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Comment by CoastalCoder | Hacker News Reader

Anyone know the reasons for the cancellations?

I didn't see that in the article.

Interestingly, they danced around it. It's one thing for conference organizers to not say it in case they want to come back, but normally local news will try to put it in a broader context.

Meta cancelled altogether, so that is probably just a cost-saving measure (Meta isn't doing too well rn).

RedHat moved their conferences to other states in the US, but still plan on holding future conferences in SF. Which, to me, also sounds like a temporary cost saving measure. I highly doubt it's because of safety or homelessness, if that was the case then they wouldn't be commiting to hold future conferences in SF.

What makes you say Meta isn’t doing well now? 2022 was rough on them, but 2023 seems to be treating them well.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/META/

I would think at this scale of conference organization, the decisions around things to do in 2023 are being made deep in 2022. So they probably decided to cancel 2023 in the midst of the big layoffs and cost cutting of 2022.

> Meta cancelled altogether, so that is probably just a cost-saving measure (Meta isn't doing too well rn).

Poorly informed comments like this by otherwise intwlligent people hurt hn. Meta is minting money right now.

Homelessness. Theft. Human poop everywhere, safety.

It wouldn't surprise me if this were the real reason. It really jumps out at you as a visitor. I mean literally last time I was there, a dude pooped in front of me. Another person ran into a restaurant to grab my leftovers. Numerous people were cursing at their imaginary enemy. All in areas of town where visitors might be quite common.

It's really quite bad and it's an impression someone ought to do something about.

I found used condoms on and around my car not once but twice, and that was enough for me…

Just make sure not to wear a technicolor dreamcoat and remember they won't refund your deposit.

West Coast city stuff then. It's everywhere.

I'm convinced there isn't any kind of immediate solution to these problems. Not that we should give up on mental health and addictions treatment. I just think the solution is way broader. Reduce income inequality, improve schools, keep up the drug treatment so the children of people with drug problems stand a chance, better research about when opiate prescriptions are appropriate (like 24 hours post surgery at most then just acetaminophen), universal healthcare and childcare to stop people falling into poverty... Then wait a good 20 years for those things to ripple through society.

I know HN loves solutioning and grand projects, but at least consider that this isn't always the way. Consider the article from a couple of days ago about letting ACL tears heal on their own rather than doing surgery. You cannot engineer your way out of everything and often it makes things worse.

> keep up the drug treatment so the children of people with drug problems stand a chance

The current "treatment" is to hand out free drug paraphernalia and what has been proposed in cities like SF and Seattle are taxpayer-funded "safe injection sites" fully staffed with nurses. An analogy would be to try and cure a rat problem by sitting on a park bench tossing them pieces of bread. It's irrational and it doesn't work.

The obvious solution with rats is just to kill them, but people aren't rats, so the analogy doesn't work. Safe injection sites are intended to stop people from dying and reduce the spread of communicable diseases, because people are worth trying to save.

The problem being inherently human, you have to come up with solutions that at the very least treat them as such.

This approach sounds a lot like treating a heart attack with diet and exercise. Sure diet and exercise are great, but they’re not what’s indicated while you’re keeling over. First fix the acute problem and then look work on reducing recurrence afterwards.

And of course there is an immediate solution: remove the people violating the social contract from society at large. It’s up to the people of San Francisco to either find a politically palatable way to do that or continue to live in a kind of fecal anarchy.

Edit: in case it’s not clear I’m not euphemistically suggesting incarceration as the only option, although it is one. Some kind of supervised halfway house SRO type thing would be another option among many. Drug rehabilitation also.

That's just it, I don't think you can do that. The equivalent of acute treatment for an MI in homelessness would be coralling them elsewhere or removing them from the city and replacing them with known good humans harvested from elsewhere.

Probably how NYC recovered from the 70s and 80s is instructive, or the decades long overall decline in violent crime in major cities. SF for all the crap it gets is still near an all time low in violent crime. Was it acute treatments, or did general conditions just change?

San Francisco also needs to make housing a lot cheaper by building way more of it, including marginal options like SROs. So much of the disorder you see on streets of wouldn't be happening in public if housing wasn't insanely expensive to the point of people needing a good steady job lest they become homeless.

Not heart attacks, but the issue with CPR is that outcomes after it are really bad. You can do interventions, but the five-year outlook isn't good for ~90% of people needing CPR.

In other words, it's a lot of work to get the a homeless addict to be a net-neutral for society, if that's even possible.

In lieu of Red Hat and Meta saying why they cancelled, it would be pure speculation.

More expensive and a pain to go to the conference. I guess that's a big part of why they're attempting to extend CalTrain to Salesforce Transit Center at a ridiculous per-mile cost.

To clarify, this is speculation, neither the articles nor the companies have said anything of this sort.

RedHat have moved their conferences to Florida, so I highly doubt cost is a big reason. Florida itself is much cheaper, but a decent chunk of RedHat employees live in Cali, so flying them across the continent is not that much cheaper.

EDIT: I was wrong, RedHat is mostly east coast, I'm sorry.

Red Hat are headquartered in North Carolina, with the engineering HQ in Massachusetts. There's way more workers on the east coast than the west.

Denial. No one's going to be honest about not having events there.

Not denial from me, I was thinking of how the city might be trying to make it so people can get there more comfortably, which includes less chance of experiencing some of SF's problems. I don't think it's a very good plan because it's expensive and far into the future, but I think it's a part of the misguided approach the city is taking.

I've actually walked from the CalTrain station to Moscone. It's not all that far.

(of course, your hotel is probably farther.)

So have I, haha.

Except I've never been to Moscone. Just past it, dozens of times.

I like Chaat Corner. That's more of a landmark for me than Moscone.

Edit: wow, I've heard your voice before. You did an interview w/ Nassim Nicholas Taleb that I watched.

I hosted him. It wasn't an interview; in fact, he's the only person I hosted where I showed him the intro beforehand (which was his own writing)! Didn't want to mess around with this guy /s

Haha, cool. I would like to meet him one day. And I have some more Google Author Talks to watch.

Hasn't RedHat been headquartered in Raleigh since its inception? I knew a few people who moved out there for RedHat from the Bay Area.

Moscone isn't that much closer to the Salesforce bus station than to Caltrain. It's about the same time once you add in the extra time to wind through the tunnel and get out of the terminal.

The issue with Caltrain is it ends about 1.5 miles short of downtown.

Nobody's going to take Caltrain from the airport to Moscone. Spending a few billion dollars on a bus station is ridiculous but it's orthogonal to the issue at hand.

Moscone now has a subway stop, which may help with downtown connectivity (but I won't hold my breath).

Nobody? How about people staying at an airport hotel? And you realize that conference attendees have to fight traffic if they aren't staying at a hotel downtown, because conferences start at about the same time a regular work day starts.

Have you ever made the BART–Caltrain connection? Nobody in their right mind is going to do that if their final destination is Moscone.

It takes the better part of half a mile to get from platform to platform, and originally I thought the connections weren't timed. Turns out it's worse. BART refuses to do timed connections on the weekends, and on the weekdays they pretend to time it. Connections from Caltrain to BART are 15–20 minutes. Going from BART (e.g. the airport) to Caltrain is not "timed" and is a 20–30 minute transfer. Icing on that shit cake is that BART doesn't run when the first few and last few Caltrain runs are made. So, yeah, nobody will do that. There's no reason to unless BART isn't running, in which case you're reliant on taxis/ubers or one of the scarce SamTrans buses that was gutted to pay for BART to get to the nearest Caltrain station (Millbrae).

If they're coming from the airport they'll take BART to Powell and walk to Moscone or do the ridiculous transfer at Powell to the subway to nowhere and get off at Moscone station.

It's all moot though as BART's not even stopping at Millbrae today because reasons.

I've made that transfer. It sucks but it's still a relevant option, especially for people who live next to a CalTrain station. A CalTrain that goes downtown would likely get them to make it easier for airport passengers to get to Millbrae. Because of that a CalTrain that goes downtown would be worth a lot, but still a tiny fraction of the proposed budget. I hope it doesn't happen if it's going to cost that much.

The conference attendees when at the airport have their luggage. The airport hotel is a more realistic scenario. Or a CalTrain accessible hotel. And some of the airport hotels have good access both to CalTrain and the airport. I think more would if this extension were made.

  people who live next to a CalTrain station

Right. Nobody's taking Caltrain from the airport to a conference at Moscone.

  Or a CalTrain accessible hotel

How many area hotels offer shuttles to SFO? How many offer shuttles to Caltrain? Airport shuttles will stop at the international terminal which is where the BART station is. Shuttles to Millbrae (Caltrain) don't exist ergo nobody's taking Caltrain to Moscone.

Even if there were shuttles to Caltrain, it's a much shorter walk from Powell at 4th and Market (or the Moscone station at 4th and Folsom) than 4th and King or the transbay terminal.

You said nobody in your original reply to me and reiterated it in your other two replies. Are you sure that the vast majority of the conference attendees from other states fit the same profile of staying in a hotel downtown? Maybe they are but I would like to see some data.

I said nobody is going to take Caltrain from the airport to Moscone. In fact I looked at three hotels near SFO and they all offer shuttles to SFO but not to Millbrae. Who's talking about downtown? I have no idea what you're on about.

That's because they're right at the airport. Look at the hotels with airport in their name that are within a few miles of the airport. A lot of them are closer to a CalTrain station then the airport.

https://www.hilton.com/en/hotels/sfosoes-embassy-suites-san-...

  Please note that we offer a fee-based shuttle to San Francisco International
  Airport SFO, from 5AM-10AM and 5PM-10PM. Please reserve the shuttle using
  the link below.

That's closer to south city Caltrain than the airport, and yet… nobody is taking Caltrain to Moscone. Judging by that neighborhood nobody's walking to Caltrain either. Caltrain to Moscone isn't a thing.

Yes and hopefully it won't be a thing (just something that happens enough that it's not nobody - I would walk from some of these hotels south of the airport to the Caltrain station, and take Central Subway or walk to Moscone when I arrive at 4th and King). But the extension to downtown is attempting to make it a thing. They're hoping that people who take it downtown will take it to go anywhere that they consider downtown accessible. Part of the plan is an underground passage to the Embarcadero BART station. I think the planned budget is ridiculous but I think it would be used at least enough for it to be considered a thing.

But aren’t most conference attendees from out of town?

My guess is either shrinking demand for the conference (vs the cost) and or location desirability.

I'd have to see a map of where conference attendees stay. I assumed some would be commuting every day just like residents. I also could be wrong but I thought a lot would stay in hotels near the airport, especially those who live out of town but work for companies that have offices in South Bay and are going to visit the offices while they're in the Bay Area.

One option for commuting conferencegoers is to take transit into the conference to beat the traffic and take Uber or Lyft back after having dinner near the conference, when there is less traffic. Except some would take it on the way back as well because the traffic got them to familiarize themselves with public transit.

Conferences are held downtown.

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