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Comment by nathan_f77 | Hacker News Reader

Hello from a cafe in Chiang Mai.

> Chiang Mai is very nice, but doesn’t have the Met, or steampunk masquerade parties or 50 foodie restaurants within a 15-minute walk.

That's true, I do miss museums, theater, and live music from my favorite bands. But there's some really fun events (Songkran is coming soon), you can find some good music, and there's a lot of really good restaurants.

If I had a lot more money, I would probably live in NYC, LA, Hong Kong, or Melbourne. But Chiang Mai is great for now.

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Melbourne? Really? Is that a thing now?

Maybe I need to head south for the winter.

Melbourne like all Australian capital cities has congestion problems and very expensive housing. I've found myself wishing I was in the startup scene in Sydney instead (seems more mature and serious.)

I'm in Sydney and was under the impression the scene in Melbourne was much better! The grass is always greener...

I've lived in both, and I can assure you Sydney's startup/dev scene is far larger. For one thing, basically all the multinational IT giants (Google, Facebook, Amazon etc) have their Oz HQs in Sydney.

Fair enough, although Facebook don't have any devs here, so I'm not sure they belong on that list. I found a bunch of places are similar in that they only have sales staff here - RedHat has most of their devs in Brisbane and Cisco has more in Melbourne, for example. Looking at Amazon's jobs page it seems like there's dev roles in Sydney at least, and Google definitely have devs here.

Lots of sales offices in Melb (Google, LinkedIn...)

Losing Startcon to Sydney was one of my top reasons other than that international startups (particularly fintech) seem to gravitate towards Sydney.

Melbourne does have some noticeable startups - Carsales.com.au, realestate.com.au, envato, seek but I think there isn't enough done to phrase them. If you are in Melbourne however I'd recommend coming a Inspire9 pitch night or a SiliconBeach meetup. Finally Andrew Hyde's writing speaks of some of the strengths in Melbourne http://andrewhy.de/why-your-startup-should-visit-melbourne/

Can you not move? The distance is not that big as far as I remember (at least not comparing to AU in general).

Its very possible, spending the medium term figuring out my next move (haven't even been in Melbourne for a year)

I heard there is a bit of a tech scene in Pai. There wasn't a few years ago when I was there but that is somewhere I could imagine working remotely from.

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