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Ask HN: Good Hacker Cities
46 points by quellhorst on Jan 25, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 154 comments
What cities are good for hackers that don't require a car? Being a hacker I can be anywhere, but I'm tired of driving across country in a car.

It would be nice to fly somewhere that has good public transit. Good connectivity, inexpensive cost of living, and good people.




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.


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.


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.


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


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.


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 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


It's they took PGs advice...weird.

http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html

"[5] A friend who started a company in Germany told me they do care about the paperwork there, and that there's more of it. Which helps explain why there are not more startups in Germany."


We still have a lot of "rule compliance costs", esp. when a company has employees, but you can hack this. In the worst case you just source this paper work out. The problem is more that Germany lost its startup-mentality. The last time we were a real startup country is 100 years ago.


In the times of the German Economic Miracle there must have been a great startup-mentality here. That has been roughly 50 years ago.

And i'll throw Karlsruhe into the pot. It's called the internet capital of Germany, has lots of companies (especially web companies) and one of the best universities for computer science (and other technical fields). Living costs are relativly low.


I like Karlsruhe but I know nobody who calls Karlsruhe the internet capital of Germany. That goes to Berlin,Hamburg and Munich


For games, Hamburg (Germany) is great. Probably slightly more expensive than Berlin, but at least as great in terms of public transportation and culture.


Slightly is an understatement.


Why exactly do you want public transportation? I left Denmark and I definitely don't miss the public transportation or the high prices on taxis and cars.

In Denmark people in general prefer cars even though they are taxed very aggressively. And public transportation is subsidized very aggressively.

If you "can be anywhere" being a hacker, why do you drive around in a car if you don't like it?


I don't like the maintenance aspect. People try to rip you off for simple issues. Tools take too much room to carry with the car.

So, you left Denmark? Where are you now?


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.


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.


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?


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.


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?"


LA used to have a world-class train system

It was just a movie. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Electric#The_.22General...

Other factors that may have contributed to the decline of electric traction in the United States include [...] low revenues.


Don't forget:

The plot of the 1988 movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit is loosely modeled on the conspiracy to dismantle the streetcar lines in Los Angeles.


Unless you work in the East Bay, Oakland is a bad place to live for a hacker, simply because the commute to other parts of the bay is very inconvenient. My advice for people who don't know the area is: don't live in the east bay unless you also work in the east bay.

Most hacker jobs are in the south bay, followed by the peninsula and the city. The commute from the east bay to the south bay is painful, much more so than from the city to the south bay.

If you work in the city, you can take BART, but the convenience of BART depends on how close you live to a station. Berkeley/Oakland residential areas are much more spread out than SF. It isn't unlikely that the station is a 30 minute walk from your house.

When I lived in the east bay and worked in SOMA I had to walk 30 minutes to BART, then BART for about 30 minutes, then another 20 minute walk on the SF side. Now I live in the city and work in the same area of SOMA and I can get there in 15 minutes on the train or a 40 minute walk. I don't even want to talk about when I lived in the east bay and had to drive to Cupertino. What a driving nightmare...

In summary, Oakland is NOT a great hacker city unless you can do your hacking on that side of the bay...


Pleasanton, like Oakland, is in Alameda County, and the two are connected by the BART Dublin/Pleasanton Line.

Santa Clara County is car country.


The right job.


you pretty much need a car in Austin. best public transit in Texas, but that's not saying much.


Yes, I agree that you need a car unless you happen to live in central Austin or downtown, or in certain parts of South Austin. The downside of course is that those areas are generally more expensive. The median house price in Austin last I heard was something like 190K, but in central Austin I'd imagine it's over 300 if not more.

IMHO, Austin's upside is the low cost of living (see above median house price, low taxes (no state income tax)) and overall livability -- lots of live music, universities, etc. I think the tech scene here is better than a lot of places, though no doubt it's not nearly as good as Silicon Valley. Still, there are few places I'd rather live.


Austin is pretty bikeable, and there is (limited) car sharing for the few times you actually need a car. The buses seem like they'd work well enough and were fine the couple of times I used them, but biking is faster and more fun.

I think Dallas and Houston have Austin beat in terms of public transit. Dallas has plenty of rail, Houston has some rail with a lot in the works, and Austin has a commuter rail line that's about to open but doesn't actually get you anywhere without transferring to a bus that will be stuck in traffic. There's more to a good transit system than rail, but it's the best indicator I have since I've only used Austin's system in Texas.


I have lived in Houston for years, that city is designed for having a car. Drivers in big trucks and SUVs are very aggressive around cyclists and pedestrians. A plus is that it was cheap to live there.

I did see a coworking place is located on 7th street in Austin for only $350/month.


I'm thinking of moving my home base to Austin. And yes, Houston is definitely designed for driving. Even "the cool shops near the university" district near Rice U is essentially just a mall with streets running through it. Things are way too spread out.


i came from houston.

austin wins hands down. the bus system's a lot better. the houston rail line is mostly useless unless you work in the medical center.

besides it's possible to bike in austin.


I used to have a car there, but I still would take the buses or walk most places.

You only really need a car if you live in the suburbs of Austin. Buses in central austin take you anywhere you need to go. And its a pretty small town anyways so if worse comes to worse you can just walk home.


Cambridge is the only one with both jobs and usable public transport. If you are a decent cyclist, I may add Berkeley.


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). When you need big customers and investors London is less than an hour away by train.


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.


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.


I didn't find rent to be all that different. You're looking at about $650-700/month with roommates in Davis Square, $1100-1200 for a 1BR in Davis/Porter. In Mountain View, you're looking at about $800-900 with roommates or $1400 for a 1BR. Harvard Square and South End rents are actually more expensive than many places in Palo Alto and Mountain View.

The big difference is in cars: you don't need a car to get around most places in Boston, but you do need one in Silicon Valley. And if you live in places of Boston where you do want a car (like the Somerville/Medford border, or much of Waltham, or western Arlington), the rents fall by $200-300/month to compensate. So then you really are looking at close to a 2x difference with Silicon Valley.


I'd agree that Mountain View beats Harvard Square and the South End on cost, but I don't think Mountain View is nearly as fun to live in as Harvard Square. Harvard Square has a subway stop, lots of stores, restaurants, and Harvard. The cheap part of Mountain View has a maze of twisty little streets, all alike.

(I should admit that I've never actually lived in Mountain View, but I did live over the line in Palo Alto, and I went to Mountain View a lot.)


Again, it's the car vs. pedestrian dichotomy. I live in Mountain View now, and there're plenty of stores, restaurants, Stanford, etc. within a 15 minute radius. It's just that that 15 minutes requires a car. (Well, technically I can walk to downtown from my place, but it takes me 20-30 minutes.)

I used to live in the Boston suburbs, with most of my friends in the Porter-through-Central area, and there's tons of stuff within 15 minutes of Harvard Square. It's just that that 15 minutes is all on foot. You don't want a car in Boston, as parking can frequently be as expensive as rent.

If you like driving, Silicon Valley is fine. If you'd rather walk, Boston is way better.


Agreed. I really don't like driving.

I'd also say that maintaining a car costs more than maintaining your feet, but compared to rent, both are small.


Oh, also: the burritos here suck.

Let there be no mention of Anna's. La Costena FTW!


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?


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).


Yes, there is a Chipotle in Davis Square, almost across from the Burren.

But the best burritos (in my opinion) are at Tacos Lupita on Elm Street. The food is El Salvadorean; the burritos are delicious.

(El Pelon near Fenway was also quite good, until they burned down again.)


A friend of mine frequents Taco Loco over in Somerville. I've never been, but he seems to always be talking about how good the food is there.


Boloco's okay, there's one on Boston & Winthrop in Medford, and some other sprinkled around town.

Have you tried the Blue Shirt right in Davis Sq? As far as cheap and easy food, pizza and bagels here seem like the burritos of SF.


Yeah, the Blue Shirt is delightful. They just expanded into the space next door and added free wifi. If I didn't have an office for work, that would be my target.


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...


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.


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 ;^).


Great advice about checking out at the worst weather period.


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.


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 :)


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).


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.


Atlanta is not in a part of the US where people traditionally care much about things like being able to walk places, from what I've seen. My best experience with public transport has been in Portland, Oregon. In the US, at least - pretty much anyplace in Europe is better.


Sounds awesome. Last experience I had with the Muni involved buses skipping stops, lines being shut down with minimal notice, and busloads full of sweatshop textile workers. Maybe it's improved since then. But news.google.com doesn't think indicate that.

But then, GPS or no GPS, it's going to be hard to impress people from cities with real public transit systems with a bus; there's nowhere in NYC or Chicago you'd reasonably want to go that you can't get to on a train that runs every 5-15 minutes.

I agree with you, I wouldn't put Atlanta on my list of awesome public transit cities either.


"and busloads full of sweatshop textile workers."

Wait... you're complaining that you have to share the bus with other people who can't afford a car? Perhaps you'd prefer two separate systems, so we can reserve one for those who are just too cool to use cars? :/


Getting rid of the sweatshops would do fine, thanks.


Which muni bus has loads of sweatshop workers?

The trains are fine. The big bus lines like the 38 are pretty good. Some of the other bus lines, like the 19 which goes through the tenderloin to SOMA are gross and can be unpredictable.


I lived in SOMA, so the bus I'm mostly thinking of is on Howard running downtown. It's possible things have gotten better. But I'd never take a bus anywhere in Chicago (or NYC); the trains go everywhere.


Howard is a one-way street that goes the opposite direction of the Embarcadero (downtown?). Also, there aren't any buses that run on Howard.


Then I'm wrong and I'm thinking of Folsom. I lived on Sumner, which is between Howard and Folsom. (Our offices were 2 blocks away, but my wife worked downtown).

[edit] I'm thinking of Mission. Sorry.


MARTA is pretty good compared to where I'm living currently (I've been to Atlanta a fair bit). I really wanted to use the buses here, but the third time a scheduled bus just never came, I gave up. And that's hardly the only issue.


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. :-)


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.

;>


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


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.


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.


Go to Ana's in Davis Square or the MIT student center. Best burritos ever.

All the mexican places around here (downtown at least) are hoity toity and expensive.


though palo alto sucks for mexican food, the best places in SF are far, far above and beyond anything in boston -- anna's doesn't even care to compete. try el farolito or el castillito. my favorite in the boston area is tacos lupita, in somerville (it's where the people who work at anna's eat.)


I've eaten many a tasty burrito in Palo Alto -- try Antonio's Nut House on Cal Ave.

Also some great burritos at La Bamba on Old Middlefield in MV. The new location on Castro is pretty tasty too.

Anna's at MIT definitely holds its own though.


Eww.. read Farolito's health score card and see if you still want to go back there. Walk two blocks west to Papalote's - 24th and Valencia. IMHO, best (cheap) burritos in SF.


la tacqueria (aka taco bob's) in union square is excellent. bset vegetarian mexican in the north east. i cant speak for the meat side of things.


That's nice, but I think that most hackers aren't too concerned with the size of their flat.


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.


Tell me about it. A Stanford buddy and I have been wrangling about how to deal with the sky-high rents that are currently pushing out to EPA. EPA used to be a halfway ok rent refuge.

Apparently one of the big apartment leasing companies there, Woodlawn Arms or something, that he leases from, has been facing legal action over some practices that involve shoving out older tenants so that they could reset the rents from ~700 to ~1100.


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.


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.


Keep your coat for next winter. You will likely be surprised at how cold 50 degrees can feel :)


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 for more info (calendar there too).


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.


Chicago has all that. But I wouldn't try to do a startup here - the angel/VC/legal/accounting support structure is atrocious.


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?


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.


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.


Have you written about that anywhere? Would be interesting to read.


via searchyc.com: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=244156


Your deal almost fell apart because it involved an LLC?

You do an LLC because it has no overhead and pass-through taxes; an S-Corp to issue employee equity and keep pass-through taxes, and a C-corp when you have to. That's not idiotic advice.

Although I've been through the funding process more than once, you really sound like you know it more than I do. But your take seems really biased towards term sheet negotiation. I'm not sure how relevant that is to most entrepreneurs.


No, it was a C-corp. (Again, we were a VC and needed the different classes of stock.) The example is that merely being a C-corp wasn't sufficient.

Again, experienced startup lawyers would have alerted us to this. Mere corporate attorneys would not, and did not, contemplate the edge case I outlined.

Look, if you're happy to bootstrap forever, Chicago's great. But if you even have an eye on VC at any point, GTFO and go to the coasts.


For the record, I agree, and Chicago was an issue when we talked to VC back in '05.


Chicago's not a great place to get funding (we have JK&B and... nothing?)

The Funded says: http://www.thefunded.com

  Prism Capital
  OCA Venture Partners
  William Blair Capital Partners
  Mesirow Financial Private Equity
  Baird Venture Partners
  SSM Ventures
  ARCH Venture Partners
  Adams Street Partners
  ARCH Development Partners
  Hyde Park Angels
  i2a Fund
  Apex Venture Partners
  Fusion Capital Partners
  Frontenac Company
  IllinoisVENTURES
  Merrrick Ventures
  Dunrath Capital


A number of these are really small firms that don't lead on early stage tech investments.


OK. I didn't know. Thanks for the enlightenment.


Agreed about angel/vc, but not legal/accounting (Chicago is a legal and accounting hub!). To compensate for being in Chicago, you do have to be creative finding VCs and angels. I'm doing a startup here in Chicago anyway. But I compensate for the lack of Chi-VC by having 3 other co-founders who live in San Francisco, and making trips out to the West Coast about once a month. :-)


other funding sources in Chicago, are Mason Wells, and http://www.portageventures.com/

Follow http://techcocktail.com/ if you want to see the tech vibe in ChiTown.


Also, we should get rolling on a Chicago HN meetup.


You're the one with the readership, and you mentioned it, so I volunteer you, Brad. :)


Ha. Well, I'm happy to oblige then. I just went to another weird local blogger meetup and it got me pining for something a bit more interesting.


I am trying to get VC through my school (UIC) they have a competition where you can win 20k if you compete.


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


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.


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.


yeah, from my experience Metro usually takes twice as long as driving. It is very cheap though ($1.25/ride).


Why did this get downvoted - people may disagree but a legitimate and informed opinion. Upvoting it back.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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).


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!


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 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.


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.


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.


That's pretty sweet. I'd love to do that in Sharm el-Sheik :-) Cheap flights to and from the UK and everyone speaks English and there must be plenty of hacker-divers...


I'm sure there are a few! Get in touch if you head over here for a combined hacking-holiday or sth!


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.)


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.


learn more about Ann Arbor's hacker culture and community at http://a2geeks.org/

we're trying to get a bit more organized around here, and be better neighbors to our startup friends in the area (publicizing our events, and partnering with others in the region - e.g. hosting a TechCocktail.com event here in March, and supporting the TechNow09.com event in Royal Oak in April).

thanks for the boost, Tom. Zingerman's Roadhouse on me, the next time you're in town. :-)


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.


Name 4.


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.


Neither Intel, nor Yahoo, nor Qualcomm appear to be hiring FTE's in Champaign (although I found an Intel temp position). Obviously, I didn't look very hard though.

I don't doubt that there's a small constellation of UIUC-affiliated tech startups around Champaign, though the same thing exists in A2, in Austin, and in RTP. The benefit of A2 over Champaign is that you are almost guaranteed freelance (or FTE) work outside the school. I don't think Champaign is a safe career choice compared to A2, RTP, or even Pittsburgh.

Sorry, it's a message board, I didn't mean to piss at you.


Or you can go to Chicago and have many colleges to make friends at (GO to ACM meetings) great community and you can get anywhere on metra / cta. Negatives are the VC funding I guess.


I like Champaign/Urbana, but it's far from the best place for a startup.


You didn't specify the country so: Tokyo.

Rent is expensive, though.


Tokyo. Rent is expensive, though.

...Per square foot. However, Tokyo has micro-apartments available, right? 60 sqft?


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.


New Orleans! You can get around just fine without a car, great people, and good times.


I live in a cabin in Truckee, and I only use a car to go camping and to get groceries.


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.


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...


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.


Europe (every city) ;-)


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).


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.


How about telecommuting from where you are/want to be? Are any of those of you hiring willing to engage telecommuters?


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.


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 which is a "fitness club for the brain," but to those of you that know about CoWorking, Petcha Kutcha, and http://BarcampMilwaukee.com, you will find 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://www.wisconsintechnologycouncil.com/

http://goldenangels.angelgroups.net/

http://www.siliconpastures.com/

http://www.kegonsapartners.com/

http://govsbizplancontest.com/

Check out 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.


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.


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.


Manila - Very Cheap, lots of Tech talent. You def dont need a car and you shouldn't if you value your sanity.


Philadelphia :D


I actually can't for the life of me figure out why Philly hasn't taken off more for young professionals. Trains direct to NYC, DC, and AC. Great schools between Penn, Princeton, Villanova, and all the others. Great sports town (go to the Palestra before you die if you like basketball). Quizzo. Cheap to live there.


Philthydelphia is inexpensive indeed, but only because no sane person would ever want to live there.

I vote for Portland, OR.


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.


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.


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.


There's lots of great restaraunts; more here than in Boston/Cambridge/Somerville. Most of the good restaurants are BYOB, which I've never seen in another city this size. There's a lot good beer here, everyone I talk to is an expert on brewing. Art Museum, Franklin Institute, three arthouse movie theaters downtown. Rents are pretty cheap. I personally like being able to drive over to Jersey sometimes to get away from the crowds, but I'm a little weird.

I don't know where you went when you were here, but if you come back, you should check out Northern Liberties. It's a great little neighborhood.


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..


I'm another hacker in Philly. There seem to be a few of us... we should have a hacker news meetup here.


We already have one of sorts: http://startups.philadelphia.groupomatic.com/

It was started by another Hacker News member, epi0Bauqu. It started up a few months ago from a post here, and we meet up once a month.


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.




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