

Ask HN: Most Hacker Culture in the Northwest - theschwa

I currently live in the Midwest, and the entrepreneurial and hacker culture is practically non existent out here.  I'm looking to move to possibly either Portland or Seattle, but I wanted some input on where would be a good area, maybe with some near by universities.  I know all about Microsoft and Amazon etc. in those areas, but what about the culture?<p>Your thoughts?
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bootload
_"... I currently live in the Midwest, and the entrepreneurial and hacker
culture is practically non existent out here ..."_

Midwest of where?

"Hacker culture in the northwest" - northwest of where? To me north west is
the Kimberleys ~
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimberley_region_of_Western_Aus...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimberley_region_of_Western_Australia)
inhabited for 40,000 years but hardly a hacker hotspot.

But you raise a good point. In _"Founders at Work"_ , Evan Williams faced the
same problem moving from Nebraska, west to Cal. (Ch8, p111) ~
[http://www.scribd.com/doc/7753680/Founders-at-Work-
Stories-o...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/7753680/Founders-at-Work-Stories-of-
Startups) The move meant he worked at O'Reilly which turned out passed a word
on to some people who Williams raised money from. Connections.

So your geography problem is not yours alone. I live at the _"artichoke end of
the Startup world"_ and what bought this home to me was a visit by the creator
of Majordomo (his first Perl program), Brent Chapman ~
<http://www.greatcircle.com/gca/staff/brent.html> at a local Perl Monger
meeting while he was doing his MBA in Melbourne. The key point Chapman made
about the difference b/w Silicon Valley and other Hacker hotspots was the
ability to get things done, faster. Want a high speed connection? Next day,
done. Need some legal work on IP? There is a higher concentration of people
specialised and able to do the job. Proximity to connections translates to
speed.

 _"... but what about the culture? ..."_

Read this article ~ <http://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html> and see what
signals Portland and Seattle send off.

~~~
theschwa
Thank you for the quick reply.

I'm from Lawrence Kansas. It's the home of the Django web framework, but that
doesn't really show. I go to the University here, but no one in engineering
here has much ambition.

By Northwest, I mean Oregon and Washington area. I think I'll be a million
times better off if I'm at least in a large city, and I'm leaning towards
Seattle.

Thanks for the article and the advice

~~~
bootload
_"... I'm from Lawrence Kansas. It's the home of the Django web framework, but
that doesn't really show. I go to the University here, but no one in
engineering here has much ambition ..."_

I often wonder if open-source products developed for the web, are they immune
to geography. Companies are another thing. You need a certain amount of
infrastructure to get things to work and take-off: employees, finance etc. So
you are asking the right questions.

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callmeed
I am a couple hours east of Portland, but I don't think you can go wrong with
either. You'll definitely find a larger number of hackers, startups, and
larger tech cos in Seattle.

I've been to both plenty and both seem to have a good culture. If I had to
pick one, it would probably be Seattle.

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aaronbrethorst
Seattle. I just passed my five year anniversary of moving here from the
Midwest (Minneapolis, to be specific), and still love it. It's warmer, and has
great beer and coffee.

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nailer
Portland was home to the last Ubuntu conference, and there's quite a few other
meets there.

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sown
I once looked into Oregon and was despondent to see that there is not much
work there.

