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Comment by maerF0x0 | Hacker News Reader

Sharing experience as someone who has lived in SF and around the Bay Area, and now has moved to another popular US city. At least pre-pandemic, there is a vibe difference, a sort of "magic" of having the expertise colocated (not necessarily in office though!). The best I can analogize it is imagine the networking value of being at a tech conference all the time. You'd meet people and they would know what you meant when you described your job, and you could have a conversation with them about it. Versus where I'm at now, people simply do not get it, you talk with them about tech things and their eyes glaze over, they discount you as "nerd" and usually remove themselves from the conversation. The sharing of ideas is far better than any online community (HN included) than I've ever experienced. It's hard to convey, you truly have to live it to feel the difference.

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I don't mean to sound snarky, but... aren't we supposed to be valuing diversity above all else these days, and the idea of building a homogeneous community should be anathema?

FWIW, where I live (outside Austin, but I don't think that's specifically relevant), as you predict, I don't feel that everyone just understands exactly what my job is. On the other hand, I do feel like people are curious and eager to learn. I find (I know, just one datapoint) that whether I'm talking to somebody from our local semiconductor industry or a lifelong Texas rancher, there's some respect for the idea that we prosper by being a community from all walks of life.

ETA: I'm not necessarily talking about any kind of "protected class" of race/gender/whatever. I mean people that are rich and poor, Christian and Buddhist and atheist and whatever, techies and ranchers and oilmen, and so forth. In other words, people who really have different ways of interacting with the world, not just skin deep.

> aren't we supposed to be valuing diversity above all else these days,

Perhaps, but after years of you being the person who is not valued, precisely because you are 'diverse', the idea of a homogenous group is likely appealing. I don't quite count myself in there, but I do live in a rural area, and there aren't as many people in software as there are in other industries. I don't particularly get the sense that people who don't know what I do care to learn or are all that curious, on the whole.

San Francisco has these people too. It really is a diverse place.

+1 I wasn't intending to say all of SF/BA are tech people. I'm saying a noticeable difference in the number of people who are Tech aware and tech open minded.

I used to live at 8th/Mission, I have felt the difference you speak of and still I could never live there again. There is a cold, passive hostility there that you don't feel in other places.

I don't think the parent is arguing for SF, but for A place where tech is highly concentrated. I moved away from SF in 2013 and miss the tech focus all the time. I feel like I moved away from the center of the earth. I loved my time in SF, but likewise cannot imagine moving back due to all the problems around crime and crazy prizes due to NIMBYism. I'd love to live in a place like SF in the late 00s/early10s though.

> I‘d love to live in a place like SF in the late 00s/early10s though.

The recent increase in violent crime in SF is still lower than any period in the 00s or 10s except the three-year window from 2009-2011.

Yes, it really was very good in that era. And even walking alone through the TL didn’t actually feel unsafe. I wouldn’t do that now.

That was also the last great opportunity to buy a home there too.

I didn't feel safe in SF until maybe the mid-late 90s. SF was seriously a violent place until the tech boom. China Basin, where the ballpark is now, was one of the worst parts of the city.

A "safe" SF only existed for about 20 years total.

San Francisco is safer (in terms of violent crime rate) today than it was at any time in the 1990s. (It also went up from the late 1990s to the mid-00s, so if you only started feeling safe in the late 1990s, that was probably your personal circumstances, not the actual safety of the city.)

Fair enough. I don't think it's that unsafe now either. It just felt like it had a lot more rough edges when I was younger, but that could've been due to differences in experiences as I got older.

"Forget it Jake, it's Chinatown"

To correct my ambiguous post, my experience was early '00s to late '10s. I can't speak for the 90s.

It’s like how all the glass makers lived on a single island in Italy during the Renaissance. I could be wrong, but advancements in telescopes, microscopes, and even beakers are somehow related to the glassmakers in Florence

Zoom and FaceTime won’t replicate this. The question is whether AR and VR can come close within 10 years?

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