Alternate hypothesis: a high concentration of Americans, who are fascinated with anything to do with themselves. That's what I found interesting about it.
Indeed. I found myself eager to get a copy and see how I really behaved. I suspect I'd learn rather a lot about Russian culture by seeing how we stand out via the descriptions in the book.
I would love to read the inverse of this book: explaining Russian minutia to Americans like myself. But I agree, if this exists in English translation it might be worth reading for this purpose just by contrast.
Or educated, curious Americans that are merely curious how others portray us.
Even with the short article, I'd never even second guessed interviewing a babysitter would be even remotely strange to other cultures. To be fair, I no longer do so -- my friends' kids are finally old enough to watch mine. Hey, I pay decently -- and it gives my friends a night kids-free, too. Win-win-win!
HN has a lot of international members from all over the world. I can confirm this using Google Analytics from the few times my articles made it to the front page and I got hit with thousands and thousands of visitors. They're from all over the place, Africa, Asia, Europe, South America.
The USA is still the biggest chunk of my traffic. When my last article got on HN's front page, I got hit with 29,000 unique visitors in 24 hours. 14,000 of them where from the USA, the rest are from all over the world.
There are many who were either born in or immigrated to a large US city who might have never experienced suburban life. One doesn't have to be Russian to be shocked by differences in US suburban/city life.
(американец -- женат на украинке, учится говорить по-русский)
Timezone. European mornings tend to see more Eurocentric posts making HN homepage; as the day progresses, you can really see a shift, ending with more "valleyism" overnight. I don't really see many "australasian" posts though.
I think that just comes down to numbers. There are only about 40 million people in Australasia compared to 740 million people in Europe and 312 million in USA.
By saying "australasia" I'd also include Japan (130mn), South Korea (50mn) and India (1.3bn) -- not China, which is notoriously insular on most levels. They sum up to a sizeable contingent that doesn't seem to be represented in HN posts (note: i'm not saying they should, this is not about political correctness).
I noticed the occasional post about Indian matters, but it looks like the other Asian communities are just not interested in HN at the moment.
