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Comment by upthedale | Hacker News Reader

> a location that’s far less expensive, and easier to immigrate to, than Silicon Valley.

4 years ago I travelled (mostly-) western Europe by train, staying in some of the big cities. Compared to the likes of Paris, Barcelona, Rome and Munich, I felt Amsterdam was a lot more expensive.

Of course times may have changed, and the comparison was to Silicon Valley, which I have no experience of, but it struck me as a strange point to pick out when I would have considered there to be more compelling arguments specifically about Amsterdam.

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Paris, Barcelona, Rome (maybe Munich too): You'd have to learn French, Spanish or Italian in order to live a normal life there. In Amsterdam, all the locals speak English, so it's pretty easy to stay here for several years without having to learn Dutch. I have several foreign friends who've been living here in Amsterdam for years without having learnt Dutch. Of course it's always better to know the local language wherever you live, but in Amsterdam you really don't have to.

I made a quick search on Google and Amsterdam turns out to be less expensive than the cities you cited.

First two links:

http://www.citymayors.com/statistics/expensive-cities-europe... http://www.finfacts.ie/costofliving.htm

According those links, San Francisco or San Jose aren't even in the top 50 most expensive.

Every time I read one of these "the Valley is moving to X" articles, I'm reminded of the last 15 years of "the Valley is moving to X" articles that haven't come true. Tech is a huge industry, and growth allows for jobs everywhere. I don't know why all of these articles have to be phrased as if jobs need to leave the Valley to make it happen.

Mike just wrote a blog post about how much expensive Amsterdam is: http://mur.mu.rs/?p=179

About the "the Valley is moving to X" I can tell you our objective is not to move the Valley here. What we want to really accomplish is to build the some sort of evolution of it. We want to build a great community and make Amsterdam the technology and innovation center in Europe. The outcome looks bright and we are very optimistic about it.

We definitely do not need to move the Valley here for Appsterdam to be successful, Europe is full of great talent. But of course people from the Valley are welcome as well and can make our community richer.

> About the "the Valley is moving to X" I can tell you our objective is not to move the Valley here

And yet the subject of the OP is: "Say hello to Appsterdam: developers aim to move the Valley to Amsterdam"

Of course, if it was a less clickworthy title like "Amsterdam trying to increase number of tech jobs", we wouldn't have seen it upvoted.

Interesting. Of course I based my statements on my travelling through those places for a few days - I guess that's significantly more different to actually living somewhere in cost terms than I had considered.

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