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Comment by Dewie | Hacker News Reader

To have just one cluster IS messed up. It would be one thing if Italy had its own tech cluster, or even if all of Europe only had one cluster. I never said that "meatspace" (what a terrible term, btw) isn't important. But why can't it be more distributed?

Not surprising that an apparent American isn't as concerned about it as me, though. Let's all move to the US and then make conferences about how the tech industry needs more diversity. The conferences will be hosted in Silicon Valley, of course. There will be free catering and foosball.

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I'm a Ukrainian/Jewish American (though I do, admittedly, live and work in SV).

It's not that I'm in favor of only having one cluster, I've just accepted it as a fact of life. To some degree this has always been the case -- art in Florence, music in Vienna, etc. etc. etc. There are tons of examples.

I'd love for other major clusters to emerge, but sociological laws are as real as the laws of physics. It's no use to lament the inconvenience of gravity, and it's no use to lament the inconvenience of network effects. They simply exist.

> art in Florence, music in Vienna

The period of glory for one local school was much shorter than you can grasp with a superficial familiarity with the subject. And even during that period, the "lesser" centers were also important to the history of art.

> I'd love for other major clusters to emerge, but sociological laws are as real as the laws of physics. It's no use to lament the inconvenience of gravity, and it's no use to lament the inconvenience of network effects. They simply exist.

Hand-waving pseudo science. Do you have anything concrete?

Just this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity

That's not support. Particularly, it doesn't reduce the burden of proof for fact claims, it just amounts to the proposition that you should interpret a particular claim in the most reasonable form supported by the actual words of the claim.

So you're saying that I should, by the Principle of charity, just accept that your explanation is true and actually has some merit from a sociological perspective with no actual evidence? I don't think the point of that particular principle is so that you can get away with saying that things are true, in the same way that gravity is true. That's a pretty high standard to set for some truth!

EDIT: serial down votes are nice. "Hey, screw this guy, let's down vote all of his posts in this particular thread".

You're the one claiming he's being hostile towards non-Americans for no reason and making trite comments about pseudoscience in the face of the reality before you.

> with no actual evidence?

There is evidence, look at the thread you're posting in. Also you could imagine what phenomena you might see when individual actors following personal incentives make choices. Maybe you could then ask yourself why centers of gravity sometimes seem to move around, and look at examples in history, and then why not ask yourself how being in a world with more affordable travel would affect things. You could then understand things about how the world around you works. But no, it's easier to cry pseudoscience and not have to think about things.

Don't take it personally. They also did it to me. While we lack the "knights of /new" from reddit, we have a new breed of "knights of serial downvoting" :-)

Well, there are efforts to have an Italian cluster (http://www.h-farmventures.com/en/ and similar), the European cluster is probably London, and the global cluster is SV for sure. It's not _that_ terrible.

Sadly, h-farm does not really play in the same league of even third rate incubators in sv, both from cash and expertise perspective... And it doesn't look like it's going to change anytime soon

It's a neat place, but it's also way too isolated. You can't have an "ecosystem" if everything else around you is farms:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/H-Farm/@45.554728,12.42898...

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