Show HN: Hacker News Map 2011

http://jmarbach.com/hackernews/the-hacker-map

by jmarbach • 15 years ago

77 36 15 years ago

jmarbach.com

DTrejo• 15 years ago

Full size image without the checkout process:

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.

jmarbach4• 15 years 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• 15 years 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?

jcfrei• 15 years ago

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

mnutt• 15 years 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• 15 years ago

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

pgbovine• 15 years ago

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

jmarbach4• 15 years ago

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

jacquesm4• 15 years 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

Kilimanjaro• 15 years ago

Curious also about the hacker on top of Uluru, kick ass.

kd0amg• 15 years 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• 15 years 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• 15 years 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• 15 years 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• 15 years ago

Thanks for the new background.

techiferous• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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

baguasquirrel• 15 years 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• 15 years ago

Looks like the French hackers all live in Paris.

kentosi• 15 years 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.

jacquesm4• 15 years 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.

jerome_etienne• 15 years ago

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.

thibaut_barrere• 15 years ago

The source of data may be skewed - are these IP addresses that led to a specific article, or at a specific time etc ?

That said - it's freaking awesome: I can confirm I'm the dot on the west of France :)

olalonde• 15 years ago

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

BlazingFrog• 15 years 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• 15 years 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) 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• 15 years ago

Israel is looking very busy

drake2010• 15 years 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• 15 years 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• 15 years 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• 15 years ago

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

jacquesm4• 15 years 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.

Show HN: Hacker News Map 2011

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