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Ask HN: How many people on Hacker News live in rural areas?

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Re: Ask HN: How many people on Hacker News live in rural areas?

#61
I live in rural upstate NY, and have for (essentially) all my life.

Even ignoring the posts that just straight-up assume all tech workers (or at least all the ones worth considering) are in Silicon Valley, I've seen so many posts that assume, in various ways, that tech workers live in cities. Or even that basically everyone lives in cities.

From people talking about self-driving cars ignoring that rural roads (including gravel and dirt roads) exist, or that roads exist that might not get plowed/sanded immediately after snowfall, to people talking about employment and compensation just assuming that any tech worker can instantly find a new job paying as much as or more than their previous job if anything goes wrong, to people talking about nutrition, health, and food assuming that everyone has access to a wide variety of great supermarkets and specialty stores...

The bias is real, and it's so deeply disappointing a lot of the time.

Even worse are the people who appear to genuinely believe that we would be better off if no one lived outside of cities. They never seem to have much answer to questions like, "Then who's going to grow the food?" beyond handwaves.

Re: Ask HN: How many people on Hacker News live in rural areas?

#62

Rural is actually a perspective. I live in a "town" of 23.000 people. I am Dutch and I do not live in a large city. Amsterdam is the nearest city for me and that is 65 Km away. It's one hour by train and 45 minutes by car. Every time someone asks we where I live they never heard of my town as it is insignificant. 4 Km from my town is a slightly smaller town called Enkhuizen and it more known so I always reply that it…

Quite true, where I live is “rural”. There are miles and miles of farmland all around me, but I am also less than hour away from 4M people

Re: Ask HN: How many people on Hacker News live in rural areas?

#63
post #54

Town shy of 30K residents. I can go anywhere by foot, if I take the car it's because I have to leave the city or go to the supermarket. 10 minutes from my home I can find an amazing network of trails to ride with my MTB or to hike by foot. I would never live in a city. We recently received FTTH which is amazing, coming from a less than ideal 10Mbit/1Mbit DSL.

Curious about MTB trails and fiber. Where is this?
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