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Comment by ramesh31 | Hacker News Reader

The bay during the 2010s was a very special time and place. Hard to understand if you weren't there. I've never felt a sense of community and energy and excitement like that anywhere else. Not to mention all the free pizza and beer. If COVID is over and that world comes back, I'd love to return. But right now there doesn't seem to be much point.

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> It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run... but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant...

> Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 1971

I'm pretty sure people have been saying this about the Bay Area since the Gold Rush.

Isn't "very special time and place for community, energy and excitement" a function of your age, more than anything else?

Everybody experiences their special unique unrepeatable time and place. It doesn't matter which decade they lived, or where. For me, it was the early 90s in post-communist Czechoslovakia. Also, "hard to understand if you weren't there".

Free pizza and beer might not hold the same sway they did 10 years ago. You cannot step into the same river twice, etc.

The internet exploded post financial crash.

The iphone invented a whole new platform for ideas.

The economy moved substantially online during this time.

It was a transformative moment in technology being driven out of silicon valley / sf.

I think that's true although I also think that the past decade has been a pretty good time to be in tech broadly. I'm not sure it's really specific to the Bay Area/SF although it may be more obvious there because of how concentrated it is. (And, as you say, an outsized amount of the most visible tech came out of (I'd say) the West Coast.

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