Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Pittsburgh is a great town. It looks a bit like it was on the barely winning side of a fist fight, but it has lots going for it:

- Two big, well funded, well respected schools cranking out talent. CMU is one of the top schools in the world for CS.

- Cheap rent

- If you want to buy a house, some really beautiful neighborhoods

- SEI - lots of cyber security talent

- Great food and activities, it's not hard to find plenty of things to do, some innovative areas that are turning around dead warehouse and industrial areas

- Some parts of the city are really beautiful and nice places to be, lots of great parks and so on

But there's some realities that I don't think limit what can come from the city, but rather shape what kinds of businesses should set up shop there.

- Geographic isolation

- Parts of the city can be pretty rough still, rougher than what you might find elsewhere

- hard to bring in quality talent if they aren't being sourced from the schools

- Non-tech talent comes from completely different industries

So I think that if you can shape a business that targets a large domestic market and solves real problems, even non-sexy B2B ones, you can probably grow a thriving business there. You probably won't end up hitting it big on social media, but many B2B problems are billion dollar businesses.

> Some parts of the city are really beautiful and nice places to be, lots of great parks and so on

It's hard to understate this point. Compared with San Francisco, Pittsburgh is much more visibly green. There are trees everywhere, grassy areas abound, and the city itself is nestled in green hills.

San Francisco is full of concrete. The Bay Area is still really brown from the recent droughts. There are certainly people who can overlook this and live perfectly contently. But in Pittsburgh, I don't have to give up the greenery for a city life.

The Bay Area turns green and brown every year. It has nothing to do with droughts. In the winter, the grass on the hills is green. In the summer, it is brown or "golden." That color is what the phrase "Golden Hills of California" is referring to.

Rule of thumb is that the Santa Cruz mountains are green and the East Bay Hills are brown. When I moved to the Bay Area, I was taught that this is how you orient yourself: if green is on your left and brown on your right, you're going north; if green is on your right and brown on your left, you're going south; if you're driving toward brown, you're going east; and if you're driving toward green you're basically in the mountains already or on one of the bridges.

I didn't know that about tge Santa Cruz mountains. The hills are brown in the summer in the North Bay and on up into Mendicino county.

It's because the fog regularly rolls over them on the peninsula, even during the summer. So there's a lot of moisture available for redwoods, undergrowth, etc.

BTW, it doesn't apply to the foothills, nor does it apply farther south (past Cupertino or so). So Rancho San Antonio is still brown in summer, ditto Lexington Reservoir, The Dish, San Jose foothills, etc. San Lorenzo valley is green year-round, though.

There is a remaining conception of Pittsburgh as a dirty industrial wasteland. Today one good look at the city from a high vantage point on a sunny day kills this conception instantly.

Good luck finding a sunny day because Pittsburgh enjoys the fewest hours of annual sunlight of any major city, and continues to have air quality as bad as any other US city, being in the top ten worst according to the Lung Association.

Most people in California don't realize that the air quality in the San Francisco Bay Area is actually worse than in Pittsburgh [1].

Moreover, after growing up in Pittsburgh and living in Seattle, I can tell you that Seattle definitely has less sunlight (it's not even close) than Pittsburgh. So much less that my doctor had to prescribe my Vitamin D to address a deficiency I had when I moved there (after living in Pittsburgh my whole life, no problems).

[1] "California is home to eight of the 10 cities in America where air pollution is worst" https://qz.com/963089/california-is-home-to-eight-of-the-10-...

Most people don't realize that because it's not true. The air quality of the combined statistical area of San Francisco is worse than that of the CSA containing Pittsburgh, but pollution in the expansive San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose CSA is centered elsewhere, whereas Pittsburgh is the pollution epicenter of its CSA. This is due chiefly to its geography, not some kind of moral failing. San Francisco has very favorable geography for air quality.

As for your linked article, that seems irrelevant. Nobody thinks Hanford, CA is an upcoming tech hub.

I'm not sure Pittsburgh is much sunnier

Rank City Annual % sunshine 164 PITTSBURGH, PA 45% 165 SEATTLE C.O., WA 43%

I don't feel like there's any major lack of sunlight and I've lived in Pittsburgh for years. Source?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_sunshine_d...

Seattle is shown to be even worse in the winter months than Pittsburgh on that chart.

Seattle is at a higher latitude.

Winter often has very long periods of ZERO sun, literally not being able to point at where the sun is. My GF called it "gloomy doomy". During the winter I would actually forget what a sunny day looked like.

Often remarked that we had less rain than Portland, but also less sunny days.

What causes the poor air quality? There are no obvious pollution sources other than cars.

There are still major steel works in the area, some of which are operating with grandfathered emissions limits. Also Pittsburgh receives the wind-blown emissions of practically every coal-fired power plant in the nation.

I was visiting a friend in SF, we had a dog with us. Was pretty shocking how far I had to walk to find a square foot of grass.

San Francisco has an ocean and a bay though.

There's a very similarly sized city on the west coast with similar population, etc.: Portland. It is a good illustration of what can help or harm cities.

Portland lacks anchors like the one put down in Pittsburgh by robber barons. Later philanthropists like Vollum of Tektronix in Portland weren't nearly as effective as Carnegie. Silicon Forest turned out to be a bit of a volatile dud compared to Silicon Valley.

Pittsburgh, on the other hand, has great universities in CMU and U Pitt. Portland's equivalents PDX State, erstwhile Oregon Graduate Institute, and OHSU never reached the heights of CMU or UPitt as they lacked the deep and broad foundation of Pittsburgh's universities.

I like both cities, but just on the basis of Shadyside-Oakland-Lawrenceville-etc. and the intellectual atmosphere there, I love Pittsburgh much more.

Disappointingly, in Portland there's no intellectual atmosphere of any sort.

Pittsburgh is a great town. It looks a bit like it was on the barely winning side of a fist fight

I was born in Pittsburgh, and I have some experience with towns in the region and other rust belt river towns. Maybe I'm biased, but I'd say that Pittsburgh, in its good parts, looks better than most in the region. Also, I'm old enough to know the benefits of the Clean Air Act on that town. Once, you could literally smell when you were getting into Pittsburgh, and the sulfur from coal burning literally made it smell like excrement! (Not exactly, but it was a smell in the same family of smells, due to the sulfur.) Today, there's not a trace of this!

Yes, this is why the mayor of Pittsburgh made a big public pushback on Trump's "Pittsburgh, not Paris" speech -- Pittsburgh is an example of a city that recognized the importance of breathing quality air and so was able to clean itself up from Beijing-level air quality to the modern-day green city it is today.

Short YouTube video: https://youtu.be/tbFJMgfMCAs?t=1m12s

I'll never forget, as a kid, seeing a news report on KDKA, showing a white cat with long fur. The only way to see that the fur was white, was to spread the fur and look at the base of the hairs, as the rest of the fur was an orange-pink color. This was down near J&L. (Yeah, I'm old.)

Pittsburgh still is measured to have bad air quality compared to other cities, but it's certainly not bad enough that you actually notice it.

The internet is full of jaw dropping photos of Pittsburgh pre-EPA and CAA.

https://www.google.com/search?q=pittsburgh+pollution+photos&...

Given that Pittsburgh has a lot of security talent, do you think it is a good idea for someone out of state to apply for security jobs there?

Start with SEI https://www.sei.cmu.edu/careers/

They'll be very representative of the top of the hiring pool with deep connections to D.C.

Won't cheap rent go away as soon as any substantial number of programmers move in?

The population of Pittsburgh City proper peaked in the 1950's. It then depopulated significantly as people left the region and the city center. There is an abundance of extra housing at a reasonable rate close to the city center because of this excess supply. It used to house 650k people and currently only holds 300k. It won't last forever but by no means is it on the verge of becoming an expensive city.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+of+pittsburg...

Top of the line houses in absolutely beautiful parts of Pitt aren't even breaking $1mil. Plus there isn't the local NIMBY allergy there. Pittsburgh wants housing development.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com