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/How_to_write_a_CouchRequest

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

(I'm heavily involved on CS)

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.

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

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.

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.

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. :)

I guess I should have been clearer in my post. I'm not looking to save money here, I have no problem spending one to two hundred dollars on a hotel. But in my experience it's been a lot more fun in the past to meet random people and hang out for the night. I figured this would be a good opportunity to meet interesting members of the community, particularly around San Jose (met several cool people in SF already).

This is why god invented craigslist.