Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cities and Ambition

paulgraham.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 313 posts

Re: Cities and Ambition

#151

Post by davidw »

ardit33 wrote: post #131
idmkid wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

black bums, lower class korean immigrants... I appreciate German attitudes of precision but with that mentality no wonder you lack immigrant capital.

Joke of the day: What do you call an european with no sense of humor..... drums... German!! In other news, an immigrant will always feel as second class citizen in most of europe, and Germany has a bad reputation about it. In some parts of East germany there is some Neo-Nazi resurrection, and there is lots of xenophobia. The states it is a total different thing. It depends where you are. In SF i just don't feel forei…

As another anecdote, here in Austria, which for many things has similar laws to Germany, you can't have dual citizenship, and being born here doesn't confer citizenship on you, as it does in places like the US, or Italy. So our daughter will be Italian and American, despite being born in Austria (not that we would have wanted it otherwise, but still...).

I met a German guy in the states, who was born and raised there, considered himself German, but didn't get citizenship until 18 or 19 because his parents were from Turkey.

Re: Cities and Ambition

#152

Post by timr »

jbenz wrote: post #46

I live in Columbus, OH and as I read PG's essay I was wondering what Columbus tells you. And seriously, I just kept thinking about one thing: "You should play college football." College football is king in the Bus, and the players and coaches are our royalty. It's kind of a scary thought, but I'm as big a Buckeye fan as anyone else, so I'm partly to blame. But I also admit that I don't want to live in a place where t…

If you've never lived anywhere else, you owe it to yourself to move on. I grew up in Columbus, and while it was a nice place to be a kid, I could never live there today. Too sheltered.

And trust me...the valley isn't scary. It's nothing but a gigantic suburb, punctuated with office parks. Sure, the housing is hideously expensive, and there are freakishly rich people everywhere, but otherwise, the place won't present a challenge to you. San Francisco, on the other hand, is a different world....

Re: Cities and Ambition

#153

Post by hv23 »

byrneseyeview wrote: post #48
Xlp-Thlplylp wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The values of New York come from Wall Street, which sets the tone for the rest of industry there. The attitude that everything has its price is responsible for the bad reputation that New York and New Yorkers have in the rest of the country. If you live in New York, in some sense you aren't a citizen of the United States: your residency means that you have a passport to enter the "real" United States. Another thing a…

Columbia, NYU, and Cooper Union are excellent schools. If they were located anywhere but in the center of the world's media and financial system, they would define that place as an unparalleled academic center.

The problem is that Columbia is situated so far away from the other two, and from the "heart" of the city, that the university simply cannot have the same overarching influence on society that other schools that are better integrated with their surroundings do (like Harvard and MIT with Cambridge). In addition, it's a matter of pure density- Cambridge and Boston, to a lesser extent, is seen as a college town because of the density of college students living in that area. In New York, college students compose such a tiny percentage of the overall population, and exert such a small influence on everyone else, that they are hardly given a second thought when determining the dominant themes in a city's ideology.

Re: Cities and Ambition

#154

Post by wheels »

asdflkj wrote: post #87
wheels wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the wrong question. This is about culture, not tallying. Berlin is special because it's a chaotic city in a country of orderliness. I started writing a list, but it doesn't do it any justice. Just like listing 10 big companies won't circumscribe the feel of Silicon Valley, a list of goofiness won't peg Berlin. But hang out in Kreuzberg for a weekend and you'll get it. :-) Berlin is still living on the energy f…

Wouldn't breaking the rules, if it were truly that general, result in something more substantial than goofiness? And if it's just goofiness, perhaps a better way to put it would be "break the social conventions". It might seem like I'm being contentious just for its own sake, but I'm not. It's precisely the thing that most irks me about Western Europe: the attitude of "don't break the rules". Europeans seem to like t…

It's a mix here. There's definitely a bohemian atmosphere (in many, not all parts of the city), but reducing that to sex and drugs isn't really fair. It extends to arts, street culture, work environments, etc. I think I see what you're getting at though, so I'll give a few specific examples of rules that are broken here:

- "Living in a big cultural center is expensive." It's cheap here. I don't know of any other western cultural center where that's true. 3.5 million people and there's a housing surplus. This has a huge effect on the city.

- "You need a lot of money." A side-effect of the above, there's a real de-emphasis on having cash here.

- "You should have a normal job." For good and bad, there's not much big industry in Berlin. Most of my friends either work independently or in relatively small companies. Most of those companies aren't startups in the sense that we use the word here, but small businesses that do well enough.

- "You need to grow up." You can still go out here when you're 30. Or 40. And it's not weird. And it doesn't mean you're not professional. Similarly, there doesn't seem to be the taboo against founding a startup over 30 (I'm 27 and one of the younger guys at the meetups I've been going to.).

Re: Cities and Ambition

#155

Post by mroman »

maxklein wrote: post #14

Duuude, Mister Graham, I've never even heard of this Cambridge, and I seriously doubt it is the intellectual capital of the world. And you know what - you are not qualified to judge. You've not been to Urumuqi, Jenin, Port Harcourt or Bahia, how can you make a judgement based on having been in two cities? And furthermore, I take offense at the suggestion that American universities produce the best students. In genera…

You are mistaken in concluding that "normal" people shape a city. The traits that make a city unique are the result of the actions of a minority of its inhabitants.

If your "logic" were accurate, Los Angeles would be no different than Tijuana, for example, considering that most of the "normal" people there are lower class Mexican immigrants.

Allow me to inform you of something essential about PG's essays: they require intelligence to truly understand, to the point that his core arguments will simply sail over the heads of those who lack it. Evidence of not having the required intelligence includes attempting to refute the core arguments with a myriad of minor points that appear to point out logical flaws, when they only manage to address comparatively minor items of negligible consequence.

Mr. Graham's essays are valuable owing to their QUALITATIVE aspects, not to their total QUANTITATIVE sum . . .

Re: Cities and Ambition

#156

Post by dfranke »

pg wrote: post #40
ardit33 wrote: post #31

PG fails to mention that Cambridge (and Sommerville, the emerging hipster/cheaper alternative) is like an island in the middle of a puritan city. Boston, in large, give the message of "old money rules". Where you were born, where is your summer house (Martha Vineyard, Cape Cod, or Maine?), seems to the most important thing. And coorporates rule, so you have to play by their game: meaning you have to be one of them, i…

I wish the spirit of Boston were anything so romantic as "old money rules." Actually there are hardly any of those people left. The Thurston Howells have all died, and their trustafarian kids have long since moved to Berkeley or Boulder. Except for Cambridge, Boston doesn't send any message at all that I can pick up.

The message I get from Boston is "know your history". Pretty much every block has a centuries-old story behind it, and someone there who wants you to know what that story is. I don't think it's a coincidence that the National Genealogical Society is headquartered there.

Re: Cities and Ambition

#157

Post by spazmaster »

pfedor wrote: post #141
izaidi wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would you say those cities' messages are? (I'm especially interested in Amsterdam because I'm thinking about moving there.)

I lived in Amsterdam for half a year ten years ago. It's very walkable and beautiful. You walk the streets and people smile at you. It's a happy place. I think the message is something like, "Be happy." Also, I believe it's the only country in Europe except for the UK where everyone speaks good English. In most big cities in Europe you will eventually find someone who speaks English, but in Amsterdam the odds that it…

"be happy" eh? there is no correlation between legal pot and happy smiling people. none whatsoever.

Re: Cities and Ambition

#158

Post by spazmaster »

pfedor wrote: post #141
izaidi wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would you say those cities' messages are? (I'm especially interested in Amsterdam because I'm thinking about moving there.)

I lived in Amsterdam for half a year ten years ago. It's very walkable and beautiful. You walk the streets and people smile at you. It's a happy place. I think the message is something like, "Be happy." Also, I believe it's the only country in Europe except for the UK where everyone speaks good English. In most big cities in Europe you will eventually find someone who speaks English, but in Amsterdam the odds that it…

on a serious note, I would say Amsterdam's message is 'be more creative' (or 'be creative').

Re: Cities and Ambition

#160

Post by maxklein »

mroman wrote: post #155
maxklein wrote: post #14

Duuude, Mister Graham, I've never even heard of this Cambridge, and I seriously doubt it is the intellectual capital of the world. And you know what - you are not qualified to judge. You've not been to Urumuqi, Jenin, Port Harcourt or Bahia, how can you make a judgement based on having been in two cities? And furthermore, I take offense at the suggestion that American universities produce the best students. In genera…

You are mistaken in concluding that "normal" people shape a city. The traits that make a city unique are the result of the actions of a minority of its inhabitants. If your "logic" were accurate, Los Angeles would be no different than Tijuana, for example, considering that most of the "normal" people there are lower class Mexican immigrants. Allow me to inform you of something essential about PG's essays: they requir…

I'm not the cleverest guy in this room. I once took an online IQ test and only got 115. To be fair, lots of questions were things like "What of this has no relationship with Kansas". But I digress...

If a person trying to communicate cannot make his point understood by any but the most intelligent, then he has failed in communicating.

Post reply on HN