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Comment by ProblemFactory | Hacker News Reader

> One region is desert, only 10,000 people live there

> In the other region there are 1M people

This has already been normalized: these are European NUTS-2 regions, which are drawn to contain roughly equal populations. Each NUTS-2 region is supposed to be 800k to 3 million people per region. It's not perfect, but it's not just geographical borders with wildly different populations.

For example, London is split into 5 regions, most big cities are their own region, and small countries are just one region. Going into even smaller regions would be nice (and are defined in the standards as well), but it seems that nobody has put in the effort to collect data at that granularity.

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> Each NUTS-2 region is supposed to be 800k to 3 million people per region. It's not perfect

It's far from perfect in some countries. The Community of Madrid with 6.5 million people is its own region (or Catalonia with 7.5 million); that's more than Scotland, which is cut up into five NUTS-2 regions. The Paris region (Île-de-France) has 12 million inhabitants, which is more than, say, Austria or Hungary or the Czech Republic, each cut up according to more or less traditional geographic divisions.

You have a point according to how NUTS should work, the grandparent does have a bit of a point according to what it's like in practice.

> which are drawn to contain roughly equal populations

No, the visualization is completely wrong to begin with, because areas with practically population zero like in the northern parts of Scandinavian countries are still comprised of the same regions as their southern neighbors, which makes absolutely no sense and increases their importance area-and-color-wise on the map.

I don't know about the other countries in the map but I can see La Rioja, Spain, which has a bit over 300k people, while Catalonia has more than 7M. So I'm not sure what you're saying really applies.

This is important, but I'd still say it's difficult to reason about population size affected in this chart. Its great for showing regional spread and has value, but like most data one visualisation will always prioritise some information over other info. Comparing nations has always been difficult, so I do like that they at least try to show region's proportionate to population.

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