WRT NYC, there's probably a big advantage to the less competition for talent. When you're recruiting out of college, NYC is probably as easy of a sell as SF, if not easier, and you're not fighting Facebook, Zynga, Twitter, etc. for those same people. A lot of people choose where they want to live and then where they want to work, especially programmers since a guy with a CS degree from MIT or CMU can get a job anywhere.
Possibly true given that startup employees tend to also not mind being Google / Facebook employees. However, don't discount the Wall Street / financial industry pull. For hacker employees, median cash compensation in finance dominates startups.
Plus, the number of hacker-friendly finance firms doing heavy recruiting seems to be on the rise (as a first order approximation, that's any finance firm run by mathematicians or computer scientists).
"When you're recruiting out of college, NYC is probably as easy of a sell as SF, if not easier, and you're not fighting Facebook, Zynga, Twitter, etc. for those same people."
If we're talking about programmers, I think you're also fighting with Wall Street and $$$'s.
