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Ask HN: Good Hacker Cities

• csuper 18y ago
  Portland, OR - meets all your criteria except maybe cost of living. Though that really depends on your standards. But the public transit is top notch, it is also a great place if you like to commute by bicycle. Check it out...
  • BinaryPie 18y ago
    The problem with Portland, OR is that the tech sector is kind of weak in comparison to other cities. I spent two and half years in portland working full time and spent 6 months looking for a new job. I ended up moving. Portland has decent public transit, its cheap to live there, and you can find decent jobs. Although you may not find a wide variety of jobs that aren't corporate. On that note I will say there are a couple startup incubators in town but those jobs fill up quick. I ended up moving to San Francisco. Great city. Expensive, but fantastic public transit and tons of jobs. Here are my list of cities in no real order: San Francisco, CA Portland, OR Seattle, WA Boston, MA New York City, NY Check them out. If you like a few, spend at least a week exploring and getting to know the city a little bit. Also try and go during the worst weather period so you really know you can live there.
    • quellhorst 18y ago
      Great advice about checking out at the worst weather period.
    • gcheong 18y ago
      I found the weather even at its worst is bearable, but I grew up in Astoria on the coast. Winters are not very cold, snow is somewhat rare, but rain is a given. And besides there's so much to do there: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJ4wAPL3saU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJ4wAPL3saU ;^).
  • deleted 18y ago
    [deleted]
  • roberte3 18y ago
    Ugh. Portland is way to proud of a middling effort at best. The city has no immigrants (I make a habit of counting the number of non white people when I am there... High score was 15.) Also the tech scene is middling at best, for example if you go to the 'tech' coffee shop downtown, everyone there is updating their myspace pages and playing counterstrike. The last big thing to come out of Portland was upcoming. (Although Aboutus just did a round of funding. (Wiki company)). HP (Corvalis) and Intel have huge offices nearby... In short if you want to have a nice life and be a hipster for your twenties-thirties, move to portland. If you want to try and hit it out of the park, pick someplace else.
• sachinag 18y ago
  Chicago has all that. But I wouldn't try to do a startup here - the angel/VC/legal/accounting support structure is atrocious.
  • tptacek 18y ago
    Chicago's not a great place to get funding (we have JK&B and... nothing?), but no place is good for funding in '09. As for legal and accounting, I'm lost: why isn't Chicago the second best city in the country for access to lawyers and accountants?
    • sachinag 18y ago
      There is a huge difference between startup lawyers and accountants and small business lawyers and accountants. The ones here are all the second and think they can do the first. Having worked at a VC firm where a deal almost fell apart due to legal oversight, this is a huge, huge hobbyhorse of mine.
      • tptacek 18y ago
        Chicago is a crappy place to start a company if you're hitching your wagon to a VC deal. But VC is a crap shoot anyways. On the other hand, if you want to run a business, Chicago legal and accounting is a win.
        • deleted 18y ago
          [deleted]
      • brandnewlow 18y ago
        Have you written about that anywhere? Would be interesting to read.
        • sachinag 18y ago
          via searchyc.com: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=244156 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=244156
• ajkirwin 18y ago
  Philadelphia :D
  • Rod 18y ago
    Philthydelphia is inexpensive indeed, but only because no sane person would ever want to live there. I vote for Portland, OR.
    • ajkirwin 18y ago
      It's a nice enough place. And i'm sorry, I didn't know this was a POLL. I thought we were just suggesting places that might be good for hackers and with it's cheap living, excellent transport links and communications, not to mention center city phildelphia having numerous nice co-location facilities..
    • Riley 18y ago
      I'm a sane person that's happy to live in the middle of Philly. It's a great city, even though it's got some downsides. I never understand people that have such a totally negative view of the city. I much prefer living here overall, versus my experience in NYC and Boston.
      • Rod 18y ago
        I know people who live in Philly and love it. They're sane, I think. There's no accounting for taste, after all. I have been in Philly only some 48 hours or so, but my first impressions were quite negative. I saw way too many homeless people, way too much trash on the streets, and even walking in the so-called nice areas of downtown Philly after dark I was afraid I was gonna get shot any minute. Honest question: what are the good things about Philly? Seriously.
        • Riley 18y ago
          Off the top of my head: It's the 6th largest city in the US, and it's the birthplace of the country (lots of culture and history). Most of the buildings are well over 100 years old (great architecture and craftsmanship is commonplace). Real estate prices are super reasonable, and property taxes are basically nothing (most houses are less than $1000/year). Public transportation is everywhere. Parking and traffic are much better than the NYC and Boston metro areas. Crime is almost entirely isolated to bad areas of town. There's a huge amount of independently owned local businesses. And there's hardly any chain restaurants. The locally owned restaurants and bars are awesome. There's about a half dozen world-class micro-breweries in the area. I can walk to two of them. There's grocery stores, dozens of shops and good restaurants within walking distance of most areas. But if you want to drive somewhere - NYC is two hours away, the Pocono Mountains are two hours (lots of state parks and skiing), Atlantic City is close by, and there's some good beaches (for the east coast) within two hours. The city provides free wifi in lots of places around town. There's all the nightlife and live music you could want here. And most everything is really reasonably priced. The people here do seem to litter a bit too much, and they can come across as rude at first. But I've found most people to be genuinely straightforward and refreshingly honest compared to other areas. I've lived all over the US, and I think Philly is one of the most well-rounded and underrated cities. It's very much like NYC in the late 80's/early 90's.
• zain 18y ago
  San Francisco is an excellent place for a hacker. 1) Plenty of other hackers in close vicinity 2) Lots of startups all over the city 3) Excellent public transportation 4) Awesome bike trails all over the place Plus, you can walk into pretty much any coffee shop in SF and see at least one or two techies coding away on their macbook :)
  • psadauskas 18y ago
    Boulder, CO is pretty much the same. The cost of living here is only overpriced, compared to extremely overpriced in SF. Also, we have better snowboarding here. :-)
  • tptacek 18y ago
    Did you seriously just suggest that San Francisco has "excellent" public transportation? Because, seriously, it doesn't: the Muni is one of the worst large systems in the country, and a lower percentage of residents use it than any comparable city. What's worse, most people who work "in San Francisco" don't, and commuting to south bay is untenable without a car (and even with the car, a good half of the market is at least a 90 minute daily commute away from SOMA).
    • zain 18y ago
      It seems to be fashionable to rag on Muni these days, but after living in two other urban cities, Muni is the best public transportation I've seen. It runs practically everywhere and is quite affordable and prompt. Muni cars run on clean electric lines, and their busses are now electric hybrids. Each is outfitted with a GPS that updates boards at each stop to let you know in real-time how long before the next bus arrives. They have a phone number and a website that has this real-time info too. Hell, that website even has an iPhone version! It costs 45 bucks a month to go anywhere you want. It runs 24 hours a day with plenty of frequency and services pretty much every inch of the city. What more can you ask for? Ever checked out Atlanta's MARTA system? The bus service is random and wait times are often 30 minutes to 2 hours. Without a car, you're basically screwed.
      • 18y ago
• nostrademons 18y ago
  Boston/Cambridge. #2 tech hub (behind the Bay Area), and you don't need or want a car in the city. Unlike in Silicon Valley, where you basically need a car. Neither is exactly inexpensive, though. The problem with living in a tech hub is that tech people tend to make lots of money and bid the price of everything up accordingly.
  • pingswept 18y ago
    I live next to Cambridge in Somerville; I moved here from Cambridge, before that Palo Alto, and before that San Francisco, and before that, Oakland. Real estate and rent in Cambridge is substantially cheaper (2x?) than anything in Silicon Valley, and Somerville is even cheaper. Some of Somerville is rough, sort of like Oakland, but areas of it (like Davis Square) have all the benefits of Cambridge. Admittedly, you're a few subway stops (say, 5-10 minutes difference) further away from Boston. The other major difference is the weather. If you don't like snow, living here sucks. But, if you like the winter, I think Somerville is a win.
    • pingswept 18y ago
      Oh, also: the burritos here suck. Let there be no mention of Anna's. La Costena FTW!
      • moss 18y ago
        Ah, the misery of looking for burritos in Boston. I moved here from the Bay Area a couple of years ago. It's the best place I've ever lived, for all the reasons you mention--but no burritos. And yeah, then people add insult to injury by bringing up Anna's. The most adequate burrito I've found around here was at Super Burrito in Everett. Know of anything better?
        • KB 18y ago
          Chipotle has the best burritos I've tried in the Boston area. There's one in Harvard square and another in Davis square(I think).
• pg 18y ago
  Cambridge/Somerville, Berkeley/Oakland, SF, Portland. You can live well without a car in Silicon Valley, though it's not a city. Maybe Austin, but I've never been there, so can't say for sure. Maybe Boulder, if it's over your threshold of urbanness.
  • drsnyder 18y ago
    I'll second Oakland. The cost of living is lower in terms of rent/housing and you can still be close to BART and lots of great parks, trails, and culture. From Oakland, you can work anywhere (just about) from Fremont to SF.
    • tptacek 18y ago
      So if you lived in Oakland and your best job opportunity was in Santa Clara on Great America Parkway, what's the convenient way you'd get to work without a 45 minute car ride? Or for that matter Sunnyvale, or even Pleasanton? There are obviously lots of good reasons to live in SF/bay, but transportation really doesn't seem like one of them. What am I missing?
      • revelude 18y ago
        The right job.
      • gojomo 18y ago
        Santa Clara is not anywhere along the "Fremont to SF" easy-access claim of drsnyder. If you want to live in Oakland and don't like a 45-minute car commute, you don't take a job in Santa Clara or Sunnyvale. Oakland to Pleasanton should be reasonable by BART. The Bay Area can't compare to the USA's best train-centric cities (NY, Chicago, Boston) but beats most other domestic places for mass transit. Still, it's spotty, with some great corridors and some journeys that are really hard.
        • aaronblohowiak 18y ago
          Fun historical factoid: LA used to have a world-class train system! Good luck with its public transport now, though... "I'd have to take 5 busses and it would take 3 hours? To get groceries?"
• dangrover 18y ago
  I was enamored with Boston as a city until I moved to Palo Alto a couple weeks ago. Already, I can't imagine ever moving back.
  • medearis 18y ago
    I've lived in Palo Alto most of my life and wouldn't want to live anywhere else. You can walk around the main parts of the city and it has somewhat of a community feeling while also being a major hub for tech and innovation.
    • hugs 18y ago
      I liked Palo Alto enough when I lived out there (well, technically right next door in Mountain View), but I could never justify paying a mortgage out there -- unless I was very, very rich (which I'm not--- yet). I moved back to Chicago we're I can get double the house for half the price. The Chicago tech scene is not as huge as Silicon Valley but it's big enough for my needs.
  • aaronblohowiak 18y ago
    Keep your coat for next winter. You will likely be surprised at how cold 50 degrees can feel :)
  • pingswept 18y ago
    I moved from Palo Alto to Cambridge in 2004. My rent decreased by $50, and the size of my house doubled. On the other hand, you're probably sitting outside in the sun eating a tasty burrito.
    • baguasquirrel 18y ago
      That's nice, but I think that most hackers aren't too concerned with the size of their flat.
      • pingswept 18y ago
        You're right about that. The point is that living costs are lower in Boston than Silicon Valley. I suspect that most hackers don't care about money directly, but they do care about not having to worry about whether they can pay rent.
• jayp 18y ago
  Champaign/Urbana, IL. Cheap cost of living. Lots of good engineering students on tap. Great community. Great bus service, especially around campus town. Get from any point A to any point B in town in less than 10 minutes. Plenty of events (athletics, theatre, parties, etc.) due to being a university town. Negatives...corn fields galore. And flatness. And long winters. (This is not a joke. But most will think that it is.)
  • tptacek 18y ago
    And, what, 2 places to work if you need to eat? Forget Champaign. Go to Ann Arbor, MI. You have all the same benefits as Champaign --- a walkable/bikeable city, a huge reservoir of engineering talent, a reasonable cost of living --- but you also have Detroit Metro if you need to pick up freelancing work. Detroit Metro has plenty of BigCo employers outside the big 3. I lived in A2 for 4 years, and while I think Chicago is a better place to start a company, I have lots of good things to say about the place. I have almost nothing good to say about Champaign, which is a bleak, depressing place vindicated only by its proximity to Chicago.
    • jayp 18y ago
      You can just beg for good. On a more serious note, I am not basing my opinion on employer choices...even though I argue that there are plenty.
      • tptacek 18y ago
        Name 4.
        • jayp 18y ago
          Intel, Yahoo, Qualcomm, Byte Mobile, Riverbed, Rigerglass, Australian Semiconductor (Motorola spin off), Amdocs, NCSA, Pattern Insight (UIUC research startup), Cazoodle (UIUC research startup), tons of other start ups (Snap and Buy, oneLLama, etc.), at the Univeristy of Illinois itself in IT or research programmer positions. This is just off the top of my head. Anyway, I do not want to enter a piss fight with you. I like C-U. If you don't, great. No one is forcing you to live here. I was merely suggesting it.
• phyr3wall 18y ago
  You cant beat Los Angeles. If you want great Metro Transit, this is it, and each city within LA has its own metro line. like the blue bus in santa monica/venice. south bay transit in the south bay. Plus tons of employment opportunities in the IT field with great pay. i make 90K as a front end developer. No doubt LA is the greatest
  • psyklic 18y ago
    LA greater metropolitan area is by far NOT the "greatest." BUT, live in the right place and you definitely don't need a car for your everyday life -- i.e. West Hollywood, Pasadena, Santa Monica. You may, however, be inconvenienced without a car if you want to attend tech/entrepreneurship networking events (which tend to be in West LA, Santa Monica, and WeHo). I agree that Metro is actually good, but LA is huge and so the coverage isn't as tight as more condensed cities. There is also a heavy car "culture" here, so socially-speaking you won't meet many others without cars.
  • waldrews 18y ago
    Why did this get downvoted - people may disagree but a legitimate and informed opinion. Upvoting it back.
    • cdibona 18y ago
      Probably because suggesting LA for a person who wants public transport is like suggesting they move to the maldives if they want great, low latency, bandwidth for their data center.
  • silencio 18y ago
    I rip my hair out at this. I live close enough to Century City that I can generally walk to metro/santa monica/culver city lines if I can't take my car, but to most places I want to go to it's horrid and ends up taking more time and costing more as well. The only time I have never regretted taking a bus is in the super early mornings when I have an entire bendy Metro Rapid bus to myself all the way downtown, or when I can take the commuter express...both usually to get to some destination near downtown. You need to live in very specific areas to benefit from existing public transit, and the inflexibility of the existing systems (and city sprawl) will not make you happy in those occasional situations you need to go to some kinda event that is way out of your way. Other than that, yes, maybe Metro itself is pretty awesome. Also, I have to mention that the flyaway service is awesome too, public transit from westwood to lax in the same time as a shuttle only paying 1/4 of the price? Yay! I wish car sharing were more popular in this area, but flexcar/zipcar sort of fucked us over in that aspect.
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• cookiecaper 18y ago
  I was going to suggest Salt Lake City, and you don't absolutely need a car here, but you're much better off with one. It meets all of your other criteria finely, though. There's a very large group of IT companies here, especially in Utah County, 15-30 miles south of Salt Lake. Predominantly, Novell (as well as the SCO Group) and other things. It's a relatively low-profile area, very clean, very safe, very nice people, and modern infrastructure and appliances. A great place to live and work, though I wouldn't want to raise children here.
• theantidote 18y ago
  I'm gonna go ahead and add DC to the mix. It has 3 airports, an excellent metro and bus system, Verizon FIOS, relatively cheap out in the exburbs or apartments in formerly sketchy neighborhoods, and great proximity to NYC. The only issues are the lack of people and VCs. You can always do contract work for the government though!
  • lallysingh 18y ago
    Another point for DC. Don't forget it's a great place to start a business if you want a way in to have the gov't or DoD be a customer. SBIR programs are available, which are almost free $$ (you dev a product they need, they'll help pay for its development, and then buy lots of them from you). $70k instead of millions, but they don't take any part of your company in return. There are apartments by metro stations, but you also have ZipCars http://zipcar.com http://zipcar.com which you rent by the hour ($9.25/hr weekday in DC, $11/hr weekday in NYC). I grew up in DC, and now live in NY. If you prefer a suburban life, go DC. If you like the city, NY. One benefit of both places to The Valley is the gender ratio here -- slightly biased for more single educated women than men. I've heard the valley's a sausage party. Although I've heard really good things about LA in this dept. Another point for Boulder Colorado, some friends enjoyed the tech startup culture there, too.
  • paddy_m 18y ago
    DC is for the most part a soul sucking environment. I grew up there and I moved to NYC. One thing that I noticed was, a hacker attitude plays much better in NYC than DC. Being rude and abrupt is tolerated if not respected in NYC (I'm talking about general life, non hacker circles), in DC saying things honestly and decisively is not a valued trait.
• thingie 18y ago
  Europe (every city) ;-)
  • c1sc0 18y ago
    Yes for the public transport. No for the hacker 'connectivity': not all cities are created equal in Europe; there are huge differences in cost of living and 'cost of entrepreneurship' (taxes & regulations).
  • iuguy 18y ago
    London, Berlin, Hamburg, Paris all have good transport and good communities. Places like Enschede in Holland or Istanbul in Turkey have great hacker communities but not so good public transport.
• macco 18y ago
  If outside the US would be an option, Berlin (Germany) Public transportation is great (24/7), a lot of cultural activities, quite a view of web startups there and in contrast to other big cities in Europe and the US, it very cheap.
  • fp 18y ago
    For games, Hamburg (Germany) is great. Probably slightly more expensive than Berlin, but at least as great in terms of public transportation and culture.
    • eru 18y ago
      Slightly is an understatement.
  • randomtask 18y ago
    Seconded. There are a few hackerspaces [1] there. The Chaos Computer Congress is great. If you're thinking of moving there, knowing German makes things easier, but you can definitely get by without it. The nightlife is definitely one of the best in Europe. As the comment above said it's very cheap. I'm seriously considering moving there once I have a bit of money saved so I can work on my own projects for a few months without burning through cash too quickly. [1] http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/Hacker_Spaces http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/Hacker_Spaces
  • FleursDuMal 18y ago
    Have you got any advice on the tax situation there for a self-employed programmer/online marketer? I'm in the process of checking it out now, just curious about a local perspective.
    • jk4930 18y ago
      The German tax system is said to be complicated, but if you keep your business simple, it's usually not that much of a problem. The tax that will most interest you is the income tax (as a natural person). There's a difference between the tax rate and the effective tax you pay. You can see this at this image (pink = effective): http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/de/a/ac/EStTarif.PNG http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/de/a/ac/EStTarif.PNG If you run your business as a freelancer, you will most often have no trouble with the tax stuff. If you want to incorporate we just got a reformed company law that gives us the "Unternehmergesellschaft." It's like a LLC oder Ltd., you can start it with 1 EUR and it's made esp. for startups. You have to accumulate 25% of your profits until you reach 25,000 EUR and become a "real" limited liability comp. (here GmbH). Foreigners can incorporate, too. Taxation is the "Koerperschaftssteuer" (corporation tax) which is flat 15%, then you have the local "Gewerbesteuer" (business tax) which (in Berlin) costs you also around 15%. Dividends are taxed flat with 25%. If you don't have good advisors you pay a bit more taxes with a company than as a natural person alone, but you have the limited liability, you can more easily hand out shares to investors, have more possibilities with financing, a.s.o. Some more info there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Germany http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Germany
• nandemo 18y ago
  You didn't specify the country so: Tokyo. Rent is expensive, though.
  • gravitycop 18y ago
    Tokyo. Rent is expensive, though. ...Per square foot. However, Tokyo has micro-apartments available, right? 60 sqft?
    • nandemo 18y ago
      60 sq ft... 5.5 sq m? Well, probably yes. 15~20 sq m studios are common. If you're willing to share an apartment (having your own bedroom), you could get by with about U$600 in central Tokyo, and as low as U$400 in the suburbs.
• dualogy 18y ago
  Exotic developing countries for the win! I'm still having a hard time "getting" the whole "hacker city" question, which comes up every now and then and always ends up with SV / SF / CA as the only reasonable options. If you're plannign on hacking away most of the time, possibly even bootstrapping product development, you need: 1. transport -- so-so is already good enough, you're not meant to be out and about all the time 2. connectivity -- so-so is already good enough, you're not meant to be online all the time (since most of the time, its not research you're doing but distractions like HN) 3. inexpensive cost of living -- thats what really matters unless you made it big already! But then SV / SF / CA is a no-go. 4. "good" people -- they exist everywhere, just like the "bad" ones Originally from Berlin (which is pretty friggin cool for a German city), I almost exclusively live as an Expat in Cairo, Egypt now, to combine drastically lowered costs with perpetual sunshine. I highly recommend it. There's a small and very nice expat scene here, not much of a "hacker" scene. Well, it depends. I gather, like in other emerging economies, there's hundreds of thousands of people here in this 20 million metropolitan area who happily "hack" away on C++, C#, Java, basic web stuff. They just don't care much about Web 2.0 or Hacker News, Macs or even the whole "GNU hacker ethic" etc. They're "just" into programming (but then, isn't that "pure" interest more what we're looking for anyway?...) Sure, they all use pirated commercial rather than open source software and sure, many of them often work on outsourcing gigs found at rentacoder, but: it's not like there are no "hackers" here. I don't need a huge social scene since I wanna get stuff done, not talk about it and I don't need a VC or angel scene since the only money I will ever take is that of paying customers. I don't trade futures, particularly not my own. Granted, I'll keep my German passport for setting up the formal company there at some point and I'll keep my German health insurance, too. I'll keep my German consulting clients and I'll keep paying taxes to the German state. But we're talking about locations to live-and-work here... Now, what else do we have in store. A hugely different culture and a strongly religious one but if you don't speak the language, you don't get most of it anyway. It's a different pace of life that's fascinating to watch. Crackling infrastructure, although hey my ADSL has been up uninterruptedly for a couple of days now! Transport: depends. There's a vast oversupply of Really Cheap Taxis here, more than making up for the relative lack of a public transport system. Basically you can get wherever you want 24/7 at minimal costs. But I prefer biking which gets you through the perpetual jams more quickly and also that's the only exercise I get so I keep riding it. Get a mountain bike though, to cope not with mountains but with dirt and the quality of roads and pavements. It all depends on your individual priorities. Mine were and are: climate, cost structures, cheap flight availability to mainland Europe (to Berlin from here: 4 hours and EUR 140!), peace and stability, low crime level and a certain basic safety. Smog, Islam, dust, pollution, noise and crowdedness I can live with, these aren't so high on my list of priorities. I guess it's about making the trade-off that fits you personally. And I guess the equivalent for a US person would be some minor, warm Latin American country within cheap-flights reach that also is or is being kept peaceful.
• maryrosecook 18y ago
  If you're willing to not confine yourself to the US, London is great for cheap public transport. On average, the cost of living is quite high: housing and nights out are expensive. However, if you're clever, you can actually subsist on a low amount of money: eat at home, live in a small flat outside central London etc.
  • puzzle-out 18y ago
    London does not have cheap public transport, at least compared to other European cities, but then again it is getting more bike friendly - but make sure you invest in a some waterproofs.
  • JimmyL 18y ago
    There are many great things about London - cheap public transport is definitely not one of them. The TfL network is certainly quite expansive, but is also rather expensive. There's also the generally high cost-of-living, the shitty broadband connectivity (as in the companies are crap, expensive, and bandwidth-limited), and a near-universal hatred of bicycles. Also, it's cold and gray 95% of the year.
  • zcrar70 18y ago
    London is a tough city to live in. I've been here 10 years now, and whilst it's true that you can subsist on little money, the quality of life is low and the stress levels are high. I certainly wouldn't recommend it to anyone who cares about living standards (although it's most probably the only place in the UK to get any kind of funding, not that I'd know because I'm not working for a start up).
• madmotive 18y ago
  Brighton, UK works fantastically for us. You can walk between most parts, most tech businesses and coworking spaces are fairly central. There are regular trains and buses to get out to Sussex University where there are a bunch more. The community is very welcoming and there are events and user groups almost every day of the week (http://sussexdigital.com http://sussexdigital.com). When you need big customers and investors London is less than an hour away by train.
• lv_ 18y ago
  Manila - Very Cheap, lots of Tech talent. You def dont need a car and you shouldn't if you value your sanity.
• c1sc0 18y ago
  Do you even need a fixed city these days? I've spent a lot of time on the European high-speed train network lately and I've jokingly been thinking about 'setting up office' in the train. For some reason I'm very creative and productive on trains. You got wireless, snacks & drinks, relative quiet and if you take one of these all-you-can-travel (Germany: Bahncard 100) deals you just bought yourself an office in every German city for about 3500 euro / year. If you want first-class it'll be 5900 euro.
  • quellhorst 18y ago
    That's part of my goal, I have a fixed address for things that require it. Someone is at that address who can receipt/deposits of checks or handle forwarding of any mail that needs my attention. I doubt I could work on a train all the time. But I really could live almost anywhere as long as I had a net connect.
• disambiguated 18y ago
  Bangkok - great food, good connectivity, close air-wise to Singapore/HK, low cost-of-living, good overhead/underground trains, cheap taxis, tuk-tuks, and motorcycle-taxis. Plus, it's easy for even totally unattractive social misfits to obtain intimate companionship, with no strings attached. ;>
• mtw 18y ago
  montreal, canada. There's foulab.org (a hackerspace), also FreeHackers meetups, lots of tech user groups (scheme/ruby/python/php...), one of the cheapest cost of living in North America, great friendly people, culture too (it's bilingual, active art scene). For connectivity, there's IleSansFil around the city, which provides free wireless in bars and coffee shops
• talleyrand 18y ago
  New Orleans! You can get around just fine without a car, great people, and good times.
• andrewhyde 18y ago
  I can't believe Boulder has not been mentioned. Thriving tech community, really beautiful place and a great transit system. I ride my bike 80% of the year. http://www.boulder.me http://www.boulder.me for more info (calendar there too).
  • bhb 18y ago
    I second Boulder. Yes, its certainly not a big city, but its got more than its share of good restaurants and bars considering its relatively small population. Beautiful weather for most of the year, nestled right into the mountains. The startup community is stellar in my opinion. And yes, you can ride your bike almost all the time and when you can't, the buses are easy to use.
• time_management 18y ago
  New York has a lot of incredible people, and our public transportation is probably the best in the country. However, the cost of living in New York truly sucks. If you lose your job, you're fucked. Housing costs are kept very high by three factors: (1) rent control, which leaves a lot of upper-middle-class, well-connected people in an arrangement that is superior to ownership (they pay 1960s rents, which is less than maintenance) costs and therefore never leave, keeping about half the good housing locked-up (2) Wall Street, and (3) indulgent parents who willingly drop $4k/month for their unpaid marketing intern progeny to have the "Manhattan experience" in their 20s. The latter two of those are threatened by the economic situation, and rent control is supposed to be phased out if the vacancy rate reaches 5%, ending the state of "housing emergency" that New York has been in since the 1940s, although I'm not optimistic about that one coming around.
  • lsemel 18y ago
    NY has developed fairly large tech community over the last few years. Go to any Tech Meetup, and around 500 people show up. If you want to live cheaply, most people opt for Brooklyn, where a many of the startups now have their offices.
• jbrun 18y ago
  Montreal, Canada. If you don't mind the cold, you have great public transit and bike lanes throughout the city. Not to mention amazing food, culture and low cost of living.
• ken 18y ago
  I know many people here in Seattle who don't have cars (and others with Zipcar, if you only need it on occasion). I have a car, but I only drive it every couple weeks, at most, and I would certainly get along fine without it.
  • potatolicious 18y ago
    Any others care to chime in about Seattle? I'll be moving there in a few months and would like to know how it stacks up as a hacker city. Last time I was there I was left with the impression that it's a pretty boring city with a lot of health-conscious people... so I guess that's 1 for 2? The downtown area was a lot quieter than most, and unlike most cities I've been to didn't seem to have a lot of the food and arts that most downtowns do...
    • ken 18y ago
      I guess "pretty boring" depends entirely on what you're looking for. There's plenty going on here, and many things I do can't be found together anywhere else (except maybe SF). So if you like French food and Broadway musicals, NYC is obviously better, but if you like rock climbing and Japanese art, Seattle is hard to beat. While many other cities are certainly bigger and busier, Seattle has more of what is interesting to me. (Classic selection bias: obviously somebody living here by choice would feel that way!) If you have any specific questions, I'd be happy to try to answer.
• russell 18y ago
  How about telecommuting from where you are/want to be? Are any of those of you hiring willing to engage telecommuters?
• Allocator2008 18y ago
  I currently live in Austin, and quit driving a year or so ago. Car I had was old and just wasn't worth the hassle. Good bus system in town. Only if you work in the suburbs do you need a car. I use the bus nearly every day, other than if I am working from home on a particular day. I am a little ambivalent about getting another car. Lot of money involved which I could better spend on things like iPods.
• andrewljohnson 18y ago
  I live in a cabin in Truckee, and I only use a car to go camping and to get groceries.
• laut 18y ago
  In general I don't like public transit. But in many places you can get around without neither public transport nor your own car. Walking, bicycles, taxis, planes.
• jdavid 18y ago
  Milwaukee! It's a laidback city between Madison, WI (super liberal) and Chicago ( liberal ), and Milwaukee is a nice mix in between, which i would label progressive. Milwaukee has a great place called http://bucketworks.org http://bucketworks.org which is a "fitness club for the brain," but to those of you that know about CoWorking, Petcha Kutcha, and http://BarcampMilwaukee.com http://BarcampMilwaukee.com, you will find http://bucketworks.org http://bucketworks.org to be your second home. Its a shared technology and art space where all of the MKE hackers and innovators hangout and mix things up. WE-Energies allows You to choose to buy renewable only energy for a higher price. ($.12KWh vs $.07KWh) There are co-op gocers, and the city is really walkable and buss-able. Good cheep and hip places to live in Milwaukee are Menomenoy Valley, 5th Ward, Bayview, Riverwest, where you can rent a room for $400-$700 a month. There are a ton of microbreweries, and if you know the difference between pasteurized filtered macros, and unpasteurized unfiltered micros, you will love Milwaukee. There are a few great places to visit like Centraal, Transfer, and Palm Tavern. On Friday at 4pm go to Lakefront Brewery for a brewery tour, fish fry and polka. In the sumer every ethnicity is celebrated, each with their own festival. There is always something to do. The new thing in MKE is to have over 300 beers to choose from, YES I SAID 300, so you can sample just about any bier in the world. Most of Milwaukee is bussable, bikeable, or walkable. The city has Bike Holidays and is considering buying 700 bikes that could be rented to go between any two bike racks. Its also one of the few areas in the US that has school vouchers so your kids can go anywhere. The cafe's are AWESOME, every cafe has wifi, although many use WEBBeams so you get 2 hours free with your coffee, or for 20-30$ a month you get unlimited access at any cafe. You can totally avoid any coffee chains in Milwaukee, we have SO MANY INDEPENDENT COFFEE shops its great. We even have one on the lake. Much of the coffee in Milwaukee is from Altera, and is fair trade. Since I was there for 10 years, I put a lot of Time into building the tech culture. I can introduce to almost anyone you might need to grow your business/ code base in Milwaukee. We have an active investment community. http://wistechnology.com/ http://wistechnology.com/ http://www.wisconsintechnologycouncil.com/ http://www.wisconsintechnologycouncil.com/ http://goldenangels.angelgroups.net/ http://goldenangels.angelgroups.net/ http://www.siliconpastures.com/ http://www.siliconpastures.com/ http://www.kegonsapartners.com/ http://www.kegonsapartners.com/ http://govsbizplancontest.com/ http://govsbizplancontest.com/ Check out http://urbanmilwaukee.com/ http://urbanmilwaukee.com/ for more info. If you want to get connected to people in milwaukee just email me: jdavid.net@gmail.com I have heard that if you like SF or Seattle you would like Milwaukee, and if you need a metropolis every now and then, Chicago is a 2hour train ride away.