Hacker News Reader

Comment by werner34 | Hacker News Reader

London and Berlin have 3).

London and Berlin have a lot of people in general, from different fields (finance and government as much as tech). Is the number of programmers/capita higher in those two cities than average? I think Silicon Valley is the highest you can get (that's my guess at least).

EDIT: IMHO, the closest thing Europe has to these is actually Zurich: it has top universities, money and big companies all in a small geographical area.

Zurich is a tenth the size of silicon valley by population though, and it is a big financial centre too. There are other comparable tech-specific places, like Sophia Antipolis, Toulouse.

By github usage, which seems a decent proxy [1], London is second after San Francisco, followed by Paris, and Berlin is only 7 (much smaller city though, so density could be higher).

[1] http://www.itworld.com/cloud-computing/376551/where-world-ar...

Unfortunately, London and Berlin are national capitals. Silicon Vally (even if you extend it to San Francisco) isn't even a state capital.

National capitals have defence contracts and government IT, which so lucrative it sucks a lot of talent away from industry. London is also a financial centre, so that's even more competition.

London does not have defence contracts, thats largely out west, Reading way. It does have a fair amount of government IT, but that is more dispersed too (uk.gov is a new exception, but historically things like tax collection were moved out of London back in the 1970s).

London has two world class universities and Cambridge is pretty local.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com