is often mentioned at HN, since most of the Russian engineers born in 1968-75 learned the math the beautiful Soviet way with Skanavi drillbook.
- obelisk_ 11y agoIs this the book? https://books.google.com/books/about/Elementary_mathematics.html?id=qu_uAAAAMAAJ https://books.google.com/books/about/Elementary_mathematics....
- odovdor 11y agoYour link points to some math review book by the same author. I believe the author meant the drillbook such as https://issuu.com/normagee/docs/scanavi_sbornik_konkursnih_zadach_1/9 https://issuu.com/normagee/docs/scanavi_sbornik_konkursnih_z....
- avar 11y agoThe USSR made some amazing contributions to technology, but it's a bit of an exaggeration to say that it "gave birth to human travel in space" which to me implies that it was a novel technology nobody else was working on and wouldn't have happened any time soon without them. The first manned US flight was a month after the Soviet one, and the US had successfully returned monkeys from space before that, so arguably they were ahead technologically but less willing to use a human test subject. It's more accurate to say that ICBM development in both the US and USSR had the unintended side-effect of giving birth to human space travel once the political benefits of using nuclear launch systems for human space travel were realized.
- oneeyedpigeon 11y agoThis looks like it's searching literally for just the country name in text (and I guess that's all it can really do). Of course, this slightly favours countries with a name that might have another meaning (China, Turkey) or might represent another geographic location (Georgia).
- jmadsen 11y agoI'm guessing the number of stories about people's "China" tea sets & "Turkey" dinners are statistically minimal on Hacker News. Couldn't tell you how much Georgia is skewed, as a quick scan shows they are almost all from the state. Being number 40 on the list, I suspect it isn't that interesting to most people.
- oneeyedpigeon 11y agoA quick scan revealed a story about going 'cold turkey' but, I'm sure you're right. I was actually expecting some thanksgiving-related stories; I'm sure they're there!
- rurban 11y agoI find it curious that Austria ranks last in countries mentioned (with >100), but ranks #4 in upvotes. This is a very interesting and big discrepancy. Are the Austrians really that silent and excellent? But from my personal experiences in popular european culture they are compared to their more northern european fellas louder (and they do publish a lot) and of the same kind of excellence.
- creshal 11y agoIt's lumped together with Germany in a big chunk of the few submissions where it gets mentioned, so that could explain the similar scores.
- nl 11y agoThere are many comments remarking on how Jordan because of the large number of stories mentioning Michael Jordan (both of them) is causing problems. Apparently people are unaware that this problem is at least partially solved in modern named entity recognition systems. The first story from a search for "Jordan"[1] is "Machine-Learning Maestro Michael Jordan on the Delusions of Big Data and Others". Stanford NLP[2] tags "Michael Jordan" as PERSON. The first story mentioning Jordan as a country is "Internet Blocking Begins In Jordan". It tags Jordan as LOCATION Spacy's POS tagging tags "Michael" and "Jordan" as a compound person in the first example[3] and "Jordan" as GPE (geo-poltical entity) in the second[4] [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Jordan&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Jordan&sort=byPopularity&prefi... [2] http://corenlp.run/ http://corenlp.run/ (annoyingly the state can't be passed via URL parameters) [3] https://api.spacy.io/displacy/index.html?full=Machine-Learning%20Maestro%20Michael%20Jordan%20on%20the%20Delusions%20of%20Big%20Data%20and%20Others https://api.spacy.io/displacy/index.html?full=Machine-Learni... [4] https://api.spacy.io/displacy/index.html?full=Internet%20Blocking%20Begins%20In%20Jordan https://api.spacy.io/displacy/index.html?full=Internet%20Blo...
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- syllogism 11y agoYou can see that the tagger basically works on this specific case by looking at the distributional similarity of the tagged tokens, as well: https://sense2vec.spacy.io/?Jordan%7CGPE https://sense2vec.spacy.io/?Jordan%7CGPE https://sense2vec.spacy.io/?Jordan%7CPERSON https://sense2vec.spacy.io/?Jordan%7CPERSON (This specific word works well because there are plenty of examples of both entities in the training data, which has a lot of text from the 1980s Wall Street Journal. Other examples are much worse. I have high hopes that distributional similarity can help surface these errors, and fix them.)
- lmm 11y agoI imagine it's a lot easier to tag "Michael Jordan" (correctly spelled) as a person than "Micheal Jordan".
- xioxox 11y agoInteresting, though a lot of posts seem to be about the US by default. I see he's missing Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as mappings for the UK. It would also be useful to add capital or major cities as synonyms (e.g. Paris, London, Berlin...).
- bertil 11y agoI would love to have the ability to tag a post as “relevant outside of the US” vs. “not relevant outside of the US” for things like tax, identity theft and banking.
- vishnuks 11y agoHN Search on Algolia says India is more mentioned than China. India has 37,236 results but China has only 15,228. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=china&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=china&sort=byPopularity&prefix...
- aidos 11y agoInterestingly, if I type china I get 15,228 results but then after I hit enter it drops to 8,682. 8,318 if I wrap it in quotes. Ah, actually, if I leave it for a minute it bounces back up to original number. This is all very curious behaviour! Edit it's the same for India too, btw
- aws_ls 11y agoI observed that it shows results like 'Indie', 'Indians' etc. , when you type 'India', until you press <enter>. On pressing <enter> there is a finality to the search, and it removes other possibilities.
- bymafmaf 11y agoWell, Turkey has double meanings which makes it wrongly #24 :)
- thomasilk 11y agoAustria has the least mentions but is in 4th place when it comes to upvotes per post. That's what I'd call efficiency ;)
- markatkinson 11y agoI see South Africa is nowhere on the list :/
- DanBC 11y agoDoes this under-count the US? A lot of stories will be about "California", and they don't feel the need to say "California the US"
- pbhjpbhj 11y agoMany stories are pertinent to a particular geography but fail to mention it at all. Commenters seem often to assume all readers are in the USA.
- cel1ne 11y agoOn a related note: Most articles in my medium.com-digests originate in the US and focus on US-discourse. It's not interesting to read yet another debate on state health-care or dating, if you're living in europe where state health-care is really a no-brainer and dating isn't that structured. I asked the medium-team if I could somehow configure my digest, so that I have more diversity in the origins of the articles they send me. They declined, so I stopped reading it. It's a shame. I backed them on kickstarter originally.
- spinningarrow 11y agoWhat sort of structure does dating have in the US? (Genuinely curious, I've never thought about this before)
- tomp 11y agoI'm curious about this as well, I don't understand the "dating isn't that structured" part of his/her post at all.
- chrisseaton 11y agoI think in the UK a lot of relationships have no 'dating' phase at all, people just start spending more time with each other and then one day they're implicitly boyfriend-girlfriend with nothing actually said. The idea of asking someone to go on something that was expressly a date or to be exclusive would have seemed very stilted and formal to me when I was single. I'm married and I think I only ever went on two 'dates' with my wife when we started seeing each other. Everything else was far less formal.
- personlurking 11y agoHow can I be notified when a particular country is mentioned on HN, whether stories or comments?
- taneliv 11y agoMight be fun to see EU countries combined under single label.
- amar-singh 11y agoMostly US ...
- known 11y agoAre they different from http://stackoverflow.com/ http://stackoverflow.com/?
- sbensu 11y agoHere[1] are the countries sorted by stories per capita which shows which countries are over represented. If you want to play with the script that fetches the population numbers, go to Tools > Script Editor and add your Wolfram Alpha API key. [1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UX3OvN6MXDkuCiLpKPW2xB74UQz8F9KVapm7Xy_JLCg/edit#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UX3OvN6MXDkuCiLpKPW2...
- techaddict009 11y agoSurprisingly Title wise the result is bit different: India in title was more than China: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=India&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=India&sort=byPopularity&prefix... https://hn.algolia.com/?query=China&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=China&sort=byPopularity&prefix... And United States lesser than both: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=United%20States&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=United%20States&sort=byPopular...
- scrollaway 11y ago"United States" doesn't account for "US", "USA" or "America"
- captainmuon 11y agoIt is a bit unfortunate he omitted Korea (both Koreas, since it is ambiguous). I would expect North Korea to have shown up quite often. There appears to be a certain morbid fascination with that country on this site (which I can somehow understand).
- wcummings 11y agoHN barely pays attention to anything outside of silly valley, in or outside of the US. Lots of spam and low quality marketing content for shitty west coast startups.
- wott 11y agoThemes: 1 United States: masters of the Universe 2 China: evils commies, but biggest capitalists 3 India: H-1B source 4 United Kingdom: mother of colonial masters 5 Japan: funny robots 6 Russia: evil soviets conquering the free world 7 Canada: mounted police 8 Germany: nazi cars 9 Australia: other indigenous people genocidal colonists, but more discrete 10 France: messy/ordered, free/binding systems no one understands; Parisss 11 Israel: origin of half of the problems of the world, but nothing can be said against them for they are friends of the masters (even masters cannot say anything), so let us talk about drones 12 Spain: collapsing tomayto economics 13 Brazil: bikini crimelords, evil socialists 15 Pakistan : like H-1B, but terrorists 16 Netherlands: technical devices for growers 17 Sweden: boring devices 18 Greece: collapsing goat economics, might become evil socialists 19 Italy: romantic bunga-bunga 20 Ireland: collapsing potayto economics, less Irish than 4th generation American-Irish masters. 21 Mexico: builds and feeds Silicon Valley 22 Switzerland: safe, safes, savings
- fennecfoxen 11y ago> 9 Australia: other indigenous people genocidal colonists, but more discrete Psst. Discrete is when you're doing math with integers and exploring non-continuous phenomenon. Discreet is when you're trying to keep a low profile. Pass it on. > 11 Israel: origin of half of the problems of the world Certainly involved in half the problems, but is it the origin or is it the destination of the problems? One way or another: some day long after they're finally vaporized by atom bombs, history will surely look back on us and wonder what was wrong with humanity in our day and age (while pointing fingers about the next brewing crisis, obviously)
- forinti 11y agoI had to look up the origins of these words and they both derive from the latin "discretus". So this makes me wonder why there isn't one spelling only. It couldn't do more harm than the verb "to read".
- kuschku 11y agoInterestngly, in German, there is only one spelling and pronunciation for both.
- pvsukale1 11y agofeeling kinda pround seeing india on no 3
- awl130 11y agoreally? you just left out korea completely? that sucks. the confounding of north and south korea would have been informative nonetheless.