Re:How to Make Pittsburgh a Startup Hub
by boulos on Tuesday April 12, 2016 @07:05PM
(#11484364)
I'll second that I found it strange that the brutal Pittsburgh weather wasn't mentioned. CMU, Cornell and MIT have an awfully hard time competing for graduate students in CS when the visit days have to be late March or early April (there can be nearly a sixty degree Fahrenheit difference once you include wind chill).
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Brutal is pretty relative. I grew up about an hour north of Pittsburgh and moved into the city about eight years ago. I find Pittsburgh's weather to be abnormally sane for the area. Pittsburgh doesn't get the extremes that much of a Rust Belt gets. Even 35-50 minutes outside the city gets four or five times the snow. Sure, the temperature gets into the single digits for a couple of weeks (negatives with wind chill, but I've found there's not much wind in a Pittsburgh winter), but most of our summers don't exceed 90˚F. I can heat and cool a 1400 sq ft house for under $200/mo with gas heating and electric A/C, plus a house full of geeky electronics, a house inhabited by people who chronically forget to turn things off.
What's brutal to me? North Dakota. Montana. Maine. Vermont and New Hampshire. Northern New York and its Buffalo area.
Stockholm syndrome. Pittsburgh gets less direct sunlight per year than Seattle. 6 months of the year you basically can't go outside without freezing your face off. It's still snowing in April...