

Looking for a place to stay tomorrow night (Tuesday) near San Jose - cstejerean

I'm going to be at NVISION'08 for the Programming CUDA track on Tuesday and Wednesday. I'm looking for a place to crash Tuesday night, preferably somewhere with easy access to San Jose (ie. close to Caltrain).<p>I figured this might be a good opportunity to meet some members of the community. Also, if anyone is up for getting a beer Tuesday night, I'll buy the first round.
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senthil_rajasek
<http://www.couchsurfing.com/>

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mikeatlas
New members with no prior references may find it hard to get a couchsurfing
host immediately, especially on short notice.

Simply becoming a member of the site doesn't guarantee a place to stay...so
here are some helpful guides to get started in the CS community and culture.

<http://www.couchsurfing.com/mission.html>

[http://wiki.couchsurfing.com/en/Searching_and_requesting_a_c...](http://wiki.couchsurfing.com/en/Searching_and_requesting_a_couch)

<http://wiki.couchsurfing.com/en/How_to_write_a_CouchRequest>

<http://wiki.couchsurfing.com/en/Cheat_Sheet>

(I'm heavily involved on CS)

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cstejerean
Thanks. I've been a member of CS for a while although I've never actually
looked for a host. I was more interested in offering others a place to stay if
they happen to be in my area. I've been considering looking on CS but decided
against it since I really wanted to try and meet members of this site more
than I cared about finding a place to stay.

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tokipin
can't help you there, but i have to say i'm very curious about CUDA. the
"billions of little cores" parallel architecture seems good

i think it's because it gets straight to the heart of parallelism. when you
only have two or three cores/threads you might be worried about how to
apportion some task to each core/thread, and worried about things like thread
safety, whereas having to deal with hundreds of cores cuts that out completely
and encourages purer parallelism/collective/emergent/"natural" algorithms

my thinking is that maybe instead of starting with RISC processors and trying
to control some number of them, we can instead start with a full parallel
architecture (perhaps like what CUDA uses) with millions of cores, and
"emulate" RISC/x86/etc on top of that, wherefrom it would be natural to add
parallel opcodes and whatbeit

these are just notions though

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Kaizyn
Just get a hotel room instead of trying to leech off of the News.YC community.

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silencio
At the last conference I attended, I didn't receive confirmation that I would
be attending until one month beforehand (also, the delay was not something
that was my fault, it was Apple for being unusually late and taking a while).
I spent the next week trying to look for a short stay apartment or a hotel
room that wasn't $500/night that was also in a neighborhood where I (as a
woman going alone) would feel okay about being alone and would not have to
commute upwards of an hour to attend said conference. Having a sold out
conference (if you haven't guessed already, it was WWDC) on top of multiple
other busy conferences in the same area at the same time meant that there was
a huge shortage of available hotel rooms.

Then a friend (that at that point lived across the world from me and that I
only knew from IRC) found out about the situation and offered to let me stay
at his and his friend's hotel room since it had two beds and a sofabed and
they were also attending WWDC. If he didn't offer to do that, I would have
been stuck with a HUGE hotel bill or the possibility of not being able to
attend the conference because I didn't want to be stuck with a huge hotel bill
(think literally $500/night times 6-7 days). Instead my trip was fun, I felt
safer being with guys I knew over being alone, and my trip was affordable
because of their generosity in sharing.

Sometimes things happen and it's not easy to find a place to stay. Other
people in this community may be willing to let this guy crash on their sofa
for a night in exchange for something. Calling him a leech is unjustified if
you don't know why he's asking for a favor like this.

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Kaizyn
If a friend offers to let you stay with them as happened in your case, that is
one thing and they are being generous. You have a good friend there.

However, when you post to a public forum asking strangers for a place to stay
while you're visiting somewhere, it's just trying to take advantage of the
generosity of others you don't even know. This really should not be considered
acceptable behavior for such a forum as this.

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silencio
I'm torn. On one hand, you do have a valid point, but on the other hand...it
depends on the person.

That friend that let me crash in his hotel room was then at most an
acquaintance I knew from IRC. I mentioned my problem on an IRC channel and he
offered to help out for the entire 9 days I was planning on staying. I did not
go to him and ask if he had a place. After we met up in person, our friendship
really developed. You could say it was just a smaller version of the HN
community, as that now-friend was pretty much someone I've never _met_ before,
just another person I said hello to on IRC on a semi-regular basis.

Some people wouldn't take offense to the idea of sharing a couch like this.
Others may. But it's only due to the generosity and openness of certain people
that an idea like couchsurfing is even possible. And well, if anyone did maybe
feel like letting this guy crash on their couch, they can get to know him
better beforehand, and in person. The HN community isn't totally strange..yes,
you don't know everyone personally, but people here most likely share some
interests. I know that if someone here asked, we had lots of interests in
common, and they didn't mind sharing a couch at my house and I didn't mind
them staying over that I would most likely not mind them crashing for a day or
two. Especially if they did some chores around the house or something
small...doing the dishes after dinner, taking out the trash. :)

