Ask HN: Visiting SF on a Budget? I want to do a trip to SF to sightsee and network. But I want to keep costs down. Hotel / AirBnB are the easiest options, but what about co-living spaces and hacker houses? Ideally want to network with people working on llms / ml ops, so the community of a hacker house is appealing. But never stayed in one before, so not sure what to expect! Any help would be appreciated. |
Our ballpark is beautiful, catch a game there on a sunny day even if you don't care about baseball. Just go on a ticket site or the ticket window right before the game and you should be able to get in cheap.
Put up a "couch wanted" post on Craigslist. It's still active here.
Our meetup scene is still very active. Most events are free and sometimes even have free beer and pizza. I for sure have seen a few AI groups.
Check out https://noisebridge.net
Take the Caltrain down to Mountain view and make the pilgrimage to the computer history museum
The only neighborhoods where you should prepare yourself for SF looking like a dystopia is dead-center of the city, ironically right next to City Hall. You can visualize SF like an apple with a rotten core. No offense to the people living there, it's just a fact that it looks rough. All the neighborhoods on the outside are chill and pretty. It's only a small part of the core (Tenderloin, and the northern edge of SoMA near Tenderoin) where things look super rough. Even there, you'll be fine. I lived at Hyde & Ellis for a year. Treat people with respect and you'll be treated with respect.
Beware The Great Wall Of Fog in the west. You'll be at the Ferry Building and it's beautiful and sunny. And then you head to the ocean and you are practically swimming in fog.
You've got to ride a cable car once. Just pay the $8 and do it. Get on near the Ferry Building, then get off at the Fairmont and grab a beer at The Top Of The Mark (on a sunny day).
Find my email (or some other way to contact me) and I can buy you a beer
I have endless suggestions on where to go and what to see, just give me more pointers on what you like / don't like.
Welcome!
I don't know why, but I felt the need to search it, haha. I thought it would be hidden or something...
Will defo reach out when I have the basic plan set.
Get a hotel in like Concord somewhere reasonably walkable from the BART, and take public transportation into the city. If you're going to sightsee, despite what people say, you need a car. I would recommend driving down CA 1, see Half Moon Bay, Santa Cruz, etc. Take another day to see Napa and the North Bay.
I can't speak for hacker houses but I think you might be disappointed. You'll end up networking with a bunch of college students, and the risk of getting taken advantage of is super high. A better option might be finding specific framework or tool you are interested in on meetup.com. You can also meet a surprising number of people in tech by going to any random bar. You won't be able to throw a stone very far without running into a bunch of tech people.
The other idea is to ask around and get a room, with existing roommates that has already setup the likes of Kitchen, Washer, etc. and piggyback your grocery purchase with a friend that has a COSTCO membership.
Best of Luck.
In terms of "Hacker houses", I've only known one person (a coworker) who stayed in one long-term, but he was pretty eccentric. He complained about his living situation a good amount, but, attempting to reduce some of his biases, they seem to be in a "you pay for what you get" type of situation.
Last suggestion: book an initial stay through a hotel/Airbnb with a short duration -- with the intent of finding a co-living space if you're really that intent on living in one. This will give you time to scope locations out _in person_ and potentially toss out options that only look good in advertisements.
Any idea how far in advance co-living spaces need to be booked? Like, is it a on-the-day type of deal, or usually a week or so?
Do they do credit checks or references or anything like that?
Pack a picnic lunch from items from a grocery store.
Rent or borrow a bicycle at the wharf. Ride it across the Golden Gate Bridge into Sausalito.
Read up on and take reasonable precautions when locking up the bike.
Bum around Sausalito and take the ferry back. Good times.
I stayed mostly to learn about Zen meditation (I had heard that Steve Jobs practiced Zen meditation). This was when I was brand new to San Francisco just before joining my first job after finishing up my Masters as an International student.
Post my one week stay here, I stayed in a hacker house (Startup Embassy) for one whole year, staying in a bunk bed and having some of the best days of my life chatting and exploring with other founders and wannabe-entrepreneurs. Then started own own hacker house (community living with airbnb beds for founders) with friends I made there for the next year, near Mountain View California. My friends made it into YC and I returned to India to startup (due to H1B visa considerations among other things). I'm not sure if these are accepting guests anymore.
[1]: https://www.sfzc.org/locations/city-center/visits-stays-city...
I don't know of any co-living spaces / hacker-houses that have short term opportunities, most are commitments on the order of a few months to a year at a time. Personally I would try to find a few roommates (in your network or through some common forums) who are collectively interested in the ML space and go from there.
To your broader question about keeping costs low, I'd recommend some general strategies that are probably true anywhere:
- Host dinner at your house instead of eating out. Raw ingredients to cook at home in SF are no more expensive than other places in the country but eating out can get really pricy really quickly.
- Get a bike, Clipper card, or sign up for Revel. People love to hate on Muni but if you're willing to wait a bit for the bus they typically get you where you need to go. You also feel more connected to the city versus looking out of an Uber window. Or even cheaper just walk the hills are not that bad.
- If you end up not going the hacker home route, there are a lot of SF Housing facebook groups where people try to find people to fill temporary sublets. They're usually a bit cheaper than rent prices and way cheaper than AirBnBs.
- If you already have an apartment back home I also know companies like Kindred let you swap housing 1:1 so you might have some luck this way.
Welcome to the city! See you around.
This makes me feel a bit old and out of touch—when I came to the city ~10 years ago, I remember knowing a few larger houses (e.g. Negev). But haven't heard of any since then—beyond private houses set up by friends with a smaller number of people. Are the larger houses still a thing?
$6.50 one way from downtown SF to somewhere like concord
Hacker Houses can be kind of intense - people are usually in grind mode. And also they aren’t as good of a deal as you’d think, because anything “tech” in SF gets a markup. You can find short term HH sublets on Craigslist sometimes but they’re usually meh.
Meetup and Eventbrite would be my go-tos for finding networking events.
Those people aren't in SF. They're in the valley.
Caltrain will probably get you between the two in somewhere between 45 minutes and an hour on a weekdays. Weekends, you're screwed. Trains run once an hour at the best of times, and are basically broken all weekend due to maintenance for the foreseeable future. (I think they're using buses to connect gaps in service on the weekends).
- Grab to-go salad box at Whole Foods
- Burritos at Chipotle
In SF, I would avoid the Tenderloin, parts of SOMA from 6th Ave and higher, Mission district below 20th Ave, Excelsior, and Hunter's Point as well as the Bayview neighborhoods. Avoid East Palo Alto in south bay (the rest of Palo Alto is quite safe).
For short-term housing, this could be a good option if your budget is ~$1000/month: Berkeley is generally quite safe https://och.berkeley.edu/housing-secondary/price-under+1100/...
That is probably the cheapest option.
Not sure about the networking
You’ll be fine street parking at golden gate. You’ll be fine street parking at Buena Vista. You’ll be fine street parking near Dolo. It’s fine, I do it all the time.
Don’t park in (or go to) the tenderloin, and be cautious around the fisherman wharf (but plenty of tourists park here daily with no issue).
I would suggest visiting the Presidio, it has a nice parking lot if you’ll drive. Alternatively , Sutro Baths and the parks around it make for great views of the water and the bridge. It’s a bit hilly but it’s a great urban hike.
If you don’t want to drive our public transit is great. Golden Gate Park is serviced by the Muni N line which is very easy to take. The N will take you pretty close to Haight Ashbury neighborhood (very fun, unique for a few hours) and Buena Vista park too. Mission Dolores park is nice and serviced by the J line. Then it’s just a short walk to the mission for great Mexican food. Get a burrito.
I’ll just add that the worst parts of the city are the parts with offices (downtown, SOMA). Go away from where tech people go for the best experiences.
I do too, and wish this was true there are “car safe” areas, but it’s really just best advice to not worry about it in the city. the Muni is cheap, Uber/Lyft are very convenient, and I just yesterday filmed a car smash and grab on Fulton street, in broad daylight by Alamo square. A lovely group of tourists were a few feet from their car when it happened. Thieves are very brazen and will be wherever tourists are, all it takes is to leave a coat or something in the back seat they think might be covering something up. I love this city, and violent crime is basically nonexistent, but property crime is very common and not prosecuted.
OP, tell us when you'll be here, and maybe we all just agree on a time and location?
Will reach out when I have a rough plan sketched out!
Honestly, and perhaps controversially, I think this is not a super bad thing. Yeah getting your stuff stolen sucks, but at a society level it’s not a big deal.
I had my car broken into in Seattle in a hotel parking lot. The hotel staff cleaned up the glass, but otherwise didn’t tell us. When we found the car, we notified the police - in Seattle this means filling out a form on their website. They automatically email you a police report to forward to insurance. I’m very confident no one in SPD was involved. We had insurance money that day and the car fixed a few days later. Between the window repair and the items stolen was probably ~$1500 in damage. But the cost of a police officer to spend hours investigating (and still probably not catching anyone) would make it prohibitively expensive to run a police force. Unless you want to put up cameras everywhere and staff the government to track people through them, you basically can’t prevent petty crime in cities. Even that may not have caught our thief. It’s just too expensive to police everything, and with so much police corruption, I’m not sure I’d prefer 3x the force at 1/3 the salary.
