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Comment by nickpinkston | Hacker News Reader

I moved from Pittsburgh to SF, and I have zero regrets. I've found no where in the world better for people trying to build the future.

I agree with PG that the best conversation is in Cambridge, MA, wealth-gathering in NY, but if you want to build your ideas - the Bay Area is the center of the modern enlightenment.

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I don't "get" SF, not as a place to live in (e.g. one that should satisfy all my needs, practical and intellectual). To me, SF is the mum in the Woody Allen sketch that keeps saying "Do your homework! Brooklyn is not expanding!" -- aka, no time for introspection or philosophical pursuits. I've found there, on top of social inequality, a curious brand of intellectual pragmatism, something like: if you cannot market it, then it's not interesting. But maybe it's a distorted perception?

That was about 80% of my impression also. Not 100%, to be sure, but there was a huge pervasive pollution from the "what will the VCs think? how does this advance your career? how will you monetize?" mindset. Everything was dominated by a certain amount of what I might call intellectual strip-mining, rather than intellectual advancement: look for something that was already developed but not yet monetized, and come up with a monetization scheme for it, rather than inventing something genuinely new.

Yea, there's no doubt that's true, but it's true everywhere. The people who are doing novel things are of course everywhere, but the filter is harder.

In SF, you can find a lot of people doing novel things, but you need to filter like anywhere else. It's just that the raw number of creatives here makes these groups larger. I still have yet to find the concentration of these types greater than anywhere else in the world.

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