All the code does is looking up mentions of cities defined in the dictionary. How do you know that the cities aren't mentioned in any other context? How do you know that this is a resonable number of cities and their respected abreviations?

This is just lazy, and I'm not using word lazy as a technical term.

I think while all the failings you point are valid, the basic analysis he does is "good enough" for noticing trends. Good job!

Commenting and not actually fixing the code - now that is lazy :P

Idea is good by the tool is not good enough -- it only notices the population centres that author has took a note of, this looks like unintentional confirmation bias.

See my reply to author with fixes.

I've added London, as per your transient request, which is now deleted. I also changed the comments to "select cities", as this code by no means represents a comprehensive analysis over all possible cities.

I just pasted my original code with properly indenting in here, so I thought to remove ugliness once I copied it pastebin.

Also I saw some small city in california 'Los something...' with population of 28k which didn't get caught by the first function that only lists 50 most populous cities so I wrote the second one that includes every town in US.

This was indeed a quick hack. Because the who-is-hiring thread is focused, I expected a small false positive error rate. Let me know what additional cities or abbreviations you'd like to see (or fork me on github).

ok formatting went all wrong, here's the same code on pastebin: http://pastebin.com/S5324Gfw

Thanks for the pastebin code. I've added London to my list for now, and I'd be interested to seeing the results with all possible cities if you wanted to merge your code in github.

The data shows that the startup community of Cambridge MA is growing fast!