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. Muni (the bus, streetcar, and lightrail system) is great for getting around the city. Some routes are crowded and occasionally get some unpleasant people, but most of them are chill. Especially if you just avoid the commute hours. Tickets are valid for like 2-3 hours, no need to buy a ticket every time you get on. The 1 route is very fun, takes you through Chinatown and the hills. The 28 takes you from Fisherman's Wharf to the Golden Gate Bridge to Golden Gate Park. 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! > Find my email (or some other way to contact me) and I can buy you a beer I don't know why, but I felt the need to search it, haha. I thought it would be hidden or something... Finally a chance to experience Craigslist! Will defo reach out when I have the basic plan set. The super boring answer? 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. I respectfully disagree. If OP wants to experience SF, you've got to sleep in and wake up in SF, too. Just like any city. Hearing the sounds of the city at night is an important subconscious memory. For that same reason, also no need to get a car. SF has MORE than enough to do for a decade let alone a tiny trip. Agree. There's nothing like waking up in that hostel in the Tenderloin and going for a morning stroll looking for AI people to network with. I laughed. I mean, I lived there for 10 years. I'm all about that aesthetic, but if you come to Northern California and restrict yourself to public transportation, or the city, you are seeing maybe 5% of what the region has to offer. For a weekend trip I would stay in SF but if I was there for a week or longer, I would get out of the city. Try if you can get to stay at HI San Francisco Fisherman’s Wharf Hostel - https://www.hiusa.org/find-hostels/california/san-francisco-... 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. If you're going back and forth everyday, I would ignore every suggestion to stay outside SF, except for maybe stays in the Daly City-adjacent areas since more trains run through there. I travel to the Bay Area on occasion for work (and used to live there for a few years), the travel time + BART costs wouldn't be worth it IMO. 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. Ah, good point! 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? Sorry, no idea about the logistics of them, but after a quick search: looking at Hacknsleep, they have a line that says "Move-in within days", so probably quick? For a great, cheap day of sightseeing: 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. Reminds me of great day getting a subway sandwich and watching the America's Cup practice sailing from the battlements of Ft Point underneath the GG bridge. Watch out for the seagulls. I stayed as a guest student in San Francisco Zen center for $20/night (currently it's $25/night). But you will have assigned work to do during the day (I cut onions in the kitchen) but you will be free in the evenings and on weekends to explore the city. The city center of the Zen center is right in the city. Details here [1] 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... Don’t forget to check out the parks in between networking - Of course golden gate is worth a day or two but also recommend alamo square or hiking to the top of buena vista.
I recommend the bus system and Uber/Lyft - driving in the city isn’t fun and you’re likely to get your window broken if you don’t have a dedicated garage to park in.
San Francisco is amazing and I hope you do make the trip.
My gmail is matthewlewisnewton - email me if you don’t already have events planned. He will not realistically get his window broken unless he parks in a few bad areas AND has a lot of clear valuables in the car and gets really unlucky. It’s just not as common as people make it sound. 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. > 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. 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. > property crime is very common and not prosecuted. 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. If you're in good enough shape, I highly recommend walking the Crosstown Trail [1]. You will see beautiful parts of the city that most people who live there have never seen before, as well as the more "classic" vistas and landmarks like Golden Gate Park, Grandview Park, The Presidio and more. There are also plenty of opportunities to stop along the way in different neighborhoods for a bite to eat or a beer/coffee depending on what you're in the mood for. Definitely start on the southeast side and work your way northwest. Note: you don't need to go all the way to Hunters Point, it's mostly just a view of Candlestick Park, which has been torn down for years. Visitacion Valley -> Ocean Beach would suffice. Maybe we should just use this as an opportunity for a self-organized meetup? OP, tell us when you'll be here, and maybe we all just agree on a time and location? +1 to this idea. The parks seem super-massive by european standarts so yeah, would defo want to check those out. Will reach out when I have a rough plan sketched out! How long are you staying? 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. Get a city pass for sight seeing and bus passes, I did that a few times and it saves money :) Staying outside of SF itself is probably the easiest way to save money. Somewhere that's either close to a CalTrain or BART station. It may be a hassle getting in and out out the city depending on where you find a place, but much more affordable. Start there, then look into co-living in the city while you're here—that's usually a longer-term commitment. 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? How expensive is the public transport? If I'm going back and forth every day, feels like it could quickly add up? https://www.bart.gov/tickets/calculator $6.50 one way from downtown SF to somewhere like concord When I was first out of college I stayed at Green Tortoise Hostel for a week on about $250. Definitely not glamorous - the rooms are pretty packed and stuffy. But it was a lot of fun hanging out with a bunch of poor young travelers from around the world. Lots of wandering the city in the day and staying out late in North Beach. 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. I've been invited out to SF to 'network' by founders and VC's a total of 3 times over the past decade+. 10+ years ago the hostels were $11 a night, and Airbnb room could be $45 - $65. The last time I convinced myself maybe sleeping in Delores Park during the day and wandering around at night could work, but luckily because of tech connections I didn't have to do that. Now days I just stay in Chicago and when VCs and founders tell me to go out to SF I tell them to buy me a ticket and a hotel room, and often I do not receive a response to that. Research the neighborhood you're staying in. It's not uncommon for people to find a hotel that's TL-adjacent, think it's a great location because it's close to Union Square, then find themselves horrified when they step out in the morning. Best way of researching? Street view / hood maps ? The unpleasant area that you hear about in the news is basically just the border between districts 5 and 6 in this map: https://voterguide.sfelections.org/sites/default/files/image... My knee-jerk answers for where to not stay are downtown, anything near the Tenderloin, anything in the mission close to a Bart station. Bayview/Hunters Point is also on that list, but no one accidentally stays there. > network with people working on llms / ml ops Those people aren't in SF. They're in the valley. How different is staying in Palo Alto vs SF? And how long does it take getting between the two? Very. 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). Palo Alto is a (mostly) wealthy suburban town next to Stanford U. Without traffic it is 30-40 minutes from SF -- twice as long when traffic is bad. There's a train that is lame by European standards but fairly good for the US, which takes around an hour, sometimes as little as 48 minutes. OpenAI is headquartered in SF? That doesn't necessarily mean there are people working at their office in SF. Others disagree: https://sfstandard.com/2023/01/13/what-is-cerebral-valley-sa... This is good advice, people looking for AI people in SF take that first morning stroll through Hayes Valley. If you’d like great and reasonably priced coffee check out The Coffee Movement near China Town. They do a $3.50 Cappuccino and it’s where barista’s go after work. They’re also on the same street as the free Cable Car museum. They have one over in the Richmond (neighborhood) now, too. Great spot. Very serious about creating a good coffee experience. Eat at Swan Oyster Depot: https://www.swanoysterdepot.us/ Other options are: - Grab to-go salad box at Whole Foods - Burritos at Chipotle Neither of those options made Anthony Bourdain https://youtu.be/jSB53vfz2Oc try a place in oakland. you can take a train into SF cheap. I've heard oakland is a bit more rough than SF. Which are the bits to avoid? Avoid West Oakland (especially near the harbor, avoid anything west of Mandela Parkway or even west of I-980) which is the most dangerous area, as well as Fruitvale and south (eg: San Leandro), and Richmond in the East Bay (the Richmond district in SF is very safe). Alameda island is quite safe, as well as Chinatown and Broadway near the BART stations and Lake Merrit. Berkeley, the Oakland hills and Piedmont area are also safe. But I would still avoid walking around at night in downtown Oakland by myself after 8PM. 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/... There is modestly more property crime in Oakland, and slightly more violent crime in certain parts of Oakland, but really, if you’re not coming back at 2AM (which wouldn’t work anyway, BART stops about midnight) it’s really not a problem for tourists. Others have posted good advice, so I'll just add that if you need any human poop or hypodermic needles, you can find plenty of both all over the ground. And it's all free! A lot of people appear to be camping and enjoying the outdoors
at various streets and locations in SF. That is probably the cheapest option. Not sure about the networking BART it up! Hostels! Green tortoise has great vibes, used to go there before I moved to the city. Cooking lunch there instead of eating out will save you enough $$ alone haha. seems they have a 7 day max limit now For short-term housing, this could be a good option if your budget is ~$1000/month:
https://och.berkeley.edu/housing-secondary/price-under+1100/... Makes sense, if they didn’t people would just live there, it’s so much cheaper than the rest of the city haha.
Still recommend it as a bridge between finding a hacker house or more expensive / more distant accommodations Never stayed in Hostels before... Any worries about your stuff going missing? I've never stayed in a US hostel, but hostels I've been in all have lockers for your stuff. Although I'd be nervous about a hostel in the US--again, I've never been to one--but I'd be worried that the clientelle would be a bit sketchier than your budget-conscious tourist. I hate to be that person, but do you really want to go to San Francisco? The crime, lawlessness, and exorbitant prices might make you regret it. If you hate to be that person, consider not being that person. You're right, I would prefer to be that person to say don't go to San Francisco. It is much too violent. Go watch more cat videos, pussy You might be suffering from right-wing media bias. Millions live in the Bay Area, and while crime is afoot in every city, most people here are doing fine if not better than your average American.
