"More importantly, the general feel of the technology scene in SF has almost zero douchebag in it."
Good to hear that someone's trying to change that.
Zed Shaw on SF vs NYC
61–70 of 98 posts
Re: Zed Shaw on SF vs NYC
#62He's right about the Mexican food in NYC, just horrible. But then all the Mexican stands are run by Chinese because the Latinos run the pizza parlors.
Re: Zed Shaw on SF vs NYC
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even more worrying is that it's still at #2 even on news.ycombinator.com/classic which shows it's not just the new people messing it up... (though, conversely, that sorta legitimizes it being here)
whoa! I never heard of "classic." What is it, and how did you find it?
Classic shows the home page as it would appear without votes from people with accounts less than a year old. pg added it about 3 months ago.
Re: Zed Shaw on SF vs NYC
#64But isn't the end result the same? Joining an existing startup as an engineer is NOT financially beneficial. Just do the math: An average post-series A startup has 10% chance of success and an average acquisition price is around $50M. Now, when you're joining as an engineer how much do you get in equity? Much less than just 1%, yet you're losing a lot of potential earning power and, most importantly, you're investing…
Crap dude you just summed my life up in a paragraph. 3 start ups, all sold and the most I ever pulled was 100k for my efforts. I did however make a comparable wage to developers in established businesses so it did not hit me so hard in the earning potential; but you are right about the intellectual capital spent. Once the risk of failure starts to subside the amount investors are willing to part with follows a simila…
Being part of three successful startups must have taught you a ton, though. Certainly more than being a drone.
Re: Zed Shaw on SF vs NYC
#65Re: "people are crazy"
San Francisco is less than twenty miles long. It's very easy to get to the other side of town in a short period of time. NY has neighbourhoods that are much more dangerous than shady parts of the Mission/Tenderloin (where he likely ended up) and even Bayview. It's just that it's much harder to stumble into them.
Re: Zed Shaw on SF vs NYC
#66I lived in Bayview, north of Candlestick, for a couple months. My sense was that it was the worst neighborhood in San Francisco. It didn't even come close to the worst of Chicago. How does someone from NYC manage to get intimidated by SF? I kind of don't believe this happened. San Francisco is too small for genuinely dangeous neighborhoods, and the whole area is so expensive that even Oakland is viable for family hou…
Depends on what time of day - while it's true the bad neighborhoods in SF aren't as large as those in other major cities, I would certainly not want to end up in a Norteño neighborhood of the Mission late at night. It's also possible he got on the 53 and accidentally ended up in the Potrero Hill projects.
Re: Zed Shaw on SF vs NYC
#67Interesting to see a New Yorker's view of SF, but why do we care? Who is Zed Shaw and why is he important?
You know Cheers—"where everybody knows your name" and all that? The Internet is like that, for some people: a third place[1], a place that people want to feel sociable and at home at the same time. Celebrities are the plague of third places; because people rarely actually know the people they meet in a standard third place (unlike Cheers), certain people—the celebrities of the individual third place—are gravitated toward as topics of conversation, because they are "safe" topics of conversation that most people there are sure to have something to say. Beauty parlors have magazine-cover celebrities; we have ranting-douche celebrities.
Re: Zed Shaw on SF vs NYC
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you care about comparing SF and NYC, I wouldn't trust somebody's account of a weekend visit. I almost laughed out loud at some of it. "Awesome summer weather" and SF are fundamentally incompatible. And Zed apparently doesn't actually like Mexican food, he just likes burritos, as that's the only thing you can only find in SF. Now he is spot on regarding Muni. Actually, probably lucky he found a bus at all. Muni vs…
I don't know why people don't like the summer weather in San Francisco. Sure, if you live on the ocean side or in Pacifica it can be foggy and cold but in other parts of the city like the Financial District, North Beach or the Mission it is really comfortable most of the summer (high 60s, 70s and sunny most days). If you like super hot weather then you just head down the South Bay or over to the East Bay and you can…
It's pretty cold here in early summer -- I was wearing a sweater and a winter coat a few evenings last month. I just spent seven years in Seattle (aka the Gloomiest Place on Earth), and even I think it's a bit ridiculous to be wearing a winter coat in July. I also routinely run into tourists over by Giants Park who underestimated the weather, and who are frantically searching for warmer clothes.
That said, I like it here. But had I moved here from LA or anywhere with heat, I would have probably been sorely disappointed.
Re: Zed Shaw on SF vs NYC
#69Why is this on HN's front page? :(
You know, I ask the same thing when the more personal stuff I write goes to #1. I can see my more technical and/or inflammatory posts hitting #1, but this is seriously a fairly mundane travel journal. Anyway, I don't post these (or anything I write) to HN so if this is tops on the front page just chalk it up to a slow news day or a possible trend worth exploring. Zed
"but the dingiest place in SF was cleaner than the cleanest streets near me"
Keep in mind that the shit that you stepped over on the sidewalk was probably not from dogs (if you were near Market street).
Re: Zed Shaw on SF vs NYC
#70Who is this guy? the next Anthony Bourdain? come one...