I get that it's super hard to replicate this and have a good time outside of the HK jungle, but to be honest it made me a lot more optimistic . You see people's real colors when you ask them to host you in their home, and in my case the support was overwhelming.
I'd imagine most unhoused individuals are doing it as a strategic cost saving. Only, they're strategy involves eating and surviving rather than paying for unreachable/unsustainable rents. Maybe they didn't choose it, but it's still the strategy they're engaging in.
There are plenty of folks who can’t find housing for other reasons like background checks, credit score checks, etc. that might not be directly related to their ability to pay rent at that point in time.
Makes sense. I guess it depends on the location, since in my case there were no animals as long as I didn't bring food in the tent. And another pro is you can pitch tents in places no one would ever go, while it's harder for vehicles. So less chances of getting busted.
Vehicles are tied to roads more or less and make contact with the most dangerous animal much more likely. Keeping food out of the tent is probably enough to discourage most animals from snooping.
This is not homelessness. This is "bandit camping". Not a value judgment on the act - when I was young climbing bum I did me a fair bit of it. But calling it homelessness is pretty insulting to the actual homeless, who aren't doing it by choice to optimize their time for a relative luxury.
You can be affected by something and not care about it. You can be affected by things you don't even know about, like the way regulations shape the houses we can live in.
Even assuming this is true, that doesn't make the article insulting. Myths about how housing does not follow supply and demand affect homelessness even more, but that doesn't make the person spreading these myths morally wrong.
There's a place for policing language, but you're not doing anyone any favors by gatekeeping homelessness. This is not involuntary homelessness, but then a large number of unhoused people could live under a roof if they were willing to accept certain tradeoffs, whether that be living with an abusive spouse, with an estranged parent, in a sober house, or far away from a community of friends. There are unhoused people who could scrape by in menial, arduous--and possibly dangerous--jobs who instead choose to live life on their own terms.
Trebaol was not forced into homelessness, but he was not play-acting or apeing a lifestyle for kicks. He was in a situation where he judged squatting four and a half months illegally in the jungle was worth saving a mere $2,000.
If you prefer to describe your past lifestyle as bandit camping instead of homelessness, by all means do so. But don't insist the rest of the world conform to your arbitrary redefinition of a term from its everyday meaning because it doesn't always fit your preconceptions.
Are you really helping the unhoused by insisting that someone is only truly homeless if they are schizophrenic, strung out on fentanyl, or otherwise totally incapable of being a productive member of society?
No but it definitely normalizes the issues around homelessness as no big deal when you write something where you’re intentionally homeless for financial gain.
And it didn't happen and if it had then he'd have crashed on a friend's sofa. And his laptop and two suits would have been safe in a locker at university.
An actual homeless person would have a quite different experience of a bust.
"I decide who is homeless and who isn't in retrospect by analyzing whether something happened to their tent in the woods or whether they were not discovered".
Sure. That's easier for you than talking about how differently things go with the cops for a rich university student caught tent camping on a lark, than for someone who is actually homeless.
Yes it does. A real homeless person doesn't go to the gym everyday to shower, or avoids bringing food to his tent but it's ok because "I can eat at the university", or charges his devices every day at the same university, or sleeps at their friend's place when the weather is too dangerous.
If was an interesting read and experiment, but it has its limitations as a real world comparison to homelessness.
Oh get over yourself with this contrived bit of supposed offense. Aside from it being nonsense, are you yourself homeless, a representative of a group of homeless people, someone who interviewed a number of them and asked if they're "offended" by anyone who doesn't absolutely have to live outside also using the phrase "i'm living homelessly"?
Also, by your invented criteria for language monitoring, many homeless people in many cities would themselves no longer be considered homeless.
Quite a few of them could somewhere, under some circumstances, find a place to stay even though it cost them just a bit too much to like, just like the guy who created this clever and interesting post.
Actually the ETHOS classification system for homeless focuses more on where a person is living as opposed to why they're living like that. OP would alternate between two categories.
I'm not sure this is entirely correct. Many have studied homelessness in an attempt to remedy it, and found that it is largely a choice* and thus near impossible to solve with resources from the outside.
*Sure, not a 'Hey, this looks fun' choice, more a conscious understanding of a tradeoff where homelessness is not choosing the alternative life.
I really appreciate the level of detail in this post. Not too little. Not too much.
It does seem that being in school made this experiment distinctly different from just living in a tent. In a sense, tuition was rent. It paid for showers, electricity, and a living room with air conditioning (the library). It also provided a supportive community. School and even society at large is more inclined to help a poor student than an adult trying to cut rent.
I make this observation not to diminish the experiment's value. I am just putting it in context to arrange its utility in my mind.
(edit: I can't imagine why this is flagged. It is def life- hacking if not tech hacking.)
100%. It's a lot easier when you live next to a Google campus. And it sorts all the menial matters that make a huge difference, like access to washing machines.
About the flagging, you seem to have been here for a while, any hint? I get the word usage can comes across as disrespectful now that people mention it, but didn't think a link would get flagged for that.
I have been here for years. Most things that get flagged are extremely objectionable or touch a political nerve.
I could see conservatives disliking that it questions capitalism's viability post AI. I could see liberals thinking you are making light of folks experiencing homelessness.
I think those are absurd, but with a low vote count, your post may only need a few absurd people to flag you.
Naturally, there could be other reasons things get flagged, but I never see them because they disappear too fast.
You could always ask @dang to weigh in. He might see something which violates the guidelines.
> Most things that get flagged are extremely objectionable
I unflag completely normal posts every day on the "New" page of HN. Many of them are actually very good posts, and some of them reach the number one spot of the front page after being unflagged.
Very rarely do I see the flagged posts being very objectionable.
I have my account set to show flagged comments. A lot of flagged comments are simply some form of "wrongthink" but not violating any guidelines. So I've used the function often to "save" a flagged thing but it seemed to have stopped working for me at some point. I can only speculate why, but I think I saw some other commenters saying that happens if you unflag too much.. wrongthink. I want to give the site admin the benefit of the doubt though. Maybe it's simply an automated process that notices you unflagged too many things that were flagged by others too much?
I also have that setting, and occasionally vouch for an inexplicably flagged comment I notice.
There's definitely wrongthink/ideological flagging and downvoting going on.
(On some comments I make, I know when I make it that it's going to get downvoted, because it pushes against an opinion of the kinds of people who will downvote to suppress criticism. It used to be that criticizing cryptocurrency would get downvotes, but now it's popular to criticize. I can get reliably downvoted any time that I suggest that adding a fee for some basic public infrastructure (e.g., to drive on street in a city), in a "market-based" way, is a handout of the basic public infrastructure to the wealthy. Also, suggestions that there's still any bias against women, in anything, somewhere, seems to reliably get downvotes, no matter how relevant; I don't know why, but I'd guess it's because the topic has a lot of general angry sentiment, and people who are angry the other direction aren't represented as much on HN.)
I'd distinguish wrongthink from something being off-topic and done-to-death or a flamewar magnet. Maybe one mental exercise test for this is whether the same person would also still downvote as "topic" if the opinion of the post/comment were flipped.
one common misconception is that "the downvote is not a disagree button". it absolutely is. I made that mistake before, in the early days of reddit they used to stress that mantra, and I made the false assumption it was true here. You are getting downvoted because people disagree or don't like what you have to say. simple as that.
Downvotes sadly are endorsed by pg (the owner of HN) for use to indicate disagreement.
Flags are not downvotes and are not to show disagreement. They do seem to get used that way.
I like the others above have show-flagged enabled. "90%" of things I vouch are things I disagree with that represent what I consider a point of view that deserves to be known, has been at least reasonably well presented, and isn't flame-bait.
>There's definitely wrongthink/ideological flagging and downvoting going on.
I actually vouch for a lot of comments I disagree with that was flagged, and upvoted it because I want it to be shown to the world. And in other times I disagree with it but vouch and upvoted because I dont want HN discussions to be one sided.
I’ve lived in China for a few years and I noticed anytime I write anything even remotely positive about my experience there I will get downvoted or flagged. Even completely neutral comments sometimes gets downvoted.
I don’t think anyone doubts there are good things that come from China. Using a throwaway account won’t help your cause marketing China. Like every other “superpower” China has their major, major flaws. The kicker is trust. Pro-China rhetoric on a highly-moderated forum should be met with skepticism.
This isn’t opinion. The great firewall of China isn’t a farce, it would be good to remember that.
It sounds more like the concern is that a post coming from China has a significantly higher likelihood to be state-sponsored propaganda than a resident’s/citizen’s genuine opinion. It makes sense on its face that it would be “higher” (that’s the point about the Great Firewall) but it seems to be a matter of personal opinion how “significant” that increase is.
Russian here. I can't show -any- cool tech made here or an optimization that we do that western countries don't because people would say I praise Russia no matter how much more often and harsher I criticize. They don't even know what I think about the country, I just can't speak about it.
I appreciate people who are saving flagged comments because what made HN great 10-15 years ago was that I often changed my views because people would articulate why they are right and they sometimes indeed were.
silencing the opposition creates an illusion of consensus. in the deluded minds of the terminally online, it is paramount to maintain that illusion.
in every remotely political discussion here, reddit opinions are allowed to be expressed as non-constructively as you please, but all dissent, no matter how factual and constructive, gets flagged within minutes.
Apparently it's because the original headline had the unfortunate juxtaposition of "homelessness" & "experimentation"?
I wouldn't be so quick to call delusion/dissent when designers of our spaces have simply made it far too easy to turn private affects into public effects..
(& It might be rude of me to be so concrete.. so.. apologies)
They're not deluded. They're evil. By faking consensus you mint new converts because the false consensus affects the opinions of everyone new to the subject. The platform designers, moderators, etc, etc, know this and that's why they do it.
Not ironic at all. Downvoting and flagging exist exactly to handle content that is not worth the effort or even harmful to respond to (remember bullshit almost always takes more effort to debunk than to create). As such, it's usually a mistake to both downvote and respond.
You've already described the solution to the problem: we upvote things that we think are unfairly downvoted. If you say mildly controversial things, you can often watch this happen on your comments. Not that I wouldn't like reasons attached to downvotes and flags...
But I think it's best to let the people vote if they value a story on how lifestyle hacking can help you go straight to building startups instead of having to first save up in a job.
What HN is or is not about is largely decided by flags (besides more direct moderator invention) so your reasoning is circular. If something is flagged then it's because enough people don't think it belongs here.
I want to be able to upvote this comment just to show everyone how rules like "don't change the headline as originally given by website" or "let randos (with unpredictable emotional structure) flag stuff" lead to suboptimal outcomes
Sure, but any system of rules leads to suboptimal outcomes. Which isn’t to say the devil you know is better than the one you don’t, just that this being a suboptimal outcome is not in itself a reason to change those rules. In that context, the title rule is rather agreeable.
I usually see people complaining about misleading headlines when it does not match the linked article. To be fair, it is sometimes an improvement but the point is that it’s always editorializing. Keeping that to a minimum only when the article’s headline is particularly objectionable seems to be better than letting every poster editorialize as a matter of course.
For these above reasons, I like the "don't editorialize" rule by itself. BUT it seems especially suboptimal in comparison to its combination with the "let people flag stories without justification" rule.
No worries, I got ya, buddy:
Imho instead of eschewing quantification altogether, rules should have a ELO style rating computed from the effects of their pair-wise combinations :)
The hard part could be the combinatorial explosion lol
Wild camping is tolerated in Hong Kong, but this guy is going to ruin it for everyone. Leaving 2.5 meter high tent pitched over daytime near buildings, is lazy and really really bad.
Stealth camping should be done in low profile tents (1.2 meters high). You should pitch tent at dark, and leave before sunrise.
The author wisely talks about safety considerations, but there's an it's-expensive-to-be-poor risk I'd like to emphasize:
One injury or illness caused by the frugality could wipe out that $2K savings, many times over, in immediate costs, and might never fully heal.
I think back to all the penny-pinching I did (less impressive than the author's), and much of it was necessary under the circumstances, but a very poor value tradeoff otherwise.
Agree. I tried to describe the step by step approach to show how you can try this gradually and mitigate the risks, but if you don't have access to a community and cheap student healthcare it's definitely quite dangerous. I'll add word about this at the bottom.
Cripplingly Expensive healthcare is only an issue in one country in the world.
I’ve been to the ER in Ecuador, Mali, Angola, Australia, Canada. Even as a tourist it was so cheap I didn’t bother using any travel insurance ( less than $50, including prescriptions)
I went to the ER in Canada (BC) a couple years ago, and they charged $950 to my credit card just to walk in the door. Everything else was extra, and charged at rates not wildly different from what I’ve seen in the US. And I’m a Canadian citizen! (I had temporarily lost my free healthcare eligibility because I lived outside the country for a few years.)
Can’t comment on all the other countries you listed, although I can add that urgent care in Germany was pretty reasonably priced.
It seems unlikely that there is not a single other country with “cripplingly expensive healthcare” besides the USA. I’m also of the opinion that there are more than 6 countries total.
An "ER visit" can be a completely benign and simple thing that happens after-hours but really you just needed a nurse/doct, OR it could be a life-changing set of multiple surgeries and tests and treatments and and and. Let's not dismiss how very-real emergency costs can be, just because we don't like the messed-up american healthcare billing mess. I've been to an emergency room in South Africa, as an example, and off the bat it cost about $100. That's almost monthly average salary of a huge portion of the population here!
Lucky that you happened to be in need in countries with a low cost of living. I needed an ambulance, stitches, and an MRI in Germany and it cost me $2000 USD. I wish I had travel insurance then.
Then again having an extra $2k in the bank might prove beneficial - perhaps preventing a personal catastrophe in a the near future. Or open doors that might make a significant difference down the road.
Risk is complicated, anything could happen. Not just doom and gloom. Individuals circumstances and appetite for risk versus reward varies.
Agreed, but, say, a 20yo who's never had anything go significantly wrong for them, might not even consider that something bad could happen.
In that case, the appetite for risk versus reward is only appetite for reward.
If risks pointed out, at least that's closer to an informed choice they're making, and maybe they'll do the same risky thing but now be more careful about mitigating risk as they do.
(Source: Person who's bet it all at least a few times, and about to do so again, but finding ways to avoid stupid decisions and mitigate risks along the way.)
True in many places, but in Hong Kong, the cost of an A&E visit or hospital admission for the author (presumably on a student visa) at that time was about USD15/day.
I lived and worked on the HKUST campus in the 90's.. Very picturesque. Surrounding coastline very rugged. He picked a good spot. No egress there at the bottom of the hill. Fun fact: He camped just below the historic location of Shaw Studios, who popularized the Kung Fu movie genre
The ROI calculation is way too short sighted to be meaningful. To start you are already paying college tuition, and the expectation is to get an education that will help you pay off the loans (and then some). Going a few hundred deeper in the hole every month to have a roof over your head (you know, the most basic requirment for humans after water and food) is a no brainer and will massively increase your education ROI. A couple months of "homeless man" cosplay is probably fun and games but start to face the heat, cold, humidity, animals, police, theft, physical danger and more and those As aren't going to remain As for long.
You're right that I was arguably irrationally attached to not ending uni with too much debt.
For the rest, I'm with you it might be hard to replicate beyond this n = 1 sample, but I'm convinced this experiment's ROI is actually much more positive than suggested in the post.
Not only did I get better grades that semester from being forced to spend more time in the library, but I learned a lot living at people's places afterwards, and, most importantly, the feeling of freedom from materials matters allowed me to make bolder bets that paid back multiple times over.
You can even go further: even if my grades had gone down, I still would have been more employable for many types of companies, starting with early stage startups.
Doesn't living in a tent also make you less vulnerable to smartphone and laptop addictions?
I noticed in myself that when I stay in minimal places (camping/jungle hut/tent), I tend to be more connected to the real world and less addicted. More productivity, clearer thought.
I read a comment on Reddit along the lines of ‘if you doomscroll every day to wake up, you wreck your dopamine levels for the day before even getting out of bed’.
I don’t have enough medical knowledge to assess this claim, but I made a simple rule: don’t touch the phone before getting out of bed! (except to turn off the alarm)
Perhaps, but it’s not really a reason to eschew conventional shelter. You’d probably try some smaller changes first (e.g., setting up screen time restrictions, deleting apps, switching to a dumb phone).
Better grades: could've spent more time in the library while paying rent anyway.
Learned a lot living at people's places: you could plan a month of no accomodation and couch surf, don't think that's such a stretch. More fundamentally, the tent piece was just a "social opener" to learn more about others. Many other things can be this social opener.
Material freedom: I buy that the experiment showed you that and that's awesome, but I also think some solid therapy around one's understanding of material reality could play a similar role.
For the grades, it's true you could always spend more time in the library out of sheer willpower. It was nice just to be nudged into it by this lifestyle, and definitely helped as willpower is limited.
People's places: have you heard of people doing this? I'm genuinely curious because I could never bring myself to be a nuisance if I didn't absolutely need it, meaning the blocker is definitely real yet fully in my head here.
Material freedom: I guess I haven't seen enough to agree with this one yet. The only intellectual pursuit I know that would genuinely get you closer to not caring about life so much as to reduce your fear in homelessness is the study of physics!
> but start to face the ... animals, police, theft, physical danger and more and those As aren't going to remain As for long.
These are the real dangers that a roof and walls offer you protection from. If you happen to find a benign niche where you don't face these threats, it's likely because there is an invisible layer of defense being provided to you by the societal structures around you.
Why put this experience along some pseudo-objective yardstick? Just read the article, the author tells you already how he experienced it and why he decided to do this. If you would not do this yourself, that's okay, but don't take away from the author like this.
Interesting article about alternative living, I understand why you would do this for fun, but obviously the risk vs. reward calculation makes no sense.
The convenience of a place with electricity, running water, a table and chair, you are legally allowed to sleep there, etc. Seems easily worth 450 Dollars a month. In the end he says he saved 2k, but that is not a relevant amount of money to save over months if you become a software developer in America.
Convenience is not the only possible reward, and the post touches on this.
I've stayed in many inconvenient places and the immediate benefit is often that it forces you to go out of your way to find good places to work from, to get food, entertainment, etc.
> This turns into a surprisingly intense experience. I get to meet people in their most intimate space and bond over late-night conversations in ways that never would have happened otherwise.
This is much like the couch surfing experience: staying with people for a few days and sharing their space, which often ends in these deep, late-night conversations. It's an incredible experience.
There are a few platforms for that, I recommend Couchers.org. It's free & open source (and I'm one of the core maintainers).
Odd given all his efforts so far, that when attempting to live cheaply in San Fran, getting a drivers license to live in a van was too big an obstacle to overcome.
It's a while back, but I think it's because you have to be a resident for at least 6 months to be eligible to getting a driver's license in a given country.
And getting the driving experience is not cheap if you don't know people who have a car you can borrow!
Ok I was expecting a lot more. So it is one $450 USD per month? That doesn't very low. I guess HK Uni have decent discounts. But
>Living in Hong Kong without a dorm room would push rent up to at least $700 a month
Unless you only rent a bed with share washrooms and kitchen I can assure you it is not $700 but much closer to $1K if not higher depending on your living standard requirements.
If only this experience could reach media outlet. Hong Kong's rental or property pricing is just crazy expensive relative to what they offer.
Cool story, but this seems like a really good way to get your visa revoked if caught.
I kinda understand doing this if at home, and you have no other options. But this comes off as reckless and somewhat naive. To save 2K over a few months you risked serious injury, violated the terms of your visa and ultimately felt a need to humble brag about it.
Here's some famous advice from Hong Kong's richest man:
--
A daily breakfast of vermicelli, an egg and a cup of milk.
For lunch just have a simple set lunch, a snack and a fruit.
For dinner go to your kitchen and cook your own meals that consist of two vegetables dishes and a glass of milk before bedtime.
For one month the food cost is probably $500-$600. When you are young, the body will not have too many problems for a few years with this way of living.
--
Note he's talking HKD, and HKD 550 translates into about USD 70.
Unlike rent, everything else in HK can be pretty affordable and it's pretty easy to have decent food for < 5 dollars / meal in HK if you go to non-western places.
There's "This-This Rice" places (Rice + 2 other ingredients like meat / vegetables) that usually have big portions and feel somewhat healthy.
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[ 7.5 ms ] story [ 284 ms ] threadEdit: I've taken a crack at it. If there's a better way, we can change it again.
I'm sure homeless people have more pressing thoughts than what words nerds on the internet use to describe outdoor living
That’s a nice out for anyone who gets caught lying. “I didn’t think it was morally wrong to repeat lies.”
Trebaol was not forced into homelessness, but he was not play-acting or apeing a lifestyle for kicks. He was in a situation where he judged squatting four and a half months illegally in the jungle was worth saving a mere $2,000.
If you prefer to describe your past lifestyle as bandit camping instead of homelessness, by all means do so. But don't insist the rest of the world conform to your arbitrary redefinition of a term from its everyday meaning because it doesn't always fit your preconceptions.
Are you really helping the unhoused by insisting that someone is only truly homeless if they are schizophrenic, strung out on fentanyl, or otherwise totally incapable of being a productive member of society?
An actual homeless person would have a quite different experience of a bust.
"I decide who is homeless and who isn't in retrospect by analyzing whether something happened to their tent in the woods or whether they were not discovered".
If was an interesting read and experiment, but it has its limitations as a real world comparison to homelessness.
Also, virtually all the "real homeless" I met went to the gym to shower.
Also, by your invented criteria for language monitoring, many homeless people in many cities would themselves no longer be considered homeless.
Quite a few of them could somewhere, under some circumstances, find a place to stay even though it cost them just a bit too much to like, just like the guy who created this clever and interesting post.
*Sure, not a 'Hey, this looks fun' choice, more a conscious understanding of a tradeoff where homelessness is not choosing the alternative life.
It does seem that being in school made this experiment distinctly different from just living in a tent. In a sense, tuition was rent. It paid for showers, electricity, and a living room with air conditioning (the library). It also provided a supportive community. School and even society at large is more inclined to help a poor student than an adult trying to cut rent.
I make this observation not to diminish the experiment's value. I am just putting it in context to arrange its utility in my mind.
(edit: I can't imagine why this is flagged. It is def life- hacking if not tech hacking.)
100%. It's a lot easier when you live next to a Google campus. And it sorts all the menial matters that make a huge difference, like access to washing machines.
About the flagging, you seem to have been here for a while, any hint? I get the word usage can comes across as disrespectful now that people mention it, but didn't think a link would get flagged for that.
I could see conservatives disliking that it questions capitalism's viability post AI. I could see liberals thinking you are making light of folks experiencing homelessness.
I think those are absurd, but with a low vote count, your post may only need a few absurd people to flag you.
Naturally, there could be other reasons things get flagged, but I never see them because they disappear too fast.
You could always ask @dang to weigh in. He might see something which violates the guidelines.
Looks like it might have to do with the title, or at least the title was changed before it got unflagged. Good learning!
I unflag completely normal posts every day on the "New" page of HN. Many of them are actually very good posts, and some of them reach the number one spot of the front page after being unflagged.
Very rarely do I see the flagged posts being very objectionable.
Flagging seems to be one of the big vulnerabilities of HN.
Maybe flaggers should be required to state the reason for flagging, and this reason should be exposed.
Flagging means "no one should even see this on HN", and random people shouldn't get arrogant or cavalier about swinging around that power.
There's definitely wrongthink/ideological flagging and downvoting going on.
(On some comments I make, I know when I make it that it's going to get downvoted, because it pushes against an opinion of the kinds of people who will downvote to suppress criticism. It used to be that criticizing cryptocurrency would get downvotes, but now it's popular to criticize. I can get reliably downvoted any time that I suggest that adding a fee for some basic public infrastructure (e.g., to drive on street in a city), in a "market-based" way, is a handout of the basic public infrastructure to the wealthy. Also, suggestions that there's still any bias against women, in anything, somewhere, seems to reliably get downvotes, no matter how relevant; I don't know why, but I'd guess it's because the topic has a lot of general angry sentiment, and people who are angry the other direction aren't represented as much on HN.)
I'd distinguish wrongthink from something being off-topic and done-to-death or a flamewar magnet. Maybe one mental exercise test for this is whether the same person would also still downvote as "topic" if the opinion of the post/comment were flipped.
Flags are not downvotes and are not to show disagreement. They do seem to get used that way.
I like the others above have show-flagged enabled. "90%" of things I vouch are things I disagree with that represent what I consider a point of view that deserves to be known, has been at least reasonably well presented, and isn't flame-bait.
I actually vouch for a lot of comments I disagree with that was flagged, and upvoted it because I want it to be shown to the world. And in other times I disagree with it but vouch and upvoted because I dont want HN discussions to be one sided.
I’ve lived in China for a few years and I noticed anytime I write anything even remotely positive about my experience there I will get downvoted or flagged. Even completely neutral comments sometimes gets downvoted.
This isn’t opinion. The great firewall of China isn’t a farce, it would be good to remember that.
by what means did you determine that was his cause?
I appreciate people who are saving flagged comments because what made HN great 10-15 years ago was that I often changed my views because people would articulate why they are right and they sometimes indeed were.
in every remotely political discussion here, reddit opinions are allowed to be expressed as non-constructively as you please, but all dissent, no matter how factual and constructive, gets flagged within minutes.
I wouldn't be so quick to call delusion/dissent when designers of our spaces have simply made it far too easy to turn private affects into public effects..
(& It might be rude of me to be so concrete.. so.. apologies)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44213954
& What if everyone starts camping on pristine beaches? That'd be something! To marvel at!
https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
But I think it's best to let the people vote if they value a story on how lifestyle hacking can help you go straight to building startups instead of having to first save up in a job.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Specifically, I was paraphrasing this part:
> That includes more than hacking and startups.
Also this was not about voting or not voting, but about people flagging the submission.
I usually see people complaining about misleading headlines when it does not match the linked article. To be fair, it is sometimes an improvement but the point is that it’s always editorializing. Keeping that to a minimum only when the article’s headline is particularly objectionable seems to be better than letting every poster editorialize as a matter of course.
No worries, I got ya, buddy:
Imho instead of eschewing quantification altogether, rules should have a ELO style rating computed from the effects of their pair-wise combinations :)
The hard part could be the combinatorial explosion lol
Stealth camping should be done in low profile tents (1.2 meters high). You should pitch tent at dark, and leave before sunrise.
You're safe! No one found me, and I took it away a decade ago.
More people were openly & brazenly wild camping in HK during covid than this.
The author wisely talks about safety considerations, but there's an it's-expensive-to-be-poor risk I'd like to emphasize:
One injury or illness caused by the frugality could wipe out that $2K savings, many times over, in immediate costs, and might never fully heal.
I think back to all the penny-pinching I did (less impressive than the author's), and much of it was necessary under the circumstances, but a very poor value tradeoff otherwise.
Edit: added! thanks for the feedback again
I’ve been to the ER in Ecuador, Mali, Angola, Australia, Canada. Even as a tourist it was so cheap I didn’t bother using any travel insurance ( less than $50, including prescriptions)
Can’t comment on all the other countries you listed, although I can add that urgent care in Germany was pretty reasonably priced.
Risk is complicated, anything could happen. Not just doom and gloom. Individuals circumstances and appetite for risk versus reward varies.
In that case, the appetite for risk versus reward is only appetite for reward.
If risks pointed out, at least that's closer to an informed choice they're making, and maybe they'll do the same risky thing but now be more careful about mitigating risk as they do.
(Source: Person who's bet it all at least a few times, and about to do so again, but finding ways to avoid stupid decisions and mitigate risks along the way.)
All Hong Kong residents are eligible (anyone with an HKID and permission to remain >= 180 days).
I honestly think everyone would be much happier and less lonely if sleep-overs didn't stop being a thing as we reach adult age.
For the rest, I'm with you it might be hard to replicate beyond this n = 1 sample, but I'm convinced this experiment's ROI is actually much more positive than suggested in the post.
Not only did I get better grades that semester from being forced to spend more time in the library, but I learned a lot living at people's places afterwards, and, most importantly, the feeling of freedom from materials matters allowed me to make bolder bets that paid back multiple times over.
You can even go further: even if my grades had gone down, I still would have been more employable for many types of companies, starting with early stage startups.
I noticed in myself that when I stay in minimal places (camping/jungle hut/tent), I tend to be more connected to the real world and less addicted. More productivity, clearer thought.
I don’t have enough medical knowledge to assess this claim, but I made a simple rule: don’t touch the phone before getting out of bed! (except to turn off the alarm)
So far, it really seems to work!
Hard to quantify how much of a difference this made, but it definitely translated in higher drive and propensity to being present.
Arguably a dorm is pretty minimal as well, it’s just a climate controlled room with a bed.
If you have to physically remove yourself from housing to stop using technology negatively, that’s an addiction problem, not a problem with housing.
Also, the success apps like tiktok and instagram does suggest addiction is more the norm than the exception.
Learned a lot living at people's places: you could plan a month of no accomodation and couch surf, don't think that's such a stretch. More fundamentally, the tent piece was just a "social opener" to learn more about others. Many other things can be this social opener.
Material freedom: I buy that the experiment showed you that and that's awesome, but I also think some solid therapy around one's understanding of material reality could play a similar role.
People's places: have you heard of people doing this? I'm genuinely curious because I could never bring myself to be a nuisance if I didn't absolutely need it, meaning the blocker is definitely real yet fully in my head here.
Material freedom: I guess I haven't seen enough to agree with this one yet. The only intellectual pursuit I know that would genuinely get you closer to not caring about life so much as to reduce your fear in homelessness is the study of physics!
These are the real dangers that a roof and walls offer you protection from. If you happen to find a benign niche where you don't face these threats, it's likely because there is an invisible layer of defense being provided to you by the societal structures around you.
The “Community Support” section was my favorite. I would love to hear you elaborate on experiences and lessons you learned while staying with others.
The convenience of a place with electricity, running water, a table and chair, you are legally allowed to sleep there, etc. Seems easily worth 450 Dollars a month. In the end he says he saved 2k, but that is not a relevant amount of money to save over months if you become a software developer in America.
I've stayed in many inconvenient places and the immediate benefit is often that it forces you to go out of your way to find good places to work from, to get food, entertainment, etc.
This was in between two stints living and working in a mobile RV hacker lab: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AT1gPmQQkxI
I'm in SF now and we'd probably be best friends.
This is much like the couch surfing experience: staying with people for a few days and sharing their space, which often ends in these deep, late-night conversations. It's an incredible experience.
There are a few platforms for that, I recommend Couchers.org. It's free & open source (and I'm one of the core maintainers).
And getting the driving experience is not cheap if you don't know people who have a car you can borrow!
Ok I was expecting a lot more. So it is one $450 USD per month? That doesn't very low. I guess HK Uni have decent discounts. But
>Living in Hong Kong without a dorm room would push rent up to at least $700 a month
Unless you only rent a bed with share washrooms and kitchen I can assure you it is not $700 but much closer to $1K if not higher depending on your living standard requirements.
If only this experience could reach media outlet. Hong Kong's rental or property pricing is just crazy expensive relative to what they offer.
Another reason is that Hong Kong has a lot more affordable housing in the outskirts, like in the village of Tai Po Tsai that borders this university.
I kinda understand doing this if at home, and you have no other options. But this comes off as reckless and somewhat naive. To save 2K over a few months you risked serious injury, violated the terms of your visa and ultimately felt a need to humble brag about it.
Not everything needs to be shared.
Here's some famous advice from Hong Kong's richest man:
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A daily breakfast of vermicelli, an egg and a cup of milk.
For lunch just have a simple set lunch, a snack and a fruit.
For dinner go to your kitchen and cook your own meals that consist of two vegetables dishes and a glass of milk before bedtime.
For one month the food cost is probably $500-$600. When you are young, the body will not have too many problems for a few years with this way of living.
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Note he's talking HKD, and HKD 550 translates into about USD 70.
There's "This-This Rice" places (Rice + 2 other ingredients like meat / vegetables) that usually have big portions and feel somewhat healthy.