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Show HN: Hacker News Map 2011

77 points by jmarbach 16y ago

DTrejo 16y ago
Full size image without the checkout process: http://jmarbach.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Hacker-News-Map-2011-John-Marbach.jpg http://jmarbach.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Hacker-News-M... (2.9MB) Edit: jmarbach, thanks for making this! Also, apologies for the hits to your server.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- jmarbach 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    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 16y ago
      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 16y ago
        Don't you have serverlogs/analytics for that?
        jmarbach 16y ago
        The server logs might indicate how many times the image was loaded, however they do not reveal the number of attempted downloads.
      - gsivil 16y ago
        Unfortunately this measuring method could discourage the people from downloading and thus could affect the measurable quantity.
jcfrei 16y ago
just bought one... been looking for a replacement for my big calendar ever since new year.
mnutt 16y ago
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.
ElbertF 16y ago
Cool, only a couple of dots around Geelong, Australia. One of them must be me.
pgbovine 16y ago
cool, it would be interesting to mine that raw data and look for correlations with other geo-related data. ideas?
- jmarbach 16y ago
  Here is the raw data that my designer used: http://www.zeemaps.com/map?group=180379 http://www.zeemaps.com/map?group=180379
jacquesm 16y ago
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 http://jacquesmattheij.com/hnips.txt
- Kilimanjaro 16y ago
  Curious also about the hacker on top of Uluru, kick ass.
- kd0amg 16y ago
  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.
  - askar_yu 16y ago
    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... :)
- scottkduncan 16y ago
  I was a little disappointed to see that I didn't get a dot from accessing HN from here in Juba, capital of (soon to be independent) South Sudan. I may have arrived here after all the data was collected. Still, this is a great reminder of how global the community is and proof that hacking is happening outside Silicon Valley.
benologist 16y ago
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.
younata 16y ago
Thanks for the new background.
techiferous 16y ago
Apparently there is someone on Hacker News from Churchill, Manitoba (population 923). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churchill,_Manitoba 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 16y ago
  Or they are here for the great articles and comment. :)
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
baguasquirrel 16y ago
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.
- jws 16y ago
  Looks like the French hackers all live in Paris.
  - kentosi 16y ago
    Exactly what I was thinking. It's also striking that while France is virtually empty (except for Paris), its neighbouring northern and eastern countries are a stark contrast.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  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.
olalonde 16y ago
The dot next to Hudson Bay (North of Canada) => rofl. Who is this? :D
BlazingFrog 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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 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.)
shimi 16y ago
Israel is looking very busy
drake2010 16y ago
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!
- toadi 16y ago
  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.
davidmathers 16y ago
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 16y ago
  That particular spot in the ocean off the coast of Africa, south of Ghana and west of Gabon, is latitude 0, longitude 0.
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    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.

77 points by jmarbach 16y ago

Full size image without the checkout process: http://jmarbach.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Hacker-News-Map-2011-John-Marbach.jpg http://jmarbach.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Hacker-News-M... (2.9MB) Edit: jmarbach, thanks for making this! Also, apologies for the hits to your server.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
jmarbach 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    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 16y ago
      Don't you have serverlogs/analytics for that?
      - jmarbach 16y ago
        The server logs might indicate how many times the image was loaded, however they do not reveal the number of attempted downloads.
    - gsivil 16y ago
      Unfortunately this measuring method could discourage the people from downloading and thus could affect the measurable quantity.

jcfrei 16y ago

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

mnutt 16y ago

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.

ElbertF 16y ago

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

pgbovine 16y ago

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

jmarbach 16y ago
Here is the raw data that my designer used: http://www.zeemaps.com/map?group=180379 http://www.zeemaps.com/map?group=180379

jacquesm 16y ago

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 http://jacquesmattheij.com/hnips.txt

Kilimanjaro 16y ago
Curious also about the hacker on top of Uluru, kick ass.
kd0amg 16y ago
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.
- askar_yu 16y ago
  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... :)
scottkduncan 16y ago
I was a little disappointed to see that I didn't get a dot from accessing HN from here in Juba, capital of (soon to be independent) South Sudan. I may have arrived here after all the data was collected. Still, this is a great reminder of how global the community is and proof that hacking is happening outside Silicon Valley.

benologist 16y ago

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.

younata 16y ago

Thanks for the new background.

techiferous 16y ago

Apparently there is someone on Hacker News from Churchill, Manitoba (population 923). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churchill,_Manitoba 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 16y ago
Or they are here for the great articles and comment. :)
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

baguasquirrel 16y ago

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.

jws 16y ago
Looks like the French hackers all live in Paris.
- kentosi 16y ago
  Exactly what I was thinking. It's also striking that while France is virtually empty (except for Paris), its neighbouring northern and eastern countries are a stark contrast.
jacquesm 16y ago
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.

olalonde 16y ago

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

BlazingFrog 16y ago

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 16y ago
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 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.)

shimi 16y ago

Israel is looking very busy

drake2010 16y ago

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!

toadi 16y ago
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.

davidmathers 16y ago

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 16y ago
That particular spot in the ocean off the coast of Africa, south of Ghana and west of Gabon, is latitude 0, longitude 0.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  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.