Demographics of Hacker News by country (opens in new tab)

  Switzerland     2.30
  Sweden          1.73
  Ireland         1.63
  Denmark         1.55
  Norway          1.48
  Netherlands     1.43

Is there a tool to check this? Personally, I don't know of any, but I saw the article in the top 15 between 10 and 14 UTC time.

Yes it is if all other numbers are smaller.

UK and Germany are also hotspots for startups, with large English speaking IT populations.

Also I wonder how many percentage of Chinese are capable of sufficiently understanding English to frequent English sites.

I doubt Asian people are as fluent in English as European people.

Possibly certain amount of numbers from those countries are native speakers living there.

There's this strange asymmetry: ask a non-American to name a US Supreme Court justice, a famous American businessman, an entertainer, a politician, and maybe some other categories that I haven't listed. We all know one, even though it might actually be hard to name the same for neighboring countries like Ireland or France.

Ask someone if they know the subdivisions of the USA, and if they know the subdivisions of their own neighbors. Do I know the mayor of anywhere in Ireland or France? I know the mayor of San Francisco.

The culture of what country is in the cinema, or the radio? Everywhere you go, it's the US, plus a little bit of the local. Check the top-10 lists of any country in Europe to see what I mean.

It's so strangely dominating.

The thing I found shocking while attending this course, was that even in a UK university, America was still the most frequent subject of discussion and reference, with the UK playing second fiddle. And then I would read comments as a part of the course from other places in the anglosphere where for instance, they are asked to name the first things that come to mind when they think of 'banal nationalism' and you read things like America's heavy use of bald eagle imagery, the American pledge of allegiance at sporting events, etc.

I've decided that since it seems nearly universal that English speaking countries give America primacy (even in the context of a non-American university focusing on a heavily European oriented subject), that there's no point fighting it. America's cultural hegemony has complete dominance over the English language.

I only take issue with extrapolating US-specific things to the rest of the world. Case in point: I don't agree with around half of the statements on HN that explain something as "human nature" when in fact it's something that usually just the Americans say or do.

I'm a Brit, so yes, the defaultism rankles, but at this point I've just learned to accept that people write from their own perspective and to not accept that is pedantry.

(Somewhat off-topic, but in case anyone cares: we in the US call it the Congress, not parliament.)