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Comment by seiji | Hacker News Reader

I moved from The Bay Area to NYC. Things I miss about The Bay Area include: meetups where the attendees are actually useful people you want to talk with, more similar developers (NYC developers tend to have +20 years on SF developers unless you're at a we-only-hire-22-year-olds startup), developers more plugged in to current trends instead of just getting on board with what was introduced 5 years ago, in NYC every other company is in "adtech," in NYC the typical career path is startup/company -> create your own HFT startup, lack of winter (but I don't miss the lack of water), ....

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What do you like about NYC? I spent a couple weeks there recently, to which I was really looking forward since I had never been there, and after about a week I loathed the noise, the garbage everywhere, and the lines at all the stores. Shortly thereafter, I caught the Norovirus from delivered food and I was knocked out physically and mentally for almost 2 weeks.

What did I like? Seeing a few famous landmarks, a couple of the restaurants, and my rental apartment had free NetFlix.

What I like: not needing a car (no car payment, no car insurance), any event (concert/meetup/parade/show/etc) is only 20-30 minutes away door-to-door and you don't need to park since you have no car, central park is okay (but it's no red rocks or la honda), you'd think having 6 million people within a 6 mile radius would make it easy to meet people but... not so much, housing prices are (supposedly) less than SF but it's still painful, tons of non-chain places to eat, my 300+ Mbps home Internet access for $80/month, can be at any airport in about 30 to 60 minutes (taxi to LGA or subway+airtrain to JFK or nj transit+airtrain to EWR), etc.

I've done the whole norovirus dance once too. It really does knock you out for a week or two. (I started feeling sick when walking around outside one morning, decided to take the subway back home, the first sickness struck while waiting for the train—I just had to throw up on the subway tracks. Pretty awful. Some nice bystanders gave me an unopened bottle of water they had with them which was nice.)

I found that there are a lot nice people in NYC that have to put up with a minority of absolute jerks that give the place a undeserved bad rep. This part is not much different from SF IMO.

Yeah, the weird thing about NYC is it's more heavily actor/waiter/bartender focused on the youth spectrum so everybody you meet is almost maximally different from everybody else. It causes a strange effect where people form overly homogenous groups when they do find people who are similar (crossfit cults, every actor has slept with every other actor, revolving doors of finance firms, etc).

In some ways it seems all the "regular" people get absorbed into other levels of success/purpose outside of technology here, so technology is left with a larger weirdo population than SF since there are many more non-techonlogy things to make regular people happy around here.

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