Comment by ben7799 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ben7799 | Hacker News Reader

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Having lived in NH.. there is some computing going on there.

But NH and Nashua in particularly mostly contributes by providing cheaper cost of living & a right wing atmosphere for people to have a long and painful commute into Massachusetts where the real jobs are.

It's honestly so bad with the massive # of people that if you're north of Boston like I am we practically need congestion tolls in town on out of state people commuting through. The highways are gridlocked almost the whole way down in the morning & north on the way home at night for 3-4 hours every day as hundreds of thousands of people commute into Massachusetts to work tech jobs. Then we got Waze and now they get off the highway and clog up all the town centers & residential neighborhoods. Sometimes I have trouble getting out of my own driveway, and the local police told me at one point they did a study and 50,000 NH cars come through our town at rush hour, and the town only has 13,000 residents including children.

I've never understood why they haven't been able to do a better job luring companies over the border.

Dyn (acquired by Oracle), PillPack, Dean Kamen, an Army research lab, and others are all located in Manchester. Considering two of those companies had Billion-dollar exits it seems they are doing something right in NH.

I thought PillPack was HQ'd in Somerville when acquired?

Could be - but they definitely had a location in Manchester as well. I believe they've since moved their HQ to Salt Lake City but still maintain a presence in the city, per their careers site: https://www.pillpack.com/careers/manchester

I work at a unicorn in NH. I hope I never have to work anywhere else. I love it here and I don't understand the "right wing" comment.

I have to agree. My brother-in-law, a retired tech guy, and two geek friends just opened a brewery in Nashua (you know it’s owned by geeks with beer names like State Machine and Double Helix). Anyway, definitely not right-wingers and their customers don’t seem to be either.

My experience is that the state is very libertarian (See the state motto "live free or die" and the Free State Project). It's not so much "right-wing" as it is "not left-wing".

If you like NH as it is (or close to it) you should be rooting for the commute to stay terrible or get worse. NH can only be NH and not MA-lite as long as it's impossible for all but the most dedicated to live in NH and work in the Boston area.

I lived & worked in Nashua, there are/were several big tech employers. I worked for a smaller company.

IIRC Oracle has/had a big office, BAE, Progress software.

But for sure, all my NH friends who lived north of Nashua all thought Nashua was a bad place and didn't really deserve to be considered part of NH.

The commute will always be horrible because most NH will shoot down a rail line or anything else to fix it that actually works. There's been work for years to try and get a train line that currently exists from Boston to Lowell extended to Nashua. Trains are socialist though so that'll never happen.

Rt. 3 in MA between Nashua and Rt. 95 in MA was expanded from 2 to 3-4 lanes per side while I lived in Nashua. It helped for a year or two but otherwise was a futile waste of money. I don't think any road project can work. The only solutions that I think could work is a big train line or companies moving out of MA into NH.

Even these days, Nashua is fairly typical of old New England mill towns that have gentrified to some degree. This mostly translates into having maybe a couple dozen square blocks of nice restaurants and shops in a walkable downtown but things get pretty rundown and/or strip-mallish as soon as you get beyond that area.

I'm not sure how much a train would even help. In my experience, having worked with many such folks over the years, many of those commuting down from NH are headed to employers in tech and elsewhere scattered all over the greater Boston area.

I was born in Manchester and grew up in Epping. My dad was a policeman in Londonderry when there were about three officers on the force.

Southern New Hampshire (I'd say Manchester and south, but especially Nashua) has grown so much in the last 30 years...we jokingly call it "Northern Mass." Most of the "small towns" from my childhood are no longer small by any means.

The reason for this is the abundance of jobs in the Greater Boston Area, which attracts New Hampshirites looking for those types of opportunities (good luck finding a non-remote tech job if you live north of Concord). However, it also has a backflow effect, encouraging Massachusettsans to move to southern New Hampshire.

The political culture is wildly different between Mass and New Hampshire. A common complaint from the elders here is how all the "Massholes" are moving to New Hampshire and want to tax everything. I can see how this growth has polarized New Hampshire politics, but left much of the rest of the state intact. I suspect this growth is the primary reason we moved from a conservative state to a swing state back in the 1990s [1] despite what the Union Leader suggests.

I'm fortunate enough to not have to be stuck in that commute, but I know many who aren't as lucky. For them, a high-speed commuter rail into Boston is probably the best long term solution. Of course, making the commute easier would encourage more out of staters to relocate here, further changing New Hampshire's politics.

To many, the Live Free or Die attitude we have is what makes New Hampshire unique and wonderful. We're proud. We get it. We don't want to be babysat by the government.

I have mixed feelings about it all.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_New_Hampshire#Elec...

There are things that are sad about how that growth affected southern NH.

I spent huge amounts of time bicycling & motorcycling through NH when I lived there.

Southwestern NH (everything pretty much west of Nashua) stayed pretty nice other than the stuff along Rt. 101, the big box nonsense expands further west along 101 every year and it expanded shockingly between 2000 (when I first moved there) to 2009 (when I left the 2nd time).

But Southeastern NH.. it feels like one continuous zoning disaster all the way from Nashua to Portsmouth... almost every main road just turned into a horrible procession of traffic and stop lights and big box stores and generic American chain businesses. It's happened lots of places in the US but it's really bad there.

> good luck finding a non-remote tech job if you live north of Concord

There is a modest amount of tech work in the Upper Valley.

That said, cost of living there isn't much lower then Boston metro.

As a former MA resident who lived on the NH border I sympathize with not wanting to be MA but NIMBY is never the answer. Things change.

It's not the development, it's the people that follow it. People aren't complaining that Nashua is turning into Lowell or Leominster, they're complaining that it's turning into Cambridge. I'm sure there's a couple old racists complain about black people or something like that but there's always a few of those people. Most people seem to take much bigger issue with the newcomers lack of respect for individual freedom and property rights more than skin color or social class. People are worried that their culture will be gentrified out of existence. They're worried that in time will no longer be socially acceptable, maybe even illegal to live the way they've live and mostly like living. It's not the "backwards hicks" that are worried about this. It's the white collar professionals who are enduring the terrible commute and double taxation because they like NH for the "do what you want on your own property and nobody cares" factor are who are worried about this.

> NH can only be NH and not MA-lite...

What is the difference between NH and MA-lite, dare I ask?

About 40 years.

There are some tech-related employers in Nashua but it's mostly fizzled in other small NH cities like Portsmouth. I think there may have actually been larger tech employers in NH a couple decades back when all the Rte 128 computer companies had a fair number of locations scattered around southern NH and Maine.

Honestly though I'm not sure the commute situation with southern NH is really all that different from people commuting from the further flung Massachusetts suburbs/exurbs into either the city or the closer-in Rte 128 ring where companies are more concentrated.

OSR is in Manchester. They're niche (Windows drivers, particularly in the filesystem stack), but well-known in that community.

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