Which countries are mentioned the most on Hacker News?
bemmu.com
bemmu.com
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...
https://sense2vec.spacy.io/?Jordan%7CGPE
https://sense2vec.spacy.io/?Jordan%7CPERSON
(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.)
(Note that the headlines were correctly spelled, so the computer part worked. The failure was at the human end..)
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.
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?
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."
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.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=china&sort=byPopularity&prefix...
Ah, actually, if I leave it for a minute it bounces back up to original number.
This is all very curious behaviour!
Edit it's the same for India too, btw
If you want to play with the script that fetches the population numbers, go to Tools > Script Editor and add your Wolfram Alpha API key.
[1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UX3OvN6MXDkuCiLpKPW2...
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.
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...).
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.
India in title was more than China: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=India&sort=byPopularity&prefix...
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=China&sort=byPopularity&prefix...
And United States lesser than both:
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=United%20States&sort=byPopular...
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 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.
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.)
Why on earth would you be considering a relationship with someone you don't know, have no friends in common, or just met?
Dating is once someone has become a romantic partner, passing the phase of going on Dates.
If you're going on Dates with someone, you're not Dating. If you're Dating someone, you're not going on Dates. They're mutually exclusive.
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)
What would you do in my case?
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.
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.
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.
Date like you have nothing to lose!
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.
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.
Practitioners generally describe it as a positive reaction; feminists see it as sexist and objectifying, up classify it as sexual aggression.
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.
> 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 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).
By the time you are dating, you are no longer going on dates. I think this is part of the confusion.
1 United States: masters of the Universe
2 China: evils commies, but biggest capitalists
3 India: H-1B source
4 United Kingdom: mother of colonial masters
5 Japan: funny robots
6 Russia: evil soviets conquering the free world
7 Canada: mounted police
8 Germany: nazi cars
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.
21 Mexico: builds and feeds Silicon Valley
22 Switzerland: safe, safes, savings
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)
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 dont think you actually read something about Brazil here on HN, something like that will be better:
13 Brazil: zika virus, weak economy and bad politicians
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.
... And I am ;)
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.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab%E2%80%93Israeli_conflict
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_Civil_War
I believe the author meant the drillbook such as https://issuu.com/normagee/docs/scanavi_sbornik_konkursnih_z....
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.
Uncontrolled military spending is a funny thing.