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I wrote this four months ago in an email to a friend of mine:

"San Francisco is definitely a great area, and you should at least visit some day. There's a vibe there that's completely different from anywhere else I've ever been. It is hard to explain. You just go there and you feel it. Things seem possible out there that would be laughed at here. That's the best way I can put it.

Every city that I've been to has a certain feel to it. New York is rude and busy. Portland is relaxed and thoughtful. San Francisco is ambitious and free-spirited. Atlanta is comfortable and complacent. Atlanta's feel was good for growing up, and it is one that's good for growing old if you're willing to play it conservatively and live a life of moderate wealth and complacency. But if you're not, you should go to a city that has a better feel for what your goals are at that stage in your life.

Does that make sense? I'm by no means trying to convince you to go to San Francisco, but for me it was important that I travelled around and discovered the city that had the right feel for me. Portland was very close, and San Francisco is nearly spot on. I have no doubt you'll be somewhat different. Give it a try though, eh?"

Its like PG read my email and decided to write an essay on it.

"New York is rude and busy."

New York is just busy -- if you are as busy as everyone else, wasting time with "Please" and "Thank you" would strike you as rude.

Not everyone is just busy. The place turns some people into monsters.

The values of New York come from Wall Street, which sets the tone for the rest of industry there. The attitude that everything has its price is responsible for the bad reputation that New York and New Yorkers have in the rest of the country.

If you live in New York, in some sense you aren't a citizen of the United States: your residency means that you have a passport to enter the "real" United States.

Another thing about New York: it clearly isn't known for science. The Science Museum in Oakland California would be impossibly out of place in New York. The two main categories of industry in New York are finance and media, broadly conceived (including the arts, television, publishing, fashion, advertising and so on).

Columbia, NYU, and Cooper Union are excellent schools. If they were located anywhere but in the center of the world's media and financial system, they would define that place as an unparalleled academic center.

I don't know about unparalleled. Harvard + MIT + Tufts + BU + BC + Northeastern + ... would probably still win.

"I don't know about unparalleled." That means, "compared with CUNY."

They used to have the most selective school ever, leading to the best Noble Prize winning streak ever (http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/iq.htm).

The problem is that Columbia is situated so far away from the other two, and from the "heart" of the city, that the university simply cannot have the same overarching influence on society that other schools that are better integrated with their surroundings do (like Harvard and MIT with Cambridge). In addition, it's a matter of pure density- Cambridge and Boston, to a lesser extent, is seen as a college town because of the density of college students living in that area. In New York, college students compose such a tiny percentage of the overall population, and exert such a small influence on everyone else, that they are hardly given a second thought when determining the dominant themes in a city's ideology.

I've never been to the Science Museum in Oakland, but New York has some pretty good science museums.

And I can't really say that Science and Oakland go together all that way in my mind either.

As I recall, the Oakland Science Museum is focused on technology. The American Museum of Natural History is a better museum in many ways, but its focus is entirely different. The Hall of Science seems like a leftover from the World's Fair--I'm probably completely mistaken.

I associate the Hall of Science with cranky aging amateur radio operators on account of the annual hamfests they hold in the vicinity. Those hams seem as if their wives ordered them not to come home until they sell off their old equipment. That's the impression of science and technology you get from the Hall of Science. That impression might be a little hard to convey, so try comparing the discussions on eHam with those on hacker news.

Since we're on the subject of the politeness of New Yorker's and the attitude that everything has its price, in New York, a simple "thank you" might be considered a costly acknowledgment.

Here's a dismal example by hacking standards, but it's still indicative of the attitude. Someone from a financial firm, known for its rating system and price indexes, had a data conversion problem. They were using Matlab--a dismal language with a bastard semantics. One of the functions they were using was Datenum(), which converts dates and times to the number of days since the year zero, in the proleptic Gregorian calendar.

The specification of this function should have been to return a floating point number equal to 1+1/86,400 (in units of days) for a date argument equal to one second after year zero. And in fact, the open source equivalent function in Octave does exactly that. However, Matlab's function differs from this in the 11th decimal place. Their technical support has been silent on the issue.

When I informed the person at the financial firm about this discrepancy, they thanked me for "my comments." In the next sentence, I was informed that that they were redoing their calculations using another method. It was stated as if the decision to do this was an entirely independent judgment, not at all informed by my observations, and completely unrelated to any problems they might have encountered using the previous method. They simply decided to change the way they were doing things, without explanation.

Finding a numerical bug that could complicate the analysis of code that depends on it is not earthshaking. But not stating what informed a decision to avoid the problem altogether is a typical New York attitude. Or perhaps the reluctance to credit others is typically corporate. Correct me if I am mistaken.

I have to agree with Paul Graham's essay on the relative lifelessness of employees: if I were an employee, I simply would have accepted the decision as a completely independent judgment, internalized it and defended it.

Just typically corporate, in my experience. That kind of person uses "I" when "we" would be the correct pronoun, and "we" when "you" would be. When "I" would actually be correct, it'll be capitalized, or attention drawn to it some other way.

I live in Tokyo right now. Everyone is very busy, yet it's obligatory to be polite at all times and with all people (at work). Don't know how it compares to NY though, never been there.

Have you been to Austin? I am very interested in going there and would like your take on it.

Nope. I keep meaning to attend an SXSW, but can never find the time/money.

Austin tells you 'you should be weird'.

It also tells you to have a beer, tube the river, and then join a band.

I don't know Austin, why is it?

I live there. I think the message is:

You should be younger and hipper and enjoy indie music.

Actually, you're picking up the last bit wrong..."and join a band" is actually the way the last bit of the message goes. But close enough.

In personals ads in Austin, "musician" is code for "unemployed", because everybody is a musician. You only mention it if you don't have anything better to say about your career.

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