Good chunks of Scandinavia would consider themselves solidly part of 'Western Europe' and with 'Mid-Atlantic US' qualifying for a category it's surprising that the United Kingdom wouldn't rate a mention, I'd wager there are far more people from there active on HN than you might suspect.
Yes, in fact western europe tops the list with ~90 points and the day just started over here. I have the feeling that the american internet userbase seems so much overrepresented on the interwebs just because it's very loud.
EDIT: ops, I misread. I thought the thread was started 22 hours ago, not two. USA still has to wake up then.
I think people tend to forget how large Europe is in total (larger than the United States), the size of the population (731 million) and how large the economy of the region is.
Well that's exactly the point I was trying to make: HN (and reddit and many others) look extremely US centric but I'd love to see access log, for I think Europeans may not be so few after all, just extremely more silent.
The similar Slashdot poll a week or so ago ('What would you prefer to be paid in? Dollars / pounds / euros / etc etc') saw a similar effect: pounds had a huge lead for most of the UK day until the US woke up and hammered the 'dollars' button :)
"metres"? Seems like an odd measure from the distance from a city. Perhaps km or miles?
Also, I suppose Denver falls under "Other US"? Seems like several disparate geographic areas are getting lumped together. Additionally, I think that "Great Lakes" is a subset of "Midwest" (Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, West Penn) and "New England" (East Penn, New York). I do understand wanting to separate out Chicago, though. Might I suggest "California, Northwest, Southwest, Central, Midwest, Southeast, Northeast"?
Hey, there's South and Central America. Where do you think Brazil is for example? Don't you think Mexico has enough population to worth a mention? No mention of Africa either?
This isn't a very good poll because the groups are different things and sizes. Why don't you just do it by State/Province?
For example. I live in Toronto so I'm going to Select the Great Lakes, so are people in Waterloo, Buffalo, etc, etc all at the city level. On the other hand, you've lumped a bunch of countries together in Eastern Europe.
Also 100m is confusing because it refers to both metres and miles. I assume in your context you meant miles but lots of people with science backgrounds would assume metres.
Sometimes we get lumped in with Australia. Sometimes the region is called Oceania or Australasia (the origin of both these terms baffles me). I checked "other".
FYI, I made a map gadget for Wave (which now works in Shared Spaces) that visualizes where people are coming from. It uses a naive but functional clustering algorithm to show density bubbles. You can try it out in this space:
http://sharedspaces.googlelabs.com/V02zVAFPz8
(You will have to login with your Google, Twitter, or Yahoo cred though.)
Is it Southern Europe? It's right next to Italy, but doesn't extend so far south, and is barely a Mediterranean country. In any case, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece are what I'd call 'Southern Europe' more than west or east, although I'd say west if I had to pick one.
We always had the problem of putting Slovenia in one of the slots. If you ask me it's in Central Europe, but historically we ware always put in the Eastern part (but that probably has more to do with politics than geography).
Have the same issue with Poland. We need this damn Central Europe category so we can escape the dreaded "Eastern Europe" badge... And since we are in no way Western, Central is the only way. </sarcasm>
Unless we speak colloquially, then there's an infinite number of groups to qualify. The OP should use some reference to choose categories ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2147290 ), his are a bit strange and subjective.
It has no official significance, just a common term, and your link proves my point. I'm from Poland and by Larousse we're not central, by Brittanica we are.
For this survey it would be nice if we had a finer granularity. It would be interesting to see where the most HN users sit in Europe. Western, eastern and "other" Europe for a population of 700+ million people is rather sub optimal.
Compare that to the amount of options for the US with its 220 mio population.
That the UN doesn't break down the United States in to high-tech regions. So 'North America' would lump together 9 regions in the list above each with a different taste.
The poll is basically a US centric poll with the rest of the world thrown in as an afterthought, unfortunately that's a pretty accurate representation of the way many tech people see the world.
This actually causes a feedback mechanism that now means that being located 'in the valley' translates in to a very real competitive edge.
Wait, for me there's nothing wrong in narrowing specific regions (such as US or even silicon valley), but the rest (like dividing Europe into west, east and other) leads to confusion, not to mention that forgetting South America is pure ignorance.
> unfortunately that's a pretty accurate representation of the way many tech people see the world.
Enh, I got burned out on Thailand months ago -- I was living there most of Q3 and Q4 2010. But I actually was mainly using HN on an iPad or iPhone while sitting on the beach, or at a restaurant, or going to/from dive boats, so it wasn't as bad as it could have been.
Wow, surprising to see someone from South Africa. Not too many coders here. I am close to you at Durban right now. Originally from India. Here for onsite work. :)
* Where do you work (temporally)?
* Where do you work (spiritually)?
* Where do you work (existentially)?
...and my personal favorite:
* Where do you work (programmatically)?