if you move out to Illinois and other companies move to Kansas or Montana, how will you poach their workers? how will you fire and replace people easily? better to be concentrated for that.

Same way as everyone else...? But even if we assume, for the sake of discussion, that girls only exist in cities, you can, like, go to the city. It's not hard. They don't put impenetrable walls around them. In fact, thanks to the insane efficiency of the highway, you can more of often than not arrive at city destinations faster from small towns than you can being in another part of the city proper. Small town boy meeting big city girl is a tale as old as time.

Living in a small town can actually be quite advantageous if you want to bask in the amenities of the big city — especially if we're talking about all the "poorly designed" North American cities that prioritize transport from outside of the city to the detriment of the local population. You must be under the impression that if you live in a small town that you are permanently chained to your property?

> there are only so many jobs in the small town

But also only so many people, so in actuality you often find "more jobs than people". Curiously, people living in cities tend to not look for work beyond city limits, so you don't even have any added competition beyond the local population.

What small towns normally lack are the extreme outlier jobs like CEO of a F500 or professional sport player. If that is what you seek, you aren't going to find it in a small town. Ironically, though, those CEOs and professional sports starts quite often live in the small towns. I know because I live amongst many of them in my small town! Where you work and where you live are not one in the same.

> The larger city also means more jobs

But also more people competing for those jobs. Not only from the local city population itself, but also all the people in the small towns. Interestingly, while city people tend to never look outside of the city, small town people understand full well that they can work in the city and aren't afraid to look. As it turns out, as surprising as you may find it, they don't put walls around cities (anymore), nor are you chained to your small town property.

Because that's where the customer places them. "If you build it, they will come" is for the movies. In reality, successful companies emerge where the people are already raring to go.

If you look hard enough you will likely find out that someone in Monowi, Nebraska also built something like Amazon, but it didn't go anywhere because, well, who wants to buy books from someone in Monowi, Nebraska?

You are welcome to start buying from, and encouraging others to as well, things from the guy in Monowi to break the cycle. He will be thrilled, I'm sure! But are you going to? No, probably not. Why bother when you can get the same thing from a guy in Seattle? Seattle no doubt sounds far more trustworthy, and certainly more impressive, than Monowi.

How would anyone know? Which web sites show postal addresses?

Because most people (not all) in the U.S. associate location with status. If you're in the defacto location for innovation, people (foolishly) take you more seriously. That, and socially, people want to be able to say "we're based in SF" or "we're working with this team based in SF." Ego will always trump rational, practical thinking when big bucks are on the table.

It's all just hobgoblins of the mind, but the market isn't rational, so...we get a concentration of talent/companies because that's what the market responds to (whether or not it's a valid perspective).

Some of the absolute best people I've met live in places you've never even heard of—in fact, nearly all of the top people I've met.

Despite most people in SF dragging a duffle bag of credentials behind them, relatively few are truly technically or creatively impressive. The ones that lack competency beyond their resume rely on the status factor to keep their grift running.

For once, stop worrying about maximizing profit.

Every big tech company has tried to improve infrastructure. They've proposed free Internet, evaluated running train systems, redeveloping bridges etc. and the opposition is always the non-techies who oppose "company towns" and so on.

Hacker News just seems bizarre these days. It's full of people who say things no one familiar with the Bay Area (where YC is from) would say. Just completely divorced from reality.

Stands to reason. If you are familiar with the Bay Area, implying that you are there, what would you use HN for? You'd simply go outside and run into all the techies and the inane ideas they have to the fullest extent you can handle. Naturally it is going to attract those in flyover places that don't have any kind of meaningful tech scene connection otherwise.

Unfortunately our national attitude around population growth would need to change.

Adding on to existing cities in any direction other than “up” is frequently denigrated as “sprawl”.

New cities seem to be the sole purview of idealistic libertarian billionaires… which would be fine except they’re the only ones who even talk about it. Not that these ever get built.

Getting citizens and then the government comfortable with the idea of building nice new places would really help - in addition to all the heroics already being done in existing cities around zoning, transit, and housing regulations.