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Why I moved to Miami

abunsen.ruhoh.com

261–270 of 342 posts

Re: Why I moved to Miami

#261

Lower Florida Keys resident here. I still own a place in Orlando which I have only visited once in the 6 years I've been gone. I got tired of hearing gunshots in the middle of the night. Between that and the chaotic (and plentiful) highway drivers, you couldn't possibly pay me to live in most (any?) large cities in mainland Florida. Despite being only 120 miles from Miami, I've still never visited, unless you count t…

Orlando is horrible, one of my least favorite cities in Florida. Gainesville on the other hand is great.

Did someone flip the street signs on me? I live in downtown Orlando and love the atmosphere. Plenty of meetups, cheap rent in and around the skyline, great nightlife, tons of big name concerts and great local shows every night of the week.

Gainesville on the other hand seemed to be mostly a bunch of drunken undergraduates. Cool if that's your scene, but outside of Grooveshark there didn't seem to be much of a tech community, and very little in the way of the fine arts.

Re: Why I moved to Miami

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Park City is hardly Mormon, I'm not sure what your point is.

If anyone else is curious, numbers for Park City that seem to be floating around: 40% nonreligious, 35% LDS, 15% Catholic, 10% other religion.

These numbers are rarely reflective of actual encounters because many people who are nominally included in the LDS figure choose not to practice or observe.

Still, 35% nominally LDS is very low for Utah. Summit County is the one place in Utah that leans blue in most elections, and is a common settling place for wealthy persons who like skiing, hence the diminishing LDS population.

Re: Why I moved to Miami

#263

There are so many great places to live outside of SF and NYC. For the price of my old Bay Area rental, I rented the upper half of a gorgeous house in the Old Town of Park City, Utah. I was a 35 minute commute from Salt Lake (half of my SFBA commute) and my front doorstep was two short blocks from the ski lift. I could walk or ride my bike to everything that I needed. Sundance screenings were half a block away. In the…

Plenty of good non-mormon places in WA and OR to reside. While not quite SLC for outdoors, they aren't bad. Bend for example

I'm not sure if this is a joke -- Bend is practically a cultural antithesis of straight-laced SLC.

I agree there are many geographically desirable locations in WA and OR. However, like the other posters, I'm not what it has to do with anything...

Re: Why I moved to Miami

#264

Auston, what is it about your blog that it won't pinch-zoom on my iPad in either Chrome or Safari? Is there an HTML5 directive that can turn off pinch-zoom? I tried "request desktop site" but it didn't make any difference. It resizes fine on desktop Chrome. Regarding Florida... a vast, beautiful and diverse region with massive immigration that has propelled it to #4 in population (and closing in on #3 New York). I fe…

Disabling pinch-zooming can be done by placing the following tag in the :

  

Re: Why I moved to Miami

#265
Great article that proves: living in NY and SF is so many times cooler than in Miami that a person needs to write an Article on how good it is to live in Florida to welcome guys to open vacancies. Epic way to hire people, but I’m sure I’m the only one who’s read the Whole article, too good and too long.

Re: Why I moved to Miami

#266
post #3

The whole Silicon Valley advantage is fading. I went there back in 1997 when it was very hard to find technical jobs in my country (Canada) because a lot of those kinds of jobs gravitated to head office cities for large companies, and many Canadian companies were subsidiaries of large American companies. In Silicon Valley, I learned that most startups fail or are acquired within in a year or so. It's like a lottery.…

I always find it interesting how a company that takes off and IPOs outside SV seems to gain almost no attention even when they have profits that would dwarf most of the hot startups. I work down the street from a startup that IPO'd a couple years ago for hundreds of millions, does double digits of daily trading on the NASDAQ, and seemingly nobody has heard of. Instagram selling for a billion is cool and all, but ther…

I think it's more what HN specifically pays attention to, than what gets attention in a global sense. My read is that the community here is focused on web-oriented, low-capital, low-time-to-MVP markets (Y Combinator's preferences sort of set the tone, but lots of bootstrappers have similar aims). That tends to make higher-capital, higher-time-to-market, high-R&D or high-sales-touch, slower-growth businesses a bit off the radar here.

I think partly it's that people are inspired by the category of businesses that seem like: given $30k and two years in a garage, I could do that! This requires a particular kind of company, and lots of success stories just don't seem like the kind of thing you could do in a garage, so they aren't part of this particular corner of the Valley mythos. For example, one of the top tech IPOs of 2013 is CDW, a Chicago-based B2B firm that's been slowly growing since 1984 by building partnerships and logistics infrastructure, and is now IPO'ing 29 years later. Totally different kind of company.

I think the location actually matters a bit less. People probably do pay more attention to SF-based companies just because that's where a lot of the startup-sector media is, but companies from elsewhere that fit the model I described also get press, like 37signals (Chicago) or SoundCloud (Berlin). A number of the more prominent HN posters with startups are also from outside the Valley, like tptacek (Chicago) and cperciva (Vancouver).

Re: Why I moved to Miami

#267

I'm not sure if others have experienced this, but my brain doesn't function very well in tropical heat and humidity. It just seems to slow down, and mental games don't seem as interesting. It may be that I've been conditioned by many episodes of tropical vacations growing up, but whatever the reason, I can't (and indeed, don't really want to) code below about 30 degrees latitude.

Do you find the opposite happens? Are you more calculated in snowy environs?

Yes, but the effect is not pronounced. I seem to do well in relatively cool, dry environments. The humidity, I think, is what affects me the most. I live in LA, which isn't exactly cold, but the humidity is always low, which makes it comfortable. But when it gets hot, my brain does get sluggish. It's true that AC helps, a lot. :)

Re: Why I moved to Miami

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I still own a place in Orlando which I have only visited once in the 6 years I've been gone Mind if I ask why you still own the place?

Because I'm unable to sell it unless I bring a large cashier's check to closing. It's more underwater than a submarine, even though I bought it in 2003 with 10% down. Till then, it rents (barely) profitably. Welcome to central Florida real estate.

Ouch. Sorry to hear that. At least you can rent it.

Re: Why I moved to Miami

#269
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The implication of this post is that people in Miami are dumber, less creative, and "worse at life" than those in San Francisco. The population of Miami is around 410,000. When someone tries to "comparing the people of X", where X is a population of 410,000, I think the bigger insight is to be gleaned from the writer's preconceptions than their conclusions.

San Francisco is a magnet for talented, ambitious, creative, brilliant, audacious people. It's hard to argue against this, and by accepting that as true, you must also accept the clear corollary - that there are proportionally more of those extraordinary people in San Francisco and fewer in Miami. And yes, that makes huge difference. While it may not be politically correct to say that one city is "dumber, less creati…

You can frame it any way you want, especially with vague terms like "talented, ambitious and creative". Art Basel is a world renowned event that surely involves tons of talent, ambition and creativity. Strange that it's in Miami and not in San Francisco.

Another true statement is that San Francisco is a magnet for homeless drug addicts. It turns out there are a lot of people in both places and you can find really good and really bad parts of each.

Re: Why I moved to Miami

#270
post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

West Palm Beach used to be a lovely working and middle class area (I lived there a half century ago), but it is now the destination for many of the region's Haitian immigrants. They've unfortunately brought many of the same problems that plague Haiti, including poverty and serious gang violence.

Ewwww, it has poor people there now? I'll pass.

Because it's not P.C. to talk about gang violence and other problems if they're minorities or immmigrants or whatever "protected class" the demented left come up with?
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