NYC cafes where I've personally witnessed coders at work include: Housing Works & McNally's at SoHo, Amrita in Harlem, Gorilla Cafe in Park Slope, Esperanto on McDougal..

I definitely agree the NYC startup scene is overhyped - this is the city of hype and startups are now cool by New York Magazine standards. But man, your view of NYC in general seems much shaped by a very specific social circle and long hours at GS ;)

Hm. New York has a population of 8,000,000 people, and you cite five cafes.

(Btw, Esperanto is cited in the footnotes of the post. It's since closed, at least according to Yelp.)

Berkeley (pop. 169,000) has you beat for sheer number of cafes (Berkeley Espresso, Brewed Awakenings, Yali's, Au Coquelet, Caffe Roma, etc.).

A complete list for SF would go on for quite a while....

I stand by my point (excusing a bit of blog-y hyperbole, of course).

Go here, center anywhere on Manhattan and type in "cafe": http://maps.google.com

Surprise!! Cafes!! Everywhere!!

Surely more than 5 of those have coders at work.

He cited five that he had personal experience with. You can't use that as a metric.

This is like complaining that LA is a bad city to film a movie because I've never seen a camera crew in Rancho Cucamonga. Manhattan != New York City.

It's worse than that. The four square blocks the author spent his time in != New York City.

I've seen several programmers working in cafes in Brooklyn. I don't really hang out in cafes in Manhattan that much (occasionally Subtletea back when I worked in the area) so I can't comment on the state of Manhattan cafes.

Really, you think cafes have come to the city only since 2008?

I lived there from 2000-2004 and this point wrung completely hollow for me. If you don't think NYC has "cafes" then you are not in NYC.