FYI, it's usually worth checking the headline that shows up after submission. Sometimes things get altered (sometimes capitalization is changed, words may be removed, etc.). Often the alterations are fine, but sometimes they change it in more ways than you expected. If you edit the submission within the first hour (?) the edited title should remain (unless a moderator comes by later and changes it again).
>90% of the people who read the headline won’t click... if you want to inform those >90% of people of a pertenant fact (Apple is starting to produce iPhone 11s in India), make the headline say it.
(Only reading the headline isn’t laziness... that’s like saying browsing library bookshelves without reading each book cover-to-cover as you go is laziness...)
The analogy holds because it’s a mere difference in degree, not in quality. I picked the analogy to exaggerate the degree in order to more clearly illustrate the quality.
Although at least this headline is fully honest and not misleading, so kudos there.
I think you might be surprised by how many HN readers (including non-Indians) know that Chennai is in India. I'm going down the list of largest Indian cities and it's not until #7 or #8, Ahmedabad and Pune, where we reach cities that I think a good number of people might not know a lot about.
Of course not. Obviously, how well-known a city is to a certain population doesn't depend on its size. There are a dozen cities in China more populous than NYC, but I doubt you could name them all.
There's more than two. New York has about ~8 million pop. From the top of my head I can at least tell you that Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and Chongqing have over 10 million residents but there's probably more.
I think you may have pulled up NYC's metro area population and compared it to the urban population of Chinese cities. The metro population of large Chinese cities is in the 20-40 million.
It's kind of a question of where you draw the boundaries. Chongqing counts ~30M because its administrative area is the size of Austria. The UN World Urbanization Prospects project [0] tries to establish comparability between nations, and came up with a top 10 of:
1. Tokyo - 37M
2. Delhi - 29M
3. Shanghai - 26M
4. São Paulo - 22M
5. Mexico City - 22M
6. Cairo - 20M
7. Mumbai - 20M
8. Beijing - 20M
9. Dhaka - 20M
10. Osaka - 19M
NYC is next at #11 with 19M.
However, if you count strictly by "city proper" (as defined by a very wide range of administrative agglomerations), there are indeed THIRTEEN cities in China larger than NYC. I'm not sure this is a hugely useful metric, however, as economically-relevant city boundaries aren't truly represented by administrative lines of control.
Metro area population is a better comparison though because city political boundaries are arbitrary and vary greatly city to city and country to country. The political boundaries in the US are much older than in China, for example, so they correspond a lot less well to where population centers actually ended up being, especially post-automobile when suburbanization allowed people to easily live outside the existing boundaries of a city's limit. And then, crucially, the city's limit was then never redrawn to accurately reflect all the people actually making up a part of that city's economy. Pull up a map of China from 1930 and it's completely different from today, whereas a map of the Northeast US from 1930 is nigh indistinguishable from today.
Just to be pedantic, if you think about Paris intra-muros, yes it's smaller but still the same order of magnitude. If you think about Paris with the suburb, it's actually about the same.
But the main thing : Paris is much more famous than Chennai.
