There 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]
(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.)
I 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.
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. 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_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.
Uhm, 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?
> 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."
> 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.
Regarding 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
I'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
I 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.
This 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).
I'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.
A 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!
Actually 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.
I 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.
HN 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.
Interesting, 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...).
I 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.
I 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.
It 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).
On 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.
The idea that a meeting is a date or not has to be clarified. You can’t just have a drink with a colleague, and let the romantic interest to-be-determined. Americans, as I understand it, tend to have “the talk” which is a clear idiom for an actual conversation where they mutually decide to “be exclusive”, i.e. not take dates with other people. Timing, number of dates and all that are also fairly established.
I have regularly seen in several countries in Europe a relationship going from inexistent to committed, public and exclusive in a matter of hours. “Having the talk” is often understood as an intent to break-up (because it sounds like “We need to talk”). Whether a meeting has a romantic interest is never really expressed: it’s generally either obvious or purposely vague than anything. That has lead many American friends in Europe very frustrated with the dating scene, because it comes off as unreadable. Europeans in the US can find the formalism icky, but they generally adapt more easily.
There are also far more differences between European countries (wolf-calls are apparently common in Italy; Scandinavia can come of as the opposite) than with the US — but formalism is certainly the big one.
As a young American, I don't really agree with this and this is definitely not the norm among my peers. It reminds me of the common misconception that Americans wear their shoes inside. Everywhere I've lived (Midwest) it's generally considered rude to wear your shoes inside, unless it's a dirty environment (e.g. the apartment of some messy college guys) or sometimes a party. I've heard keeping them on is the norm in areas like California / Arizona, though.
I tend to keep my shoes on in someone else's house, unless they are a relative or friend, or unless they say something along the lines of "make yourself at home." Although I don't wear shoes in my own home, I don't think it would be rude if someone else were wearing shoes in my house, maybe just weird. Another determinant is carpet vs hardwood floors: I'm more likely to wear shoes in a house with a lot of hardwood flooring compared to a house with carpeted flooring.
I can see why Americans would be viewed as tending to wear shoes inside, since I've seen a much stricter adherence to not wearing shoes inside in Japan (to the point of having separate footwear for bathrooms).
European here, this might explain that awkward time when my American girlfriend tried to have the formal talk with me and I thought it wasn't necessary.
> Americans, as I understand it, tend to have “the talk” which is a clear idiom for an actual conversation where they mutually decide to “be exclusive”
American here. Neither I nor, to my knowledge, any of my close friends in relationships have had this "talk" you speak of. In my experience, expectations around monogamy (or not) are not explicit but typically pretty clear from the nature of the relationship.
I'm curious how much of this view comes from watching American movies. At least amongst young Americans, it seems that dating formalities are almost completely non-existent. People are entirely ambiguous and frequently hooking up with multiple people simultaneously.
That was implicit when I described “becoming exclusive”; outside of some universities or a confessed “player” personality, that would not be common in Europe.
This was a very interesting read, thanks for sharing it with us. As an italian, however, I've to say that wolf-calls here are definitely perceived as very rude and as a thing of the past.
It’s not clearly defined, but it goes from: narrowly, the howling that Tex Avery’s wolf character does when he sees an attractive female to, more generally any equivalent reaction: whistling, clapping, openly appreciative remark.
Practitioners generally describe it as a positive reaction; feminists see it as sexist and objectifying, up classify it as sexual aggression.
Thanks for this post. As a European I wasn't aware these rules actually existed. I thought they were merely "Hollywood" tropes to have explicit romantic interest in fiction while keeping a G rating.
A lot of it might have started that way —French kissing for instance has a complicated and not well documented history of misunderstood euphemisms– but they have influenced culture and expectations. Most people have lived through less relationships and break-ups in real life than they’ve seen in movies.
That's true. In the EU, it's the context of the relationship itself that determines exclusivity, I have never seen people needing to declare it explicitly.
> Whether a meeting has a romantic interest is never really expressed
That's because to most Europeans a meeting is just a meeting, a pleasant way to spend some time in conversation and maybe getting to know a person better. Romantic interest, a friendship, or an acquaintanceship, may develop from that. If it doesn't end up being romantic in nature, that doesn't usually mean the meet-up is considered a failure.
Now, I would contrast that sharply with "player" behavior (as applied to both sexes), which is virtually the same in both the US and the EU.
I'm not sure how much of it is just terminology and how much is an actual difference, but I've found that many (unmarried) couples are still considered "dating" after a few years, whereas here in Europe (e.g. Germany) you would just be considered "a couple" or "together". In my relationship, I only went on a couple of "date" dates in the very beginning. I wouldn't say I'm "dating" my girlfriend although we do occasionally do classical couple activities like going for a nice dinner etc..
In the US it's not unusual to be "dating" multiple people at the same time. This is quite unusual in Britain where dating is much more serial than parallel.
I disagree. In the US you may go on dates with multiple people at the same time, but it is very frowned upon to be dating multiple people at the same time.
By the time you are dating, you are no longer going on dates. I think this is part of the confusion.
I 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.
This. I went to Uni with a lot of Americans and grew to quite like the whole 'date' idea, it's a lot more common now to ask people out on dates than it used to be.
To me a date seems like a formal interview for the position of romantic partner. Which isn't very sexy or natural. If two people like each other why do you need to set up a formal thing to check that? Just start spending time together like friends.
Dates are a way to spend time with someone that you otherwise wouldn't have the opportunity -- because you don't know each-other, have no friends in common, just met, etc.
People are much more spread out in the US than in Europe, so if you don't intentionally make time to spend with someone you will never see them.
(This doesn't really apply to the cities, but people don't really go on dates in the cities in the US.)
Nah I think that's the crux of the issue. You're saying you go on dates, like taking someone out for dinner, in order to work out if you want a relationship with them I'm saying in the EU that it seems weird to us and overly personal to be going out for dinner alone with someone, when you don't have an existing romantic relationship with them. You'd normally get to that stage first, and then start going on dates. So you can see how multiple dating (if that's a real thing in the US or just telly), seems fucked up.
How do I get to that stage if I don't know them yet? And if my existing pool of contacts from the opposite sex is lacking, where do I source these people from?
I've been using Tinder for a few years now and for the most part have had great experiences. My first date is always dinner and drinks, and this is the norm amongst my friends as well (American here)
> How do I get to that stage if I don't know them yet?
I really don't get what you're asking. If you don't know them yet, why are you trying to move towards having a relationship with them at all? Are you just trying to form a relationship with people entirely at random?
That's what's weird about dating culture. There was a woman who wrote an article about US dating culture vs UK dating culture when she moved to the US to go to college, and she said she found it offensive being asked to go on a date by people she didn't know well, as either they were just asking anyone at random and didn't actually care about her, or they were purely asking her out because of her looks, as that's all they had to go on, and that was offensive as well.
In the US it is considered bad form to date someone who is in your close circle -- to the level that it's called "friend-cest" where I am from.
Many Americans believe that by having your romantic relationships come from outside of your circle you're assured that you both remain independent, and it gives your relationship a sort of 'hybrid vigor'. That is, by drawing from a larger social area your relationship gains a greater vitality.
What's more, it is considerably less complicated socially -- e.g. there are no exes to worry about, or if you break up you don't have to worry about friends choosing sides.
It is also considered a very serious faux pas to date someone you work with. That will very often lead to both people being fired if it is discovered by management.
As a result, that means you need to look outside of your social network for romance. Hence, the existence of dates.
That's not generally the US norm. Nothing like that happening around here for instance.
Its not an optimal strategy. Unless the goal is to have arms-length relationships that you expect to fail. Otherwise why all the concern about breakup fallout, ignoring exes efficiently, remaining independent?
If you don't date people you know, or people you work with, then the pool becomes limited to 'complete strangers'. A bad beginning.
In europe you would just normally talk to each other during group-activities: on a party, maybe during work, wherever.
If you like someone, you would make sure that you meet him or her more often until, at some point, you will start doing things together without any others.
There are no clear rules for this. There are typical dates, like over Tinder, here as well. I guess one of the differences is that we don't define it.
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.
> 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)
Israel is neither involved in half the problems of world nor is it the cause of most the problems with which it is involved.
Look at all the problems of the world. The vast majority have nothing to do with Israel. This holds by a count of problems as well as by weighting by magnitude or people affected. (Certainly it is featured in the media more often than other conflicts.)
As for the problems with which Israel is involved, I don't want to start a political discussion, but I must dispute wott's assertion and say it is more a target of violence than an instigator.
I 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".
> Israel: origin of half of the problems of the world, but nothing can be said against them
Over its 120 years (so far), the entire Israeli-Arab conflict (with 6 countries participating directly) has caused roughly 100,000 deaths[1]. That is a terrible, regrettable cost, but it pales in comparison with the 5-year-old Syrian civil war[2], the decade-old Mexican Drug War[3], or the nine-months-long Balkan wars[4] -- all unrelated to Israel, and just a sample of relatively recent world conflicts. So the fact that you think this relatively small (though long-lasting) conflict is the origin of half of the world's problems shows that there's plenty of "saying things against (or for) them" going on.
> 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
How on earth can Israel be the origin of half of the problems in the world? Anyone who knows a tiny bit about geopolitics knows how untrue this is. And Israel gets bashed all the time on the internet, tv, newspapers and even universities where they dedicate whole weeks criticizing this tiny country. How can you say "nothing can be said"? And how ironic that this comment is one of the most upvoted, contradicting itself. Last but not least, saying that Jews control the masters is basically, well you know Godwin and all that.
I'm myself from Syrian/Muslim origin and I know Israel is not perfect, but I am sick of everyone blaming everything on them. We need to take responsibility and recognize our own mistakes so we can fix them instead of blaming everything on the juice. Seriously, stop it. And yes, Israel does build amazing tech so it deserves to be mentioned in here for that reason, not because "we can't say anything" about its politics.
I can't find any reference to the USSR on that page. Funnily enough I can't find any reference to Yugoslavia, Zaire, Czechoslovakia, the Ottoman Empire, Babylonia, Olmec or Mesopotamia either.
The 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.
The 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.
Well, USSR sort of had it right. This is why the US is still buying that rocket engines for new launches, designed more than 30 years ago in the "Atlantis".
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&prefi...
[2] http://corenlp.run/ (annoyingly the state can't be passed via URL parameters)
[3] https://api.spacy.io/displacy/index.html?full=Machine-Learni...
[4] https://api.spacy.io/displacy/index.html?full=Internet%20Blo...