The Chinese think Palo Alto is dumpy | Hacker News Reader

The Chinese think Palo Alto is dumpy

techcrunch.com

19 pointsmiddle120 comments

I throw out any articles with an opinion as a premise that is based on a nation as a singular entity.

"The Chinese say.." , "The Albanians do..", "The Americans think.."

Unless we're talking about nation-affecting issues or cataclysms here, let's keep the national entity out of journalism, please. It's fine to say things like "The people of Thailand are struggling with seasonal floods."

The WSJ[0] article that is linked in the techcrunch article even uses the phrase 'Chinese entrepreneurs'. That makes more sense.

The Chinese did not form a nation-wide opinion about the quality of Palo Alto.

/rantover

[0]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/for-these-entrepreneurs-silicon...

America in general is pretty dumpy. For one thing we have not been spending much money on infrastructure. I think Palo Alto is nicer then your typical comparable cities in the US, but that is not saying much.

I think Silicon valley has changed in a different way. Young people now want to get a safe, big paycheck at companies like Google, Facebook and Apple rather than doing a startup. I suspect that hurts innovation. At the same time maybe it will make some really big projects possible, like self driving cars and big AI advances?

> For one thing we have not been spending much money on infrastructure.

Or houses. Californians live in wooden shacks.

Or windows.

Or doors.

Or company interiors.

Or heating systems.

Or hotels (and let's not discuss motels).

(But there's many things much better about the US too)

You should try living in Western Europe and compare the small things. The difference is staggering.

  Californians live in wooden shacks.

Compare post-earthquake images from China to post-earthquake images from California, and those "shacks" look a bit better.

That explains the "wooden" part, but European wooden houses still look a lot better and sturdier than Californian ones, or American ones in general. And they do build that way even where earthquakes do happen.

And European ones especially vastly outperform American ones when it comes to sound and climate isolation (warm or cold, doesn't matter).

The sad part is that those European wooden houses are considered amongst the worst possible houses in Europe when it comes to isolation, again both where it comes to sound and where it comes to climate.

Amen... I had to fly through San Jose airport once. Never again. Most miserable airport I've been in. Stupid design. Coming in from overseas, I was forced to exit the secured arrivals area, walk outside lugging bags over broken pavement to an entirely different terminal (no automated pedestrian walkway or train connecting terminals all within a single conjoined secured zone), and go through the TSA security theater for a second time. Barely made my flight 3 hours later. This entirely ignores the hideously ugly buildings themselves. Felt creaking, ugly, poorly thought out, and old.

  Felt creaking, ugly, poorly thought out, and old.

But at least it's been ungodly expensive to design, build, and operate.

This article really doesn’t add anything new or helpful to the conversation. The message seems to be “chill, people, we have been doing okay and we still seem okay, so we will be okay”, the relevant paragraph being:

> For all of the concerns of the press that there is a new brain drain in Silicon Valley, I think we can rest easy. Despite Palo Alto’s shabby look, lack of mobile payments, and lack of face-recognition software, America still has many, many desirable qualities. It’s safe and clean. Corruption is reasonably rare. Universities are still the best in the world. The bureaucracy around running a business is reasonably simple and well-trodden. Freedom of speech and expression is also strong.

There is effectively no additional information or arguments to support that in fact all other references seem to contradict what the author is claiming.

I don’t know whether or not brains are really being drained—but if I were doing business I would be wary of even the slightest possibility that sourcing talent may become increasingly difficult, Chinese or not.

Who cares what these group of Chinese people think about Silicon Valley and our tech sectors or the work ethic. Are we effective in creating technology? Yes. Something is working. (There are a lot of criticism that I would have for it, but being worried about some group of tourists having an opinion isn't one of those )

Given how the startup center of mass moved from SV to SF, I think the bay area secret sauce was not tied to Silicon Valley's suburban form.

I mean PG called SV one big giant parking lot, and as a native who's lived here my whole life, I absolutely agree, and I love my big ol' parking lot.

If they truly thing PA is dumpy, then they wouldn't be buying so many houses in all cash deals you know. ;)

I haven't lived in the Bay, but work takes me there relatively often from my home in Seattle. Most often I've stayed in Palo Alto. Here in Seattle, I know the neighborhoods are notoriously steadfast in keeping their villages quaint... craftsmen-style homes (pepper in some modern cubic houses to taste) with broad green yards and strict zoning laws, lest every neighborhood be infected with the blight of more affordable condos and one or two decent places to grab a drink. In Palo Alto I got a whiff of the same, albeit in distinct Californian flavor. It's an allergic rejection of anything cosmopolitan or urban. Nothing wrong with that but it's no surprise that people would find it also distinctly unsexy.

My wife came down with me and we drove around with a coworker who lived there. We explored Mountain View and Menlo Park too, got some In-N-Out. My wife drooled at the big flagship Anthropologie at the weirdly-simultaneously dated and high-end Stanford Shopping Center. We laughed at the $3 million 2-br ranch houses on Redfin. Talked with our coworker about raising kids in a place like Palo Alto, and he gossiped about how PAHS kids were killing themselves on the train tracks – such a problem, they said, that there needed to be a security guard stationed there to watch out.

We went to University Ave and took a walk. A pushy salesman tried to sell us facial beauty products at $300/bottle, then we got accosted a couple doors down by a rolly robot thing with a screen for a face. The guy who was video-chatting through it was mute, possibly by some glitch. We reached the end of the street after 10 or 15 minutes of walking; "is this it?". Meandered back and walked into that JOYA restaurant for food and drinks. Sat between a tech company party of some kind on one side, and two meek young guys practicing a sales pitch for their startup on the other. We ate our mediocre food joylessly and Uber'd back to where we were staying down on El Camino, at Dinah's Garden Inn and went to bed early, hoping to get up early, which would let us get out early... Menlo Park and Mountain View, too, just seem like they were all clone-stamped from the same template: 6 blocks or so of faux-quaintess playing host to little boutiques and high end eateries, but nothing much else. Maybe they just aren't towns made for visitors, and maybe that's intentional.

The entire South Bay is incredibly dumpy. One nice thing about the Chinese system: No NIMBYs. Central planners keep the housing stock really high, and that's great for social stability.

maybe i’m just being nostalgic, but: good! maybe it should be dumpy. If it gets too shiny it’s time to be truly worried.

in my experience, hackers and researchers do our best work in settings that are less than ideal.

From Hamming’s “you and your research”:

This brings up the subject, out of order perhaps, of working conditions. What most people think are the best working conditions, are not. Very clearly they are not because people are often most productive when working conditions are bad. One of the better times of the Cambridge Physical Laboratories was when they had practically shacks - they did some of the best physics ever.

I give you a story from my own private life. Early on it became evident to me that Bell Laboratories was not going to give me the conventional acre of programming people to program computing machines in absolute binary. It was clear they weren't going to. But that was the way everybody did it. I could go to the West Coast and get a job with the airplane companies without any trouble, but the exciting people were at Bell Labs and the fellows out there in the airplane companies were not. I thought for a long while about, ``Did I want to go or not?'' and I wondered how I could get the best of two possible worlds. I finally said to myself, ``Hamming, you think the machines can do practically everything. Why can't you make them write programs?'' What appeared at first to me as a defect forced me into automatic programming very early. What appears to be a fault, often, by a change of viewpoint, turns out to be one of the greatest assets you can have. But you are not likely to think that when you first look the thing and say, ``Gee, I'm never going to get enough programmers, so how can I ever do any great programming?''

It is.

Heck, the entire valley is.

Bankrupt stockton in the 'poor' part of town has better roads than mountain view and cupertino. It's downright bizarre.

You need to exclude state routes like El Camino Real from city comparisons; those are Caltrans controlled. (Trying to get a broken magnetic loop sensor fixed on ECR can be an adventure.)

Well, you know, you don't go bankrupt without spending money.

This kind of article is worthy of techcrunch front page? Maybe someone's personal blog at best. The only value in this post is from the links to Bloomberg and WSJ

Are there people who don't think Palo Alto is dumpy?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com