Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

> Meant to simulate a town with a population of 35,000—about the size of Bennington, Vermont

because we all know how big Bennington is.




35,000 means this is likely a typo and that they probably meant Burlington. Bennington is maybe half that size.


It's hard to find a universally recognized small town of that size. Could you name one?


Setting aside small towns, I find it a bit alarming how many huge cities I know nothing about, places like Tianjin, Dhaka, Bengaluru, Ahmedabad, and Yangon. (Of course if everyone but me is familiar with these cities, I'm sure you'll let me know...) My theory is that the "culturally important" cities that everyone knows (Moscow, Cairo, London, etc.) lags by decades behind the actual growth of cities. Of course, renaming places like Rangoon to Yangon also doesn't help.

Take a look at the list of big cities and see how many you know: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_popula...


What jumped at me was the fact that list seems significantly inaccurate/unrepresentative. For example, Delhi which has a population of 11 million according to its wikipedia article is missing entirely from the list (It would be between 10 and 14 rank as it stands now). The article is controversial due to conflicts in the definition of the boundaries of a city, but by any definition, Delhi should definitely be up there.


Being in Asia, I'm more familiar with those cities than the ones to the west. The renaming often just corrects bad names picked by Europeans (e.g. Tienstin vs. Tianjin, though everyone still uses Bangalore when I was there last).


i've lived my whole life in california so monterey, ca. is what popped into my head. wikipedia confirms it's about 28k population. the peninsula area has more though.

after poking around on google maps, most historical towns are quite large now (roanoke, va and plymouth, ma are at least double that size).

bangor, maine is right around 30k. i bet most have at least heard of that town.

most of the famous little towns in the south like savannah, tuscaloosa, galveston are 50-120k+ population. key west is 25k though. with tourists in town i'm guessing it's right near 30k. there's also some really small towns by it that are probably not counted in the city population.

i think you'd be hard pressed to find a more famous 30k population town than key west. i'm willing to bet nearly every adult in the US has heard of the place, and has a pretty good idea in their head what it looks/feels like in terms of population.


I've never heard of Bangor, Maine before (despite growing up in the US). But Key West seems like a plausible alternative.


Los Gatos?

(This is not a well known place, but one of its schools was in "Saved by the Bell" so there's a tenuous pop culture link.

Wikipedia has several lists of US cities and, being polite, they tend to obscurity at the latter half of the lists. And those are places with over 100,000 people. My town - Cheltenham UK - has about 100,000 people.

So, how do you give an idea of how big a town for 35,000 people is? Number of high schools? Number of Starbucks? The article lists one church. A UK equivalent might list twelve pubs.

(my niece fibbed to me and said it was in "Greece" - something I believed for years. She also told me "oh yeah Deerhoof, they all went to my school" which is also totally untrue.)


35,000 is about the capacity of a medium sized football stadium.


Sunnydale, CA.


200,000?


That's Sunnyvale, not Sunnydale.


Springfield?



I'm sure he meant the other springfield. (There's a lot of them.)


The one in Oregon is the real one, according to Matt Groening.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: