I've often thought about building something like this into HN itself and having a 'meet' tab at the top. There are so many people, me included, whose lives have been changed by HN. I would love to find a way to encourage more positive effects in the real world. Not sure exactly how this would work, but it's encouraging to see the community taking up the cause again, and I'll be interested to hear about how this goes. If people start having real meetups maybe we can sponsor a semi-official thread about them or something.
I met my Zapier co-founder bryanh through HN 15 years ago when someone made a similar service to OP called "hacker newsers". We were the only two people in Missouri at the time which led to a meetup. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1520916
That's such an inspiring story! It's amazing how serendipitous connections can lead to something amazing. I had a similar experience meeting my previous co-founder at an in-person event in Austin where I was presenting. There’s just something special about those chance encounters, whether online or offline. I've also met a few incredible folks here on HN discussions in my city. It's one of the things I truly appreciate about this community—never know where the next great connection might come from.
The problem will be that once this goes from the front page (on a weekend) then the chances that people will remember the site are low. Nevertheless there will be users who will not see the submission and would be otherwise interested into trying that. I think the voice chat with HN that was submitted last year (was it last year?) showed us that mostly after a day or two you couldn't find any activity.
I don't know how to solve that unless you actually have your idea of having "meet" on HN itself.
Or turn it into something wider than HN.. a button that can be added to any page on the internet that becomes easier to recall "hey I wonder who else likes or wants to discuss this article on meet.x?
Could even add a 'meet' entry to the tagline above each comment, if they use this. Presumably only visible to other people who set this up. Could be a good way to remind people it exists.
I would love to see a messaging system on HN. There are so many great people here; but most don't put an email link in their profile. I think adding very simple messaging (just enough to exchange contact info) would be a very positive force in the world.
It is extremely frustrating when you recognize a like-minded individual, you want to engage with them, befriend them, for the benefit of both, and you're just unable to because they neglected to add some contact detail/link/hint.
I would imagine if they don't put an email (I don't) they don't want to be contacted. If people want to find me badly enough, they do--it's happened several times!
I never had any contact details in my profile, in fact it was empty before today.
I would actually love to meet like minded people. Just never thought anyone would want to (or be able to, I live kinda way out from where you'd normally find tech people).
+ couldn't be bothered to setup a burnable email in case of spam.
I think that is about the same as the USA. Do you think zip codes wouldn’t work. I thought that it was the simplest mechanism. A city is an area and it is easy to tell how close to a zip code one is.
XX is the départment, one of the two major administrative divisions in France. It is made of communes - "cities".
It can be rather small like 75 - Paris, or of the size of half of Massachusetts (about 11000 km2).
The YYY means that you are in this department but there is no distance relationship between the numbers. And then of course you can have a city in 78 a km away from a city in 92 and 30 km away from one in 78.
It is true that this at last gives a rough estimation of where someone is
The issue with these kinds of meeting services seems to be that as the population of the online community goes up, the overall quality, and likelihood that you'll meet a real, friendly person, goes down. It's not guaranteed, but the ideals and culture of hackernews could help realize the full potential of that dream. As it says in the welcome page, "A community site that becomes popular will decline in quality... by making a conscious effort to resist decline, we can keep it from happening." I definitely think it would be something worth trying.
I'm a little late to this thread, but I agree with others; the 'meet' tab would be an incredible addition to HN. Perhaps it could include features like location-based topic filters or even a 'looking to meet' tag where users can express interest in meeting others with similar interests. To keep things safe and inclusive, maybe we could have a 'verified meetup' system where members can host and vet events before they’re posted. I'll shut up before my brain dumps all my thoughts here.
On a related note, for any HNers (or hackers) in/around Austin, TX that want to meet, I'd be happy to help organize a meetup in Austin, if you're interested in connecting.
I was side-wondering whether OP is an X employee with all that x.com linking and mentioning. (What's hax0r about X in the year 2007+17, laments childish-laconic-portion-of-me =)
In the audience space of meet.hn, defaulting to github/gitlab/sourcehut/etc profiles instead would have been just more apt =)
I don’t know if an actual identity system is needed. I would think just have a location and an email is north to work out the details. I don’t like to prove who I am to most people on the internet. I do like to meet and talk but exactly who anybody is I prefer to take them at they com.
Nitter worked by signing in with special "guest accounts" that I think were given to fresh downloads of the mobile apps.[0] Last year, X fully disabled that functionality, which left most Nitter instances broken. At that point, the developer publicly abandoned/ended the project.
The couple of instances floating around that still work are, to my knowledge, forks of the original Nitter that have been upgraded to work with a pool of manually created X accounts, which is a relatively expensive and fragile approach that most instances probably aren't up for taking.
It's a funny cultural thing that it wouldn't have even occurred to me that someone in Europe wouldn't realize city names can conflict—it's a chronic problem here in the states.
There are some ridiculously common city names here, but one that's been in the news lately and probably confusing a lot of people is Springfield, which is the name of at least 42 different cities in the US [0], including 5 just in Wisconsin. Most of them are small, but 5 of them (Massachusetts, Missouri, Illinois, Oregon, Ohio) have more the 20k residents.
The long-defunct literary magazine Wigwag ran a monthly essay by an Angolan writer named Sousa Jamba titled "Letter from Springfield." For each installment he visited a different U.S. Springfield.
Plenty of European countries have conflicting city/town/village names as well. If they grow to large they are sometimes specified by adding more locality to their name.
Denmark has three cities names Nykøbing, typically specified as Nykøbing Mors, Nykøbing Sjælland or Nykøbing Falser. Small places are just allowed to conflict as long as they aren't in the same postcode.
In "Frankfurt-Hahn" the "Frankfurt" is still the same Frankfurt you (probably) wanted, you just got a different airport located further out. "Frankfurt an der Oder" is on the other side of Germany on the border with Poland, a ~7h drive away.
So this is more like you going to NY and landing at Newark when you expected JFK where Frankfurt an der Oder would be like ending up in New York, Iowa.
My favourite thing about the Newcastles is that one is under and one is on. I was pondering just recently whether there's any other under/upon pairs in the UK.
Yes, There are multiple Springfield in Wisconsin, multiple Madison in Pennsylvania and multiple Clinton in New York. These are some of the examples I remember. And yes it is annoying if you live in one of these towns.
Okay but how do you agree in which Springsteen, Wisconsin to meet? How do you tell your favorite navigation software where you're going to be departing from? How is this disambiguated if not by country and state combined?
FWIW, Wikipedia has a list of the most common place names in the United States. "Washington" leads at 91, which means nearly two occurrences per state, though this includes variant names such as "Old Washington", "Port Washington", and "Washingtonville":
Other issues you might want to consider are locations with multiple names or spelling variants, say, "Ciudad de México" and "Mexico City" or Pretoria/Tshwane, various script variants, or disputed names. Or closely-paired locations, such as Minneapolis / St. Paul or Dallas / Fort Worth. Or those which have changed names (Bombay / Mumbai, Calcutta / Kolkota, Madras / Chennai).
For the United States, using MSA (Metropolitan Statistical Area) will tend to group people by urban region, with less ambiguity and grouping of reasonably proximate locations. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a widely-used standard elsewhere.
Cue: "Falsehoods programmers believe about geography"
Much harder to geolocate internationally. You really need a geocoding service that accepts flexible input text, narrows the result set, and lets the user pick one.
And to keep in mind, cities are mostly unique in a state but not entirely. There was another Oakland California twenty years ago. I don't know if it still exists 'cause Google no longer works for discovery of things like that.
“Las Vegas” means the meadows. The Spanish were usually pragmatic when naming locations on their maps, e.g. Del Rio, El Paso (de Norte), and Presidio in Texas; Salida, La Junta, and Pueblo in Colorado; the Sierra Nevada in California; and El Camino Real’s everywhere.
Matt Groening grew up in Springfield, OR (also Portland, the streets names sharing a lot of character's names), it was only after he placed it in Springfield that he realized Springfield could be anywhere. He apparently makes direct references to local landmarks and establishments, and certain characters are rumored to have been based off of locals.
There seems to be undocumented requirements for romanizations of city names. Consider a Japanese city like 船橋市。 The official romanization (訓令式 / ISO 3602) would be "funabasi". This is how many people type the name with an IME. However, this is input is rejected, while "funabashi" is accepted.
I'm not sure of a good solution. It may be a good idea to state the requirements somewhere
Hmm, good observation. I guess the site supports Hepburn-romanized names. I believe adding support Kunrei-shiki and maybe Nihon-shiki names too would resolve this issue pretty well.
Given that it's an English site, I'm unsure of the value of supporting the original Japanese names too, but of course it would be neat if it did.
Is kunrei-shiki romanization ("Funabasi") actually considered official? I see Hepburn romanization ("Funabashi") pretty much everywhere (including the official city website [1] in this case). Plus, it's better aligned with how it's actually pronounced.
Wait, are there really 36 Hacker News users in North Korea? The map just refreshes if I check that, but it seems kinda unbelievable given how isolated the country is and how heavily monitored the folks living there are.
Either way, had a bit of trouble adding myself due to the tool expecting this data to be the only thing in the user's bio. Could it be updated to check if the text exists anywhere at all? Because quite a few people here will want to discuss their side projects and startups first, not start off with a random block of tags.
When I now click on Pyongyang, it just reloads the page and doesn't show the 1 hacker that the mouseover said would be there. URL remains meet.hn without path. Other cities work fine (Firefox)
Edit: Same issue for <s style="direction:35deg;">L</s>ódź in Poland. The URL does actually change briefly but then the page reloads and redirects back to the homepage. And this made me notice the Krákow person hasn't made it onto the page still :(
Hmm perhaps it fails with two or more lines at the start of the user bio? I had an extra paragraph or two of text before.
But maybe it's only looking for a certain number of lines and cutting off anything after that, hence why the interests don't show up for you and the tool fails for anyone with a lot of text before the block.
There's also downloadable CSV lists of the world's place names at https://geonames.org (and stably have been kept available and updated for many years by now) — if you already have a DB (likely in your case), script up some csv-to-dbtable dumping and thus you save on networked API call overheads just for querying the world's existing place names.
(It's regularly updated so best to keep the convert-and-dump script or logic around if you go that route.)
(technically the last examples should be Đà Nẵng and Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh, but I guess because they are internationally known cities, they use the English names?)
Aha, so in the case of Bắc Ninh, its English name is the same as it is in Vietnamese; with diacritics.
I was going to say Da Nang and Ho Chi Minh City have gotten english names indirectly due to their popularity or relevance in Vietnam, but the main capital of Vietnam, Hà Nội, has the same problem as Bắc Ninh where its English name is the same as the Vietnamese name.
I guess there's no logical reason behind this, as this sort of data is likely crowd sourced.
This is probably the first time I've seen a diacritics/text-encoding problem created by a French developer, rather than us French folks complaining about US-centric language decisions!
If you want anybody on HN to access, you might want accept-language to be set to an asterisk `*`.
Good luck and I hope we can someday meet up if I'm in Toulouse!
Hey, this is awesome - your doing a great job. Anything that exists will not exist perfectly - you had to make this real to have that bug found by that random person - well done!
Also I wouldn't lose much sleep over the English reqs. I've had many people tell me that English is the global language that weren't born in native English speaking countries.
Most recent example, a Mod was going off about how a certain help page was setup for English questions only and she did this whole explanation about it, apologized for the system.
The majority of replies was some variant of just say "International Chat" next time - people from everywhere all in agreement.
If you made this in German, French or Japanese - I'd agree with you. I think English is the expectation these days tho
I guess I'll have to change this for a less restrictive search.
I wanted a city and country to have a nice and simple URL though.
If you have any suggestion, please do share it!
- Every time I speak with people about HN, I get something along the line: "They criticize everything, and very easily".
It's also confusion that reporting of a bug is not criticism. It's a Show HN. You've asked for the feedback. People that get twisted when the feedback is anything other than pablum like "great job" need not be a developer. If you can't handle being told that something isn't working, then how do you ever expect to improve? Or maybe you've moved from being a dev and are now trying to be a founder?
Probably city-zipcode-country would disambiguate effectively both for the US (where you could have several Springfield cities in different states) and Europe (where there are probably, for instance, quite a number of `Sainte-Anne` cities on top of Guadeloupe's)
I think we're probably going to get a blog post from you a couple weeks from now titled "falsehoods programmers believe about cities"!
This is nice, I zoomed in to where I lived and added my location. I then went to see who the nearest other HN profiles and see what they're into. Looks like their hobby is developing meet.hn! Nice work neighbor :D!
I find it ironic that there are many cities with N hackers on meet.hn, yet most are not attaching any way of contacting them, nor do their profile have a way to contact them.
How are you (the people without contact details) expecting us to meet you if you don't add a way of meeting you? :)
I agree with this. We got to have a means of verifying that the other party is indeed a real HN member. Having it open like this is too spam/abuse/harvest prone, in my opinion.
I like that idea but I purposely stay anonymous on HN and I would be DOXing myself if I used this. It'd be great to be able to either use it without a username (ideally) or have the choice to keep your HN username private.
> please add Mastodon/fediverse as a type of social media account
Didn't know about fediverse! Thanks for sharing.
> Also, you generate invalid URLs for cities that have spaces in them, like Saint Petersburg.
Yeah I was dumb enough not to handle spaces in city names...
Saint Petersburg is fixed now, and most should be as well, but not all.
I implemented some kind of quick fix for now, but I will investigate further when this settles down a bit.
Feature suggestion: a "my location" button on the map, so you can zoom in to your current location. There is a browser API [1] for this (which asks permission, or you can do it based on the IP address [2]
> No meet.hn data found for this HN user. Waiting a minute to let HN API update.
My account exists since 2020, why would the HN API (which, if you click the link at the bottom of every page, says "near real time") not know my account? I'm curious how this error occurs
For anyone else having this, the "add me" button will enable itself again, but it does take a while. Not that retrying seems to work for me
Edit: nvm I'm being stupid, I did not see the "copy and paste the text below into your HN account" instruction. Thanks also to those who replied with that info, though while playing with the browser dev tools to figure out what the issue might be, I spotted that text eventually
> City not found. Make sure you use the format: City, Country (Paris, France)
It might be good to rework this—cities only, and provide a drop-down box for users to select. Having city, country is a bit superfluous for people who live in city-states.
Yes, that is the standard UI for this problem. You select a country, then that loads a the country's divisions ilfor another select box, and that load the cities for that division.
Another way is auto complete for the city with just country preselected.
I see that UI on some European sites. It’s basically nonfunctional for the US, at least. (Especially the latter approach with no “division” narrowing.) There are hundreds of towns with duplicate names, people might want to use region names that don’t exist politically (“Bay Area”), and people can be in incorporated towns (San Francisco) or unincorporated areas that get assigned Census Bureau names based on usage (Bay Point). There is just no way to create an autocomplete list that encompasses every valid place, and it’s a waste of time to try.
You could say the same thing for X, Facebook, Reddit, or YouTube. They all have flaws and controversies. Why not let each person decide which socials they want to participate in and share?
That just gives a false sense of security. Someone who means harm would simply set themselves to each city successively, while people believe it to be private (similar to the location feature in dating apps that keeps being broken to find people's exact addresses). Not that I see what harm there is in associating a username with a (nearby) city when one makes that choice consciously, so it's not like the dating app situation where you (1) believe the location will remain secret and (2) it being revealed means your exact address is now known
Then it would need a GPS-backed proof to allow more location changes while preventing abuse. There's always an intended use case and corner cases which could be handled via support ticket, thus passing through human judgement.
If there is a secure app on your phone, then how can you have multiple accounts?
Well, one answer might be that someone could spin up emulators
Or reverse engineer whatever app you have.
Or reset their phone? (or would you restrict it somehow to one account per physical phone? What happens if it gets sold or given away?)
Having worked in fraud detection a bit, it's _really_ hard to prevent people from making multiple accounts. Short of requiring ID based verification, and even then.
And then you have to still not go overboard and keep the onboarding low friction enough that people will be willing to go through it
Your points are all true. But we must not forget that security is like onion layers. The fact that something can't be made military-grade hack-proof doesn't mean we should leave it wide open for the whole world to abuse.
GPS is a one-way system, how could that ever be proof? You'd need to send people devices with some DRM on it so that they can't modify the code it runs and the check it performs (we all know how well DRM works anyway, or how desirable it is)
But I, as the attacker, would just modify the value right?
It's not that the device transmits signals into space and the satellite operator, a trusted third party, would relay to the server where the user was computed to be. Instead, it's the user self-reporting the computed value from GPS satellites' signals
That's a fair argument in general, though in this case I would both say that
- the risk of somehow abusing self-reported city-level location data is very low
- the effort involved in bypassing the proposed security measure is so exceedingly little, anyone who is passingly motivated to abuse it will also simply do that
As someone who works in the digital risk business, I fully subscribe to managing risk and that (as you say) 100% security is usually not a realistic option. Weighing risks against benefits is key, though
I'm less concerned about the abuse of a single self-reported city-level location data. What worries me here is a world-wide-open directory of people (any people) and their locations and interests and social links. It's a target group right there served on a silver platter to _anyone_ on the internet. Sorry, but, no thanks.
Why do you care if the screen shows 5 people in city X (which is not your city anyway)? What use do you have of knowing exact names of people in city X half way acros the globe?
There's a person living in Vila do Corvo. I didn't know that was a place. What are they interested in? What do the technical people of Vila do Corvo post about?
(In this case, not much, but it was fun to find out.)
In fact, it is a brand new data collector. It's encouraging HN account holders to geo-tag themselves and to put that information in the publicly available HN account profile. This profile is, more or less, blank by default.
Is it limited to hackers, or is it open to all tech-savvy, free-thinking types of HN readers? If need be, I could dust off some mad 6502 assembly language skillz. Oh, and I ran a BBS briefly in the 80s if that helps me qualify. I’m not technically knowledgeable on current technologies, but I think I’m sufficiently opinionated.
Confirms my suspicion that the most active HN users are in Canada/East Coast/Europe.
When I first discovered HN I thought it was a small Stanford thing, but over time realized it's mostly a Canada/Europe crowd (even most of the YC founders that come to San Francisco for their startup are from those places).
I suspect the current situation is mostly due to timezones and as the west coast wakes up we‘ll see more cities appear there. It’ll probably take a few days until you can deduce anything about hn-users in general from that map.
And thanks for the comment - made me look outside my immediate surroundings on the map!
I'm hitting a bug where clicking New York just refreshes the page instead of loading the city's page. Los Angeles, San José, and... most cities seem to exhibit it. Chicago seems to work?
Picking a city was tough. It insisted on the more general New York instead of the more specific Long Island City.
Trying to add myself fails, showing "Oops! Something uncool is breaking this app.". The POST request seems to be receiving 500 with the following request.
-----------------------------74974701830891853922449739590
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="1_username"
qazxcvbnm
-----------------------------74974701830891853922449739590
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="1_location"
Hong Kong Island, China
-----------------------------74974701830891853922449739590
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="0"
["$undefined","$K1"]
-----------------------------74974701830891853922449739590--
I can get it to work by using a district name e.g "Wan Chai, China". There should probably be some special handling for Hong Kong and Macau since although they are in China, they have their own ISO country codes, flags and are divided differently.
Hey! I think I saw your profile on the meet.hn for a while, but as of now, it seems that even your profile has disappeared. I tried submitting again with your advice, and the submit seemed to not give any errors yet I don't see myself on the map either.
Would be great if the tags field allowed freeform input instead of choosing from a set of existing tags. My preferred tags would have been Design, Fashion, Digital fabrication, Computational Creativity etc. but none were available.
This is a very nice project, to start with. Thank you very much for that!
I checked Paris and most of the people I see are either CEOs or VC (or something around that). I was expecting this demographics in the US, probably less in France.
I am a pure nerd, interested in technology applied to everyday items (think Home Assistant, some amateur 3D printing) but also history and all these discussions about random topics that many perceive as a waste of time.
OP: would you consider adding interests (say, the top 5) to help with matchmaking?
EDIT: woah, I just realized it is there!! Thanks!!
Bug alert: while clicking on the Seoul 'M' does work, listing its (currently 1) hackers, the close-by Pyongyang doesn't (despite also having "1 hacker" registered).
I placed myself at McMurdo Station and it shows up on the map but clicking the icon throws a 500 error.
Edit: seems to be fixed (by removing my icon from the map, now it throws error 500 when posting the data to re-add it).
Edit 2: you can place yourself in North Korea but clicking the [M] doesn't work because the name contains non ASCII characters. Also it returns error 405 when adding yourself (despite actually saving the data).
> I placed myself at McMurdo Station and it shows up on the map but clicking the icon throws a 500 error.
This was because there was no country code associated to it.
> Edit: seems to be fixed (by removing my icon from the map, now it throws error 500 when posting the data to re-add it).
I actually did more than removing it, I now make any "city" without a country code, an invalid one. It's a hotfix, I'll have to think about it more tbh.
> Edit 2: you can place yourself in North Korea but clicking the [M] doesn't work because the name contains non ASCII characters. Also it returns error 405 when adding yourself (despite actually saving the data).
Yeah, actually I'm dumb I reintroduced a "vulnerability" by not checking if the city in the form was the same as the city in the HN user profile. So you could move people around, basically. But their actual data was unchanged of course, as it's stored here on HN. That's why I was able to revert this.
About the ASCII characters, yes it's a problem. I'll implement it as soon as possible, when things will calm down a bit.
Can you tell me more about the 405 though? It seems strange.
I tried to click on the locations in Turkey to list the users. But it redirects to homepage if it contains non-ASCII characters such as Tekirdağ, Ataşehir.
Awaiting for a fix, currently unusable for my case.
Just a thought. The problem in most cases isn't finding people with whom to meet, it's actually how we meet. We've lost a lot of capacity to develop relationships that go beyond common interests and basic in-person politeness.
This is really neat. Well done on the UX and functionality.
I saw others already mentioned uniqueness of city names. In the US there is no guarantee a state, zip code, or even county won't have a duplicate city name. To solve this one must store the lat/lng coordinates instead. Then offer users a search list of matched cities, so they can select the right geographic location.
Just to leave my data point, I couldn't find San Juan, Puerto Rico (city, state/country) in your list. That said, PR is so small that I don't care about searching by city, searching for users in the island is enough for a meetup. For privacy reasons, we should also be able to add our state/country without a city.
I really like this idea. I've wanted to build something to bring startup/remote work people in my area together for a while. I bought a few domains but couldn't figure out the hook. Smart idea to build it as part of the HN userbase, since that is the userbase you want for something like this!
The website looks nice, the domain is rather unusual, which registrar did you get it from? I used punto.hn but their business model was very weird and required me to eat a $15 wire fee every year on top of the cost of the domain, I dropped them after the first year.
Have signed up. It says there's another signup from my location, but is failing to show me. It just redirects to the home page. It is showing for another city, so perhaps due to the space in the name? Thanks.
I can't tell if it's being URL encoded or not, so that's a possibility. I imagine most cities don't have apostrophes in the name so it might be an edge case.
What's the grammar this is using for parsing the field? The generated text gives vague hints but it's irritating to guess at what the constraints are, especially given update lag.
It could use some work for the USA. I'm in the better Wilmington, the one in Delaware. But it doesn't seem to want to let me use Delaware vs North Carolina.
given so many problems with city names. maybe just avoid them entirely? use lat/lon and closest clusters on them map. people will figure out themselves which city that is
OK will do. I'll email you one of these days and we'll go for an afterwork Place d'Armes or Place Guillaume II or at the Kirschberg or something like that!
I tried to add myself at Kraków, Poland. It said no such city. I tried also Krakow and Cracow spelling. Then when it accepted Kraków again (seemingly), and I posted, I ended up in... Murowana Goślina.
Brilliant idea! I get No about section for this HN user. Waiting a minute to let HN API update when trying to add to map.
But my HN accounts has about section...
This is a great idea, and I sincerely want it to work out.
For myself, I'll probably not use it, but that's because I'm an "old," and I stopped attending local meetups, because I was always surrounded by a circle of avoidance, where no one would look at me, or have anything to do with me.
Got a bit tiresome, but it's the way of the world, I guess. For non-olds, these meetups are great, with a lot of energy and enthusiasm.
Need a “wise old dudes” meet up and charge those under 40 to attend- few 20 to 30 year olds understand how much of value they could get from an “old dude” for the price of a beer/coffee.
However, it seems that most folks conflate "older" (which is getting increasingly younger -I encounter folks in their early forties that can't get interviews), and "useless."
Funny. We're doing pretty well at opening up the industry to folks from many ethnic backgrounds, and women, but the industry actively encourages ageism.
Most of the "reasons" end up falling flat, upon closer inspection.
It just seems that gray hair makes people uncomfortable. I guess it always has, but in the Days of Yore, corporations were usually run by older folks, so we had to work with them (I didn't always have gray hair, myself -spoiler: We all get a turn at this wheel).
Indeed, ageism is a serious issue. And it seems out of touch with an ageing society in most countries.
I'm not young anymore either and my experience job hunting has been that I get invited to fewer initial interviews, but when I am, the whole process is much much easier for myself than a decade ago. Onboarding is also much faster.
> This is a great idea, and I sincerely want it to work out.
Thank you!
> I stopped attending local meetups, because I was always surrounded by a circle of avoidance, where no one would look at me, or have anything to do with me
Meetups (as in "group meetups") might be part of meet.hn, but I also saw it as a way to meet new people one to one.
Hopefully this makes you change your mind, I'm sure you would have plenty of things to share!
There are multiple cities/towns with the same name in my country, but unfortunately, it's impossible to specify which one is mine at meet.hn. What a shame.
Cool! Sadly there is no drop down for the city name (at least on iOS), so I can't register my town. There is two Saint-Denis in France, my one isn't the usual one ;)
awesome idea. Would be great to have in maps view some adaptive clustering with number inside similar like nomadlist members map:
https://nomads.com/community
Also for those that nomading and changing places often would be good to have option to share location via WebLocation but make it randomized on the backend or even better in frontend (so that it's approximate to e.g 5-10km radius)
Hundreds of millions of people have posted some geographical information about themselves on the internet without being swatted. This is like saying that people who ride public transportation are bold because murders happen there
Nothing happend. The error message is not helpful at all
(can it connect? Does it find the user? Does it find the data in the about section? What URL was it trying? etc.) but said it wanted to
wait a minute for the API. User since 2020 (with this account)
[Edit] Tried again it now says
"No about section for this HN user. Waiting a minute to let HN API update."
[Edit2] Works now, the other reply about the space made me think. I didn't use identical Uppercase/Lowercase. Hmm.
It would be more useful to have a button in each city to propose a meeting—no need to email anyone. You suggest a meeting, people can join or propose changes. That's it. :<
I am trying to register from Warsaw, Poland - but I always get a 'City not found' error - I've tried Warszawa, Polska and Warszawa, Poland too.
It reports the error already at the first letter and never changes.
I am using Firefox and I get lots of Javascript errors.
I am curious how the three users that are visible on the map registered.
*Update:* the Openstreetmap call that is used seems to be correct: https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search?city=Warsaw&count... - this leads to the right data - so I guess the page is updated after I fill up the correct name, but some Javascript error blows up the process.
This is the primary candidate:
Uncaught (in promise) TypeError: x is undefined
NextJS 17
h
cache
validationFunction
p
t
setTimeout handler*8245/Q/<
a_
aR
sF
sF
sM
sU
o4
iV
sU
uR
uM
page-55b4fe444b2a460b.js:1:1221
p NextJS
AsyncFunctionThrow self-hosted:811
NextJS 13
*Update:* It also failed in Chrome. With the following error in web console:
Uncaught (in promise) TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'split')
at page-9fc22f2169c430e1.js:1:1223
at async validationFunction (page-9fc22f2169c430e1.js:1:56767)
at async p (page-9fc22f2169c430e1.js:1:47487)
I think it depends on how you use HN. I try to contribute positively in the comments and enjoy the learning aspect of the HN community. Shit posters might not want to join the train.
This website doesn't check whether your profile link matches the city you typed in their website. It means you can place any other user wherever you want as long as they have a link in their profile (moved you to Taiwan as a test).
It's also a big buggy since you show up in both places now.
I do, I'm using nominatim from openstreetmap.
I used a simple API call for the sake of simplicity, but now that the product is out, I'll probably switch to something more robust.
I know this might sound petty, but the thing preventing me from signing up is your comfort level dispersing information through x.com. You said "meet.hn has a twitter page", but sadly, twitter is dead and has been replaced by something sinister. I can't support them, even tangentially.
Imho, your take isn’t as “petty” as it is goofy and unproductive. I’m saying this as someone who has rejected social media entirely and deleted it off of my devices like 10 years go.
I also strongly dislike X being used as the primary host of public information not because of any moral disagreements with the company, but because of how inaccessible it's becoming.
Information should be accessible to anyone anywhere on any device, with or without an account. X doesn't fit that role.
Same reason I hate when companies have a Facebook page and nothing else.
The OP says in the signup that if you meet up in person and tweet a photo, he'll re-tweet you through the meet.hn x handle. Sounds benign, and it mostly is.
I'm just personally uncomfortable supporting an otherwise good cause wherein x.com gets more attention and data about the good folks on HN, because I really don't trust them and their data governance.
I've often thought about building something like this into HN itself and having a 'meet' tab at the top. There are so many people, me included, whose lives have been changed by HN. I would love to find a way to encourage more positive effects in the real world. Not sure exactly how this would work, but it's encouraging to see the community taking up the cause again, and I'll be interested to hear about how this goes. If people start having real meetups maybe we can sponsor a semi-official thread about them or something.
I met my Zapier co-founder bryanh through HN 15 years ago when someone made a similar service to OP called "hacker newsers". We were the only two people in Missouri at the time which led to a meetup. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1520916
That's such an inspiring story! It's amazing how serendipitous connections can lead to something amazing. I had a similar experience meeting my previous co-founder at an in-person event in Austin where I was presenting. There’s just something special about those chance encounters, whether online or offline. I've also met a few incredible folks here on HN discussions in my city. It's one of the things I truly appreciate about this community—never know where the next great connection might come from.
The problem will be that once this goes from the front page (on a weekend) then the chances that people will remember the site are low. Nevertheless there will be users who will not see the submission and would be otherwise interested into trying that. I think the voice chat with HN that was submitted last year (was it last year?) showed us that mostly after a day or two you couldn't find any activity.
I don't know how to solve that unless you actually have your idea of having "meet" on HN itself.
Or turn it into something wider than HN.. a button that can be added to any page on the internet that becomes easier to recall "hey I wonder who else likes or wants to discuss this article on meet.x?
Could even add a 'meet' entry to the tagline above each comment, if they use this. Presumably only visible to other people who set this up. Could be a good way to remind people it exists.
If enough people add the tag to their 'about' page, that could help keep it going.
I would love to see a messaging system on HN. There are so many great people here; but most don't put an email link in their profile. I think adding very simple messaging (just enough to exchange contact info) would be a very positive force in the world.
Upvoting this.
It is extremely frustrating when you recognize a like-minded individual, you want to engage with them, befriend them, for the benefit of both, and you're just unable to because they neglected to add some contact detail/link/hint.
I would imagine if they don't put an email (I don't) they don't want to be contacted. If people want to find me badly enough, they do--it's happened several times!
This can't possibly always be true.
I never had any contact details in my profile, in fact it was empty before today. I would actually love to meet like minded people. Just never thought anyone would want to (or be able to, I live kinda way out from where you'd normally find tech people). + couldn't be bothered to setup a burnable email in case of spam.
Sound like we live near each other:)
Near as in, in NZ? or like in the bay? Not many tech people stay in the bay, let alone in NZ.
Sorry I was joking because your generic description of isolation was relatable. I live in the USA.
I would love to have a meet tab. Maybe those that want to meet could fill in the zip code and maybe a date range.
I do not know how zip codes work in the US, but in France this is very, very specific to the city you live in. There is no concept of "area".
The first 2 digits of the zip code are an area, but a large one.
I think that is about the same as the USA. Do you think zip codes wouldn’t work. I thought that it was the simplest mechanism. A city is an area and it is easy to tell how close to a zip code one is.
In France the zip code has the format XX-YYY
XX is the départment, one of the two major administrative divisions in France. It is made of communes - "cities".
It can be rather small like 75 - Paris, or of the size of half of Massachusetts (about 11000 km2).
The YYY means that you are in this department but there is no distance relationship between the numbers. And then of course you can have a city in 78 a km away from a city in 92 and 30 km away from one in 78.
It is true that this at last gives a rough estimation of where someone is
I will study our zip code I do know that they seem to follow a sequence but I have never seen it broken down.
The issue with these kinds of meeting services seems to be that as the population of the online community goes up, the overall quality, and likelihood that you'll meet a real, friendly person, goes down. It's not guaranteed, but the ideals and culture of hackernews could help realize the full potential of that dream. As it says in the welcome page, "A community site that becomes popular will decline in quality... by making a conscious effort to resist decline, we can keep it from happening." I definitely think it would be something worth trying.
I'm a little late to this thread, but I agree with others; the 'meet' tab would be an incredible addition to HN. Perhaps it could include features like location-based topic filters or even a 'looking to meet' tag where users can express interest in meeting others with similar interests. To keep things safe and inclusive, maybe we could have a 'verified meetup' system where members can host and vet events before they’re posted. I'll shut up before my brain dumps all my thoughts here.
On a related note, for any HNers (or hackers) in/around Austin, TX that want to meet, I'd be happy to help organize a meetup in Austin, if you're interested in connecting.
Love a meet tab. I once tried to arrange a meet up in Hong Kong but then real life and work got in the way.
Would love an easier and semi official way to get things started.
I'm also in HK and happy to meet for coffee and whatever topics come to mind.
In hk too
same here!
might be cool to have HN demo days run in different cities regularly
It's really disheartening. All those names the OP has mentioned, but we can't see them as X.com has X'ed them under password.
We need to look at some other service that is open to share our own identities without the login hell.
Does anyone know if such service is available?
I was side-wondering whether OP is an X employee with all that x.com linking and mentioning. (What's hax0r about X in the year 2007+17, laments childish-laconic-portion-of-me =)
In the audience space of meet.hn, defaulting to github/gitlab/sourcehut/etc profiles instead would have been just more apt =)
I prefer when personal websites are used but agree
I don’t know if an actual identity system is needed. I would think just have a location and an email is north to work out the details. I don’t like to prove who I am to most people on the internet. I do like to meet and talk but exactly who anybody is I prefer to take them at they com.
Any mastodon server, any WordPress/Tumblr, GitHub pages, HN profiles..?
I'm not sure Twitter/X is an identity as much as it is a "place where I looked for this person first" or "place which I know this person uses".
here you go https://xcancel.com/
Incredible. How does that work? I thought Nitter was completely neutered a while ago.
Nitter worked by signing in with special "guest accounts" that I think were given to fresh downloads of the mobile apps.[0] Last year, X fully disabled that functionality, which left most Nitter instances broken. At that point, the developer publicly abandoned/ended the project.
The couple of instances floating around that still work are, to my knowledge, forks of the original Nitter that have been upgraded to work with a pool of manually created X accounts, which is a relatively expensive and fragile approach that most instances probably aren't up for taking.
[0] https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/983#issuecomment-168...
This is actually an instance of nitter.
https://xcancel.com/about
https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances#public
There are multiple cities in the U.S. with the name of my city, so unfortunately this doesn't work for me.
I'm sorry about that. I didn't realize it would be a problem. It's been reported before and I'll work on this. Thanks for sharing!
It's a funny cultural thing that it wouldn't have even occurred to me that someone in Europe wouldn't realize city names can conflict—it's a chronic problem here in the states.
There are some ridiculously common city names here, but one that's been in the news lately and probably confusing a lot of people is Springfield, which is the name of at least 42 different cities in the US [0], including 5 just in Wisconsin. Most of them are small, but 5 of them (Massachusetts, Missouri, Illinois, Oregon, Ohio) have more the 20k residents.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield
The long-defunct literary magazine Wigwag ran a monthly essay by an Angolan writer named Sousa Jamba titled "Letter from Springfield." For each installment he visited a different U.S. Springfield.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wigwag_(magazine)
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/wigwag-the-magaz...
Plenty of European countries have conflicting city/town/village names as well. If they grow to large they are sometimes specified by adding more locality to their name.
Denmark has three cities names Nykøbing, typically specified as Nykøbing Mors, Nykøbing Sjælland or Nykøbing Falser. Small places are just allowed to conflict as long as they aren't in the same postcode.
Indeed, Italy has a ton of cities called something like "old town", "new inn" or "castle", for obvious reasons.
Frankfurt am Main and Frankfurt an der Oder in Germany.
I made the mistake once of "flying to Frankfurt!" on some low-cost airline out of the UK and landed in Frankfurt-Hahn. Yikes.
In "Frankfurt-Hahn" the "Frankfurt" is still the same Frankfurt you (probably) wanted, you just got a different airport located further out. "Frankfurt an der Oder" is on the other side of Germany on the border with Poland, a ~7h drive away.
So this is more like you going to NY and landing at Newark when you expected JFK where Frankfurt an der Oder would be like ending up in New York, Iowa.
Every time o put directions to my local market town of Newport in Shropshire, google insists on thinking I want to travel two hours to Wales.
I guess it could be worse and I’d end up in the Isle of Wight.
Reused names isn’t just an American thing.
Ashford Kent and Ashford Middlesex are common issues in the southeast.
As for Hawkridge in Devon...dark night (not stormy) and it was only when I saw Dulverton road signs I got the sense this wasn't going to plan.
At least two Whitchurch stations I have used. There then the two Newcastle
Oh and Shakespeare isn’t from East London
My favourite thing about the Newcastles is that one is under and one is on. I was pondering just recently whether there's any other under/upon pairs in the UK.
I knew city names were repeated in different US states, but they repeat even within a state?
Yes, There are multiple Springfield in Wisconsin, multiple Madison in Pennsylvania and multiple Clinton in New York. These are some of the examples I remember. And yes it is annoying if you live in one of these towns.
Many US states are larger than many European countries.
Okay but how do you agree in which Springsteen, Wisconsin to meet? How do you tell your favorite navigation software where you're going to be departing from? How is this disambiguated if not by country and state combined?
I assume by zip code.
Or drop a pin.
> It's a funny cultural thing that it wouldn't have even occurred to me that someone in Europe wouldn't realize city names can conflict
The irony is that a lot of our city names came from Europe.
> and probably confusing a lot of people is Springfield, which is the name of at least 42 different cities
And a person, who wrote a song about name confusion, but wrt Springsteen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EW1Frr4OcRc
We usually don’t think much about duplicate city names in America, but we sure notice that you‘ve taken all of ours!
Guess Austin, MN hackers are just going to have to join Austin, TX hackers :)
The amount of cities called "white city" around here is annoying to, but at least they have the decency to be spelled differently.
Maybe they can do something like Discord, and append a 4 digit unique identifier?
FWIW, Wikipedia has a list of the most common place names in the United States. "Washington" leads at 91, which means nearly two occurrences per state, though this includes variant names such as "Old Washington", "Port Washington", and "Washingtonville":
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_most_common_U.S._p...>
Other issues you might want to consider are locations with multiple names or spelling variants, say, "Ciudad de México" and "Mexico City" or Pretoria/Tshwane, various script variants, or disputed names. Or closely-paired locations, such as Minneapolis / St. Paul or Dallas / Fort Worth. Or those which have changed names (Bombay / Mumbai, Calcutta / Kolkota, Madras / Chennai).
For the United States, using MSA (Metropolitan Statistical Area) will tend to group people by urban region, with less ambiguity and grouping of reasonably proximate locations. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a widely-used standard elsewhere.
Cue: "Falsehoods programmers believe about geography"
<https://wiesmann.codiferes.net/wordpress/archives/15187>
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14891185>
Yeah for US it needs to be:
City, State, Country
Also not clear if your mapper was expecting “United States” or “United States of America”
Honestly postal code is better. There are many cities with the same name in the same state. Generally postal codes are logical boundaries.
Much harder to geolocate internationally. You really need a geocoding service that accepts flexible input text, narrows the result set, and lets the user pick one.
And to keep in mind, cities are mostly unique in a state but not entirely. There was another Oakland California twenty years ago. I don't know if it still exists 'cause Google no longer works for discovery of things like that.
Check out how many "greenville" s there are. Even several in the same state.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenville
There's even more than one "Las Vegas".
“Las Vegas” means the meadows. The Spanish were usually pragmatic when naming locations on their maps, e.g. Del Rio, El Paso (de Norte), and Presidio in Texas; Salida, La Junta, and Pueblo in Colorado; the Sierra Nevada in California; and El Camino Real’s everywhere.
'Ville' translates as "town" so "Green Town" :)
Similiarly in the UK 'Downs' is an old english word for hill so I'm always amused by a local 'Highdown Hill' ("HighHill Hill").
There are, for example, over 30 cities in the US named Springfield.
Funny that I'm also in Springfield and faced this issue. I didn't think it was such a common name.
Key reason the Simpsons live there - it could be anywhere.
Matt Groening grew up in Springfield, OR (also Portland, the streets names sharing a lot of character's names), it was only after he placed it in Springfield that he realized Springfield could be anywhere. He apparently makes direct references to local landmarks and establishments, and certain characters are rumored to have been based off of locals.
>> Matt Groening grew up in Springfield, OR
No he didn't.
742 SW Evergreen Terrace. Somewhere around here: https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=742%20sw%20evergr...
Literally in my post. He moved to Springfield after living in Portland.
Portland embraces it, see for example the Ned Flanders Crossing, on Flanders St, no less: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ned_Flanders_Crossing
(The Simpsons character is named after the street.)
Springfield. There are hundreds of them.
Same in Europe.
Hasselt, 47551 Bedburg-Hau, Germany
and
Hasselt, 54533 Oberkail, Germany
Same
There seems to be undocumented requirements for romanizations of city names. Consider a Japanese city like 船橋市。 The official romanization (訓令式 / ISO 3602) would be "funabasi". This is how many people type the name with an IME. However, this is input is rejected, while "funabashi" is accepted.
I'm not sure of a good solution. It may be a good idea to state the requirements somewhere
Hmm, good observation. I guess the site supports Hepburn-romanized names. I believe adding support Kunrei-shiki and maybe Nihon-shiki names too would resolve this issue pretty well.
Given that it's an English site, I'm unsure of the value of supporting the original Japanese names too, but of course it would be neat if it did.
(More info about Japanese romanization for any interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Japanese#Moder...)
I don’t know how you romanize that, but I’ve never written or said funabashi as anything but funabashi.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepburn_romanization
It’s no surprise to me a romanization method aimed at english speakers is used for romanizing an internet input field.
Is kunrei-shiki romanization ("Funabasi") actually considered official? I see Hepburn romanization ("Funabashi") pretty much everywhere (including the official city website [1] in this case). Plus, it's better aligned with how it's actually pronounced.
[1] https://www.city.funabashi.lg.jp/funabashistyle/en/001/p0427...
something something falsehoods about addresses
Wait, are there really 36 Hacker News users in North Korea? The map just refreshes if I check that, but it seems kinda unbelievable given how isolated the country is and how heavily monitored the folks living there are.
Either way, had a bit of trouble adding myself due to the tool expecting this data to be the only thing in the user's bio. Could it be updated to check if the text exists anywhere at all? Because quite a few people here will want to discuss their side projects and startups first, not start off with a random block of tags.
> 36 Hacker News users in North Korea
Some hacker was trolling and moving people there. Should be fixed now!
> due to the tool expecting this data to be the only thing in the user's bio
Shouldn't be the case! Seems it's good for you now. If not, don't hesitate to share more details.
When I now click on Pyongyang, it just reloads the page and doesn't show the 1 hacker that the mouseover said would be there. URL remains meet.hn without path. Other cities work fine (Firefox)
Edit: Same issue for <s style="direction:35deg;">L</s>ódź in Poland. The URL does actually change briefly but then the page reloads and redirects back to the homepage. And this made me notice the Krákow person hasn't made it onto the page still :(
And only one in Miami, apparently. Me.
The only surprise is that the number is that small:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...
Lizardmen gotta live somewhere.
I was able to add myself even though I have another unrelated sentence in my bio. But I think the tool fails to show my interests.
Hmm perhaps it fails with two or more lines at the start of the user bio? I had an extra paragraph or two of text before.
But maybe it's only looking for a certain number of lines and cutting off anything after that, hence why the interests don't show up for you and the tool fails for anyone with a lot of text before the block.
Sorry for that, should be fixed now!
When I type in "Kraków, Poland", I get meet.hn/city/pl-undefined. Does your code handle diacritics correctly?
It's not diacritics, it's something more broken with geo coding.
Szczecin, Poland is found but handle is pl-undefined as for you...
But what is more interesting, Stettin, Poland works ok... and link is surprisingly meet.hn/city/pl-Szczecin
Geocoding needs some love.
Looks like even 80 years after the war, Germans haven't relinquished the city.¹
¹Stettin is an old German name for the city of Szczecin, which was taken from Germany and given to Poland to punish Germany and Poland² after the WW2.
²Poland lost 180k km² in the east, compared to 100k km² gained in the west.
My (German) grandfather was born in Stettin :)
Well, congrats on finding the second bug! Thanks!
This one is pretty big, even as big as it's funny.
> Does your code handle diacritics correctly?
It seems it doesn't, no. Sorry for this. It's my first attempt at an international product.
To give you more details, I'm using this query to fetch cities data: https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search?city=${rawCity}&c...
I probably shouldn't have restricted accept-language to en-US. I'll investigate and make this work.
> I'm using this query to fetch cities data
There's also downloadable CSV lists of the world's place names at https://geonames.org (and stably have been kept available and updated for many years by now) — if you already have a DB (likely in your case), script up some csv-to-dbtable dumping and thus you save on networked API call overheads just for querying the world's existing place names.
(It's regularly updated so best to keep the convert-and-dump script or logic around if you go that route.)
I live in Vietnam and have the same problem I think. My city has diacritics in its name, but the query
https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search?city=B%E1%BA%AFc-...
works fine.
Unlike the parent post, it does not go to undefined, it just returns 404 when clicking on the map.
Some 404 examples:
https://meet.hn/city/vn-B%E1%BA%AFc-Ninh https://meet.hn/city/vn-H%C3%A0-N%E1%BB%99i
Working examples in Vietnam
https://meet.hn/city/vn-Da-Nang https://meet.hn/city/vn-Ho-Chi-Minh-City
(technically the last examples should be Đà Nẵng and Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh, but I guess because they are internationally known cities, they use the English names?)
https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/1973756 has `name=Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh` and `name:en= Ho Chi Minh City`
Aha, so in the case of Bắc Ninh, its English name is the same as it is in Vietnamese; with diacritics.
I was going to say Da Nang and Ho Chi Minh City have gotten english names indirectly due to their popularity or relevance in Vietnam, but the main capital of Vietnam, Hà Nội, has the same problem as Bắc Ninh where its English name is the same as the Vietnamese name.
I guess there's no logical reason behind this, as this sort of data is likely crowd sourced.
No problem. As a Polish person, it is my duty to find zażółć-gęślą-jaźń-related bugs in other people's code.
> zażółć-gęślą-jaźń-related bugs
If this does mean something it's even more hilarious!
https://hrrsd.wordpress.com/2012/06/12/polish-diacritics/
"Go make self more yellow, using gusle"[0]
[0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Za%C5%BC%C3%B3%C5%82...
You are the mvp
Even worse than that, it's not possible to view cities with non-English characters in their names – like Łódź, but also Jyväskylä or İzmir.
This is probably the first time I've seen a diacritics/text-encoding problem created by a French developer, rather than us French folks complaining about US-centric language decisions!
If you want anybody on HN to access, you might want accept-language to be set to an asterisk `*`.
Good luck and I hope we can someday meet up if I'm in Toulouse!
Hey, this is awesome - your doing a great job. Anything that exists will not exist perfectly - you had to make this real to have that bug found by that random person - well done!
Also I wouldn't lose much sleep over the English reqs. I've had many people tell me that English is the global language that weren't born in native English speaking countries.
Most recent example, a Mod was going off about how a certain help page was setup for English questions only and she did this whole explanation about it, apologized for the system.
The majority of replies was some variant of just say "International Chat" next time - people from everywhere all in agreement.
If you made this in German, French or Japanese - I'd agree with you. I think English is the expectation these days tho
Also, I can't click on users that are in cities containing a diacritic (Pégomas, France) or a space (La Ciotat, France).
Nice idea, good luck with the top spot on HN!
The code doesn't handle places that don't have a province, or similar concept on OpenStreetMap. See debugger: https://i.imgur.com/X379swH.png
Looks cool! I've used the search or meetup.com before for this use case when I'm traveling, but meetup.com is slowly going away it seems.
Feature Requests:
- Mastodon support in the social dropdown
- Auto complete on the location selector
Thanks a lot for the feedbacks!
- will add!
- will add as well! I wanted something simple to launch quick and see if the project was of interest. It seems it is, so I will implement it!
Check GeoNames.org for this task
+1 for mastodon
also orcid or google scholar
Didn't know about orcid! And good idea for google scholar, thanks for sharing!
- Great idea, thanks for sharing!
- country-city does not work well in the US because we have many duplicated city names in different states
- what harsh reputation? :)
- Thank you very much!
- Damn, didn't know that. I just had the feedback that Paris, Tennessee wasn't working already.
Today I'm using nominatim from openstreetmap to fetch cities data.
This request: https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search?city=${rawCity}&c...
I guess I'll have to change this for a less restrictive search. I wanted a city and country to have a nice and simple URL though. If you have any suggestion, please do share it!
- Every time I speak with people about HN, I get something along the line: "They criticize everything, and very easily".
> They criticize everything, and very easily
I think that is a feature, not a bug.
It's also confusion that reporting of a bug is not criticism. It's a Show HN. You've asked for the feedback. People that get twisted when the feedback is anything other than pablum like "great job" need not be a developer. If you can't handle being told that something isn't working, then how do you ever expect to improve? Or maybe you've moved from being a dev and are now trying to be a founder?
Absolutely a feature.
I 100% agree
Probably city-zipcode-country would disambiguate effectively both for the US (where you could have several Springfield cities in different states) and Europe (where there are probably, for instance, quite a number of `Sainte-Anne` cities on top of Guadeloupe's)
I think we're probably going to get a blog post from you a couple weeks from now titled "falsehoods programmers believe about cities"!
Many countries don't have zip codes or they are not widely used or known.
My country (Colombia) relatively recently assigned them but no one uses them or require them, so no one knows which zip code they are living in
> Damn, didn't know that. I just had the feedback that Paris, Tennessee wasn't working already.
And Paris, Idaho and Paris, Illinois and Paris, Michigan and Paris, Indiana and …
I think about half of US states have a city called Paris.
In the US you could just use “zipcode-us”. It’s not ideal though. Otherwise just “city-stateabbr-us” - e.g. “SiouxFalls-SD-US”
This is nice, I zoomed in to where I lived and added my location. I then went to see who the nearest other HN profiles and see what they're into. Looks like their hobby is developing meet.hn! Nice work neighbor :D!
Nice little thing, congrats to shipping :)
I find it ironic that there are many cities with N hackers on meet.hn, yet most are not attaching any way of contacting them, nor do their profile have a way to contact them.
How are you (the people without contact details) expecting us to meet you if you don't add a way of meeting you? :)
The line to walk is to make oneself easily contactable by an engineer yet infeasibly difficult for recruiter spam.
For those with github, I guess one could create a pull request ;) /s
Let me set a karma that other users must meet before seeing my username.
I agree with this. We got to have a means of verifying that the other party is indeed a real HN member. Having it open like this is too spam/abuse/harvest prone, in my opinion.
this is exactly why i dont want to meet hn'ers
My feature req sounds demanding? Or you don't like me hiding my username?
Or an account age. Or both.
I like that idea but I purposely stay anonymous on HN and I would be DOXing myself if I used this. It'd be great to be able to either use it without a username (ideally) or have the choice to keep your HN username private.
Well done! I have one suggestion. Given how geographically sparse HN users are, you could consider listing nearby users too. For example:
2 hackers in Ankh-Morpork:
- Lord Vetinari
- Igor
3 hackers within 10 mi (16 km):
- Susan (Sto Helit)
- Princess Keli (Sto Lat)
- Lord Rodley (Quirm)
(It can be a bit tricky, though.)
Those guys are just scroll urchins. Those in the know will tell you the real clackers are Winton, Carlton and Emery of the Smoking Gnu.
Feature request: please add Mastodon/fediverse as a type of social media account.
Also, you generate invalid URLs for cities that have spaces in them, like Saint Petersburg.
> please add Mastodon/fediverse as a type of social media account Didn't know about fediverse! Thanks for sharing.
> Also, you generate invalid URLs for cities that have spaces in them, like Saint Petersburg.
Yeah I was dumb enough not to handle spaces in city names... Saint Petersburg is fixed now, and most should be as well, but not all. I implemented some kind of quick fix for now, but I will investigate further when this settles down a bit.
Thanks for reporting!
Added myself to the map. At first it said it couldn't find my city but the issue seems to have resolved itself after a while, maybe after I zoomed in.
Can your website handle accents? Trying to look up my neighbors in São Paulo and Goiânia redirects me back to the root page.
https://meet.hn/city/br-São-Paulo
https://meet.hn/city/br-Goiânia
My guess is your website is choking on the accented characters.
Feature suggestion: a "my location" button on the map, so you can zoom in to your current location. There is a browser API [1] for this (which asks permission, or you can do it based on the IP address [2]
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Geolocation...
[2] <shameless self-promotion> Geolocation provider comparison: https://resolve.rs/ip/geolocation.html </shame>
> No meet.hn data found for this HN user. Waiting a minute to let HN API update.
My account exists since 2020, why would the HN API (which, if you click the link at the bottom of every page, says "near real time") not know my account? I'm curious how this error occurs
For anyone else having this, the "add me" button will enable itself again, but it does take a while. Not that retrying seems to work for me
Edit: nvm I'm being stupid, I did not see the "copy and paste the text below into your HN account" instruction. Thanks also to those who replied with that info, though while playing with the browser dev tools to figure out what the issue might be, I spotted that text eventually
You have to add the link to your bio. It’s a way for the app to verify that you want to be added to the map
For me it only worked after I added their form text to my hn account description on my actual hn account page…
> City not found. Make sure you use the format: City, Country (Paris, France)
It might be good to rework this—cities only, and provide a drop-down box for users to select. Having city, country is a bit superfluous for people who live in city-states.
I'm afraid there are... 1,700+ cities[0] in the world called "San José"
That's quite a bit of scrolling you'd be forcing those people to do.
[0]: https://www.ncesc.com/geographic-pedia/what-is-the-most-comm...
See reply below.
Your reply says
> I meant a text box that users could type in, and a drop-down that returned filtered results from the input.
That's what I'm objecting to.
If I type in "San Jose", are you going to show me 1,700 "San Jose" lines where I'm supposed to find the right one?
You want a dropdown listing every city in the world?
I meant a text box that users could type in, and a drop-down that returned filtered results from the input.
Yes, that is the standard UI for this problem. You select a country, then that loads a the country's divisions ilfor another select box, and that load the cities for that division.
Another way is auto complete for the city with just country preselected.
I see that UI on some European sites. It’s basically nonfunctional for the US, at least. (Especially the latter approach with no “division” narrowing.) There are hundreds of towns with duplicate names, people might want to use region names that don’t exist politically (“Bay Area”), and people can be in incorporated towns (San Francisco) or unincorporated areas that get assigned Census Bureau names based on usage (Bay Point). There is just no way to create an autocomplete list that encompasses every valid place, and it’s a waste of time to try.
Great idea. I think it would be cool if you couldn't just add socials but a personal webpage and email (with mailto link).
Good idea, thanks!
I was scared to allow any URL, to be honest. That's why I restricted this to a set of allowed domains.
But as it's open source maybe I'll have the chance to get it pair reviewed before shipping it if this gets traction.
Two more things on the socials:
- Most socials use square icons, but Cal.com uses the logo, so it breaks the layout.
- I think it's worth adding YouTube, not just YouTube Music.
Could you add Discord to the socials?
The format for a Discord user URL is like this:
`discordapp.com/users/<User_ID>`
where `<User_ID>` is an integer. (People can copy the user ID when signed into Discord.)
Please don't. Discord is contrary to everything HN stands for as a community.
You could say the same thing for X, Facebook, Reddit, or YouTube. They all have flaws and controversies. Why not let each person decide which socials they want to participate in and share?
I have not checked all cities, but Berlin seems to be a strong contender for HN's capital. Do any cities have more hackers?
Would love to maybe do a group meet-up?
Thank you for letting me be the 1st hacker on my island ;)
https://meet.hn/city/fr-Petit-Bourg
What about security?
How is this protected from abuse? Why is this all public information?
It feels like a honeypot to be honest.
My suggestion would be to hide the names unless visitor is logged in AND there is a match in their city.
That just gives a false sense of security. Someone who means harm would simply set themselves to each city successively, while people believe it to be private (similar to the location feature in dating apps that keeps being broken to find people's exact addresses). Not that I see what harm there is in associating a username with a (nearby) city when one makes that choice consciously, so it's not like the dating app situation where you (1) believe the location will remain secret and (2) it being revealed means your exact address is now known
An app that would allow an account to change it's location more than 3 times in a year is a broken app in my book.
People move all the time. People also often have multiple accounts, which they could use to determine which accounts are located where.
Then it would need a GPS-backed proof to allow more location changes while preventing abuse. There's always an intended use case and corner cases which could be handled via support ticket, thus passing through human judgement.
If there is a secure app on your phone, then how can you have multiple accounts?
Well, one answer might be that someone could spin up emulators
Or reverse engineer whatever app you have.
Or reset their phone? (or would you restrict it somehow to one account per physical phone? What happens if it gets sold or given away?)
Having worked in fraud detection a bit, it's _really_ hard to prevent people from making multiple accounts. Short of requiring ID based verification, and even then.
And then you have to still not go overboard and keep the onboarding low friction enough that people will be willing to go through it
Your points are all true. But we must not forget that security is like onion layers. The fact that something can't be made military-grade hack-proof doesn't mean we should leave it wide open for the whole world to abuse.
GPS is a one-way system, how could that ever be proof? You'd need to send people devices with some DRM on it so that they can't modify the code it runs and the check it performs (we all know how well DRM works anyway, or how desirable it is)
GPS could confirm that you are indeed where you claim you are. In the unlikely case you want to change your location for the Nth time.
But I, as the attacker, would just modify the value right?
It's not that the device transmits signals into space and the satellite operator, a trusted third party, would relay to the server where the user was computed to be. Instead, it's the user self-reporting the computed value from GPS satellites' signals
If you decompiled the app, then yes, you could spoof GPS. Still, a well behaved backend would stop you in your tracks.
The user is not self-reporting, the app is.
Again, just because something can't be 100% bulletproof it doesn't mean it needs to stay wide open.
That's a fair argument in general, though in this case I would both say that
- the risk of somehow abusing self-reported city-level location data is very low
- the effort involved in bypassing the proposed security measure is so exceedingly little, anyone who is passingly motivated to abuse it will also simply do that
As someone who works in the digital risk business, I fully subscribe to managing risk and that (as you say) 100% security is usually not a realistic option. Weighing risks against benefits is key, though
I'm less concerned about the abuse of a single self-reported city-level location data. What worries me here is a world-wide-open directory of people (any people) and their locations and interests and social links. It's a target group right there served on a silver platter to _anyone_ on the internet. Sorry, but, no thanks.
Who says it's one account
> hide the names unless visitor is logged in
I hate websites that do this.
People know that what they're putting here will be public, they make the judgment themselves if they're okay with that.
Why do you care if the screen shows 5 people in city X (which is not your city anyway)? What use do you have of knowing exact names of people in city X half way acros the globe?
It is interesting to me and others.
There's a person living in Vila do Corvo. I didn't know that was a place. What are they interested in? What do the technical people of Vila do Corvo post about?
(In this case, not much, but it was fun to find out.)
Exactly. A _person_. That's enough information to satisfy curiosity. No need to publish exact names.
If I don't know their username, how can I look at what they post about? I think lots of people on HN are curious and inquisitive by nature
It's interesting to know what that person is up to (from what they publically share online).
Travel - it seems that if this app takes off, catching up with people as you travel is a solid use case.
It's all data you chose to share publicly. I wouldn't have put myself on the map if I hadn't been comfortable doing so.
What abuse? Your HN profile is public anyhow.
All this does is show who put a city in their profile. You could find those via Google as well.
I misunderstood then. I thought this is a brand new data collector. Thank you.
In fact, it is a brand new data collector. It's encouraging HN account holders to geo-tag themselves and to put that information in the publicly available HN account profile. This profile is, more or less, blank by default.
Is it limited to hackers, or is it open to all tech-savvy, free-thinking types of HN readers? If need be, I could dust off some mad 6502 assembly language skillz. Oh, and I ran a BBS briefly in the 80s if that helps me qualify. I’m not technically knowledgeable on current technologies, but I think I’m sufficiently opinionated.
I ran a BBS also and likely at least as opinionated. Brother.
Confirms my suspicion that the most active HN users are in Canada/East Coast/Europe.
When I first discovered HN I thought it was a small Stanford thing, but over time realized it's mostly a Canada/Europe crowd (even most of the YC founders that come to San Francisco for their startup are from those places).
I suspect the current situation is mostly due to timezones and as the west coast wakes up we‘ll see more cities appear there. It’ll probably take a few days until you can deduce anything about hn-users in general from that map.
And thanks for the comment - made me look outside my immediate surroundings on the map!
If you're living in SF area, you have an IRL social aggregator. We in WE appreciate HN more with its warts and all.
"IRL social" in SF hahah
Point taken :)
This is neat. I added myself.
I'm hitting a bug where clicking New York just refreshes the page instead of loading the city's page. Los Angeles, San José, and... most cities seem to exhibit it. Chicago seems to work?
Picking a city was tough. It insisted on the more general New York instead of the more specific Long Island City.
Trying to add myself fails, showing "Oops! Something uncool is breaking this app.". The POST request seems to be receiving 500 with the following request.
I can get it to work by using a district name e.g "Wan Chai, China". There should probably be some special handling for Hong Kong and Macau since although they are in China, they have their own ISO country codes, flags and are divided differently.
Hey! I think I saw your profile on the meet.hn for a while, but as of now, it seems that even your profile has disappeared. I tried submitting again with your advice, and the submit seemed to not give any errors yet I don't see myself on the map either.
Would be great if the tags field allowed freeform input instead of choosing from a set of existing tags. My preferred tags would have been Design, Fashion, Digital fabrication, Computational Creativity etc. but none were available.
This is a very nice project, to start with. Thank you very much for that!
I checked Paris and most of the people I see are either CEOs or VC (or something around that). I was expecting this demographics in the US, probably less in France.
I am a pure nerd, interested in technology applied to everyday items (think Home Assistant, some amateur 3D printing) but also history and all these discussions about random topics that many perceive as a waste of time.
OP: would you consider adding interests (say, the top 5) to help with matchmaking?
EDIT: woah, I just realized it is there!! Thanks!!
Congratulations on this! One remark: it seems you forgot to make the repo public; I get a 404 on https://github.com/borisghidaglia/meet-hn.
Thanks! And you were right, sorry! It is fixed: https://github.com/borisghidaglia/meet-hn
Bug alert: while clicking on the Seoul 'M' does work, listing its (currently 1) hackers, the close-by Pyongyang doesn't (despite also having "1 hacker" registered).
Similar issue here. Clicking some of them works, and other don't (E.g. Irvine works, Los Angeles doesn't)
I’m getting the following error:
“No about section for this HN user. Waiting a minute to let HN API update.“
https://imgur.com/a/B1u4ZXA
Does this video help? https://x.com/meet_hn/status/1834918518904746329
After pasting the text in you HN account, the HN API takes a little while to update. In order not to abuse it, I added a timer.
If it happens even after waiting for a bit, please don't hesitate to share more informations here or at https://meet.hn/feedback
I was getting the same issues due to the capitalization of my name. Just as a note to make sure yours is correct as well.
Me too
Nice work! I live in a rural area, would be great to know the local HNers!
Thank you! Yes I created this because I had that exact wish
Looks nice! +1 for storing data in a human-readable representation on existing user profiles.
No extra account needed + information has value outside meet.hn + information has value even if site goes away.
Great project.
Bug report: Clicking on the items in Southern and Brazil:
- Rio de Janeiro, Joinville and Curitiba works
- but Jaraguá do Sul and Florianópolis don't
Looks like it's the accents..
Cool! will you add social link for youtube? https://www.youtube.com/@VCmakes
Thanks! Will do!
I placed myself at McMurdo Station and it shows up on the map but clicking the icon throws a 500 error.
Edit: seems to be fixed (by removing my icon from the map, now it throws error 500 when posting the data to re-add it).
Edit 2: you can place yourself in North Korea but clicking the [M] doesn't work because the name contains non ASCII characters. Also it returns error 405 when adding yourself (despite actually saving the data).
Thanks for reporting all this!
> I placed myself at McMurdo Station and it shows up on the map but clicking the icon throws a 500 error.
This was because there was no country code associated to it.
> Edit: seems to be fixed (by removing my icon from the map, now it throws error 500 when posting the data to re-add it).
I actually did more than removing it, I now make any "city" without a country code, an invalid one. It's a hotfix, I'll have to think about it more tbh.
> Edit 2: you can place yourself in North Korea but clicking the [M] doesn't work because the name contains non ASCII characters. Also it returns error 405 when adding yourself (despite actually saving the data).
Yeah, actually I'm dumb I reintroduced a "vulnerability" by not checking if the city in the form was the same as the city in the HN user profile. So you could move people around, basically. But their actual data was unchanged of course, as it's stored here on HN. That's why I was able to revert this.
About the ASCII characters, yes it's a problem. I'll implement it as soon as possible, when things will calm down a bit.
Can you tell me more about the 405 though? It seems strange.
I tried to click on the locations in Turkey to list the users. But it redirects to homepage if it contains non-ASCII characters such as Tekirdağ, Ataşehir.
Awaiting for a fix, currently unusable for my case.
The 405 seems to happen randomly. No idea what causes it, sometimes it returns 200, but after a few several POSTs in a row it may return 405.
Just a thought. The problem in most cases isn't finding people with whom to meet, it's actually how we meet. We've lost a lot of capacity to develop relationships that go beyond common interests and basic in-person politeness.
This is really neat. Well done on the UX and functionality.
I saw others already mentioned uniqueness of city names. In the US there is no guarantee a state, zip code, or even county won't have a duplicate city name. To solve this one must store the lat/lng coordinates instead. Then offer users a search list of matched cities, so they can select the right geographic location.
Good stuff - cheers!
Just to leave my data point, I couldn't find San Juan, Puerto Rico (city, state/country) in your list. That said, PR is so small that I don't care about searching by city, searching for users in the island is enough for a meetup. For privacy reasons, we should also be able to add our state/country without a city.
Feature request:
delta.chat contact field, the best of the decentralised free software messengers
Easy to have multiple identities for public and private use
I really like this idea. I've wanted to build something to bring startup/remote work people in my area together for a while. I bought a few domains but couldn't figure out the hook. Smart idea to build it as part of the HN userbase, since that is the userbase you want for something like this!
Great work
Thank you very much!
Perhaps a notification when new signups occur in the same area? Or when people near you with shared interests.
I have been reading HN for 4+ years through university and moving to SF for a job in tech and derive a huge amount of utility from it.
However this is the first post that has made me want to join and interact as more than a “lurker”.
Looks awesome and I hope to meet some awesome hackers around me!
The website looks nice, the domain is rather unusual, which registrar did you get it from? I used punto.hn but their business model was very weird and required me to eat a $15 wire fee every year on top of the cost of the domain, I dropped them after the first year.
I've made more than one friend on Hacker News, one of whom I've met in person. Encouraging that to happen, by way of an app, is a great idea.
Every project has bugs at first, but I see you're dealing with them as they pop up. Best of luck working on it.
Very nice. Please add an AP option like a Mastodon account, Pixelfed, etc. No way am I using x anymore.
Have signed up. It says there's another signup from my location, but is failing to show me. It just redirects to the home page. It is showing for another city, so perhaps due to the space in the name? Thanks.
meet.hn/city/in-New Delhi
Should be fixed for New Delhi now: https://meet.hn/city/in-New-Delhi Sorry for this, and thanks for reporting!
I'm getting similar, but can see a 404 in the dev tools when trying to view the hacker in Coeur-d'Alene: https://meet.hn/city/us-Coeur-d'Alene
I can't tell if it's being URL encoded or not, so that's a possibility. I imagine most cities don't have apostrophes in the name so it might be an edge case.
No worries. I've updated in my profile too. Thanks.
Hm. After waiting several minutes, it does not seem to pick up the info from my profile.
"No about section for this HN user. Waiting a minute to let HN API update."
Also might be good to add Mastodon to the list of available social networks.
What's the grammar this is using for parsing the field? The generated text gives vague hints but it's irritating to guess at what the constraints are, especially given update lag.
It could use some work for the USA. I'm in the better Wilmington, the one in Delaware. But it doesn't seem to want to let me use Delaware vs North Carolina.
So needs City/State/Country for the US.
given so many problems with city names. maybe just avoid them entirely? use lat/lon and closest clusters on them map. people will figure out themselves which city that is
I added myself, I hope it catches on!
Added myself for the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg / Luxembourg (City) (lu-Luxembourg as this meet.hn encodes that country-city).
Motivated to meet dmichulke, pvtmert and uselpa... And the others who may join.
Count me in. I'd suggest an afterwork in the city.
But please consider adding a way to contact you to your "about" section.
OK will do. I'll email you one of these days and we'll go for an afterwork Place d'Armes or Place Guillaume II or at the Kirschberg or something like that!
I tried to add myself at Kraków, Poland. It said no such city. I tried also Krakow and Cracow spelling. Then when it accepted Kraków again (seemingly), and I posted, I ended up in... Murowana Goślina.
Brilliant idea! I get No about section for this HN user. Waiting a minute to let HN API update when trying to add to map. But my HN accounts has about section...
It was capitalization of my HN handle. Needs to match exactly.
Have you seen https://loginwithhn.com/ ?
Seems to also fall into the category of services on top of HN, like this one and at.hn.
This is a great idea, and I sincerely want it to work out.
For myself, I'll probably not use it, but that's because I'm an "old," and I stopped attending local meetups, because I was always surrounded by a circle of avoidance, where no one would look at me, or have anything to do with me.
Got a bit tiresome, but it's the way of the world, I guess. For non-olds, these meetups are great, with a lot of energy and enthusiasm.
Need a “wise old dudes” meet up and charge those under 40 to attend- few 20 to 30 year olds understand how much of value they could get from an “old dude” for the price of a beer/coffee.
As I get older, the "old wise dude" myth fades more every day. I rarely meet wise old people, it's quite the opposite actually.
Not saying there aren't any, buy I would avoid conflating old and wise together.
Absolutely.
However, it seems that most folks conflate "older" (which is getting increasingly younger -I encounter folks in their early forties that can't get interviews), and "useless."
Funny. We're doing pretty well at opening up the industry to folks from many ethnic backgrounds, and women, but the industry actively encourages ageism.
Most of the "reasons" end up falling flat, upon closer inspection.
It just seems that gray hair makes people uncomfortable. I guess it always has, but in the Days of Yore, corporations were usually run by older folks, so we had to work with them (I didn't always have gray hair, myself -spoiler: We all get a turn at this wheel).
Indeed, ageism is a serious issue. And it seems out of touch with an ageing society in most countries.
I'm not young anymore either and my experience job hunting has been that I get invited to fewer initial interviews, but when I am, the whole process is much much easier for myself than a decade ago. Onboarding is also much faster.
> This is a great idea, and I sincerely want it to work out. Thank you!
> I stopped attending local meetups, because I was always surrounded by a circle of avoidance, where no one would look at me, or have anything to do with me
Meetups (as in "group meetups") might be part of meet.hn, but I also saw it as a way to meet new people one to one.
Hopefully this makes you change your mind, I'm sure you would have plenty of things to share!
I hope that won't be the case for me. I added myself to Madrid, let's see how it goes.
There are multiple cities/towns with the same name in my country, but unfortunately, it's impossible to specify which one is mine at meet.hn. What a shame.
I split my time and live in two cities in two countries. I put both in my "about", but I don't know if your map will handle this.
Cool! Sadly there is no drop down for the city name (at least on iOS), so I can't register my town. There is two Saint-Denis in France, my one isn't the usual one ;)
awesome idea. Would be great to have in maps view some adaptive clustering with number inside similar like nomadlist members map: https://nomads.com/community
Also for those that nomading and changing places often would be good to have option to share location via WebLocation but make it randomized on the backend or even better in frontend (so that it's approximate to e.g 5-10km radius)
There is a bug where Polish cities with "ł" are returning error 404, causing the website to reload (i.e. Wrocław).
Why the majority of webapps completely ignore error handling?
Great tool! But the City, Country box is a bit unintuitive. I am not sure how to fill my place in. I live in the US so it is "city, state, country"
Good idea! I wish you also added Mastodon to the socials.
Thank you very much! Will add
Great idea! Interest-based communities have a lot more trust so things like meeting up, transacting, or dating can happen with less friction.
Great idea, I've added telegram group for hackers in Valencia if anyone wants to meet :)
I would suggest to add website option for socials
Came here to leave this comment! I'm not super active on social networks these days, but I do still blog.
Thank you very much, I saw a user from Guangzhou, China, which is only a few hundred kilometers away from me.
Cool interface!
Only thing I worry is that this will make it easier for data scientists to determine from where people are commenting from, on HN.
Can you add Mastodon (or any other activitypub-based) field? To check the identity, you just need to run a webfinger query.
Well, I signed up; hopefully someone from/visiting Thessaloniki will chime in so we can chat about common interests.
Very cool! I think many will be reticent to divulge social information on here! Looking forward to seeing this grow.
How bold of people to openly share their geolocations when doxing and swatting are routine happenings.
Happy for y'all.
Hundreds of millions of people have posted some geographical information about themselves on the internet without being swatted. This is like saying that people who ride public transportation are bold because murders happen there
I think the list of hackers should show everyone in any of the icons that are currently visible.
Awesome! I've been hoping to find something like this. Would be great if I could add a Mastodon profile.
Thank you!
Mastodon has been requested several times, will add!
Great!
My pin disappeared though? I changed my city, maybe that’s why
It's really annoying how it changes the map zoom/centre when you click on a pin.
This is great, it couldn't find my actual city, so i used the closest one that was available lol.
Not working for me. Tried ~10 times.
Sorry this happened. Could you share what you tried?
Maybe this video can help? https://x.com/meet_hn/status/1834918518904746329
If you prefer not to share publicly, you can also share your feedback here: https://meet.hn/feedback
Not on X sorry.
Nothing happend. The error message is not helpful at all (can it connect? Does it find the user? Does it find the data in the about section? What URL was it trying? etc.) but said it wanted to wait a minute for the API. User since 2020 (with this account)
[Edit] Tried again it now says
"No about section for this HN user. Waiting a minute to let HN API update."
[Edit2] Works now, the other reply about the space made me think. I didn't use identical Uppercase/Lowercase. Hmm.
Make sure your handle doesn't have a space at the end. That was my problem
Nice! You could add a feature to organize and host a meeting or contact people in some way. :-)
Perhaps it could show a reminder to have an email address in one's profile? That's recommended in general anyway
It would be more useful to have a button in each city to propose a meeting—no need to email anyone. You suggest a meeting, people can join or propose changes. That's it. :<
So everyone who signed up would need to check this site, is the idea?
Thank you!
Yes I would love to. I'll have to think of the best way to add this. If you have any suggestion please do share it!
not working properly with firefox (131.0b3, raises a javascript + CORS error) -- https://i.imgur.com/k5CvHKt.png
works properly on chrome.
2 HN users in Honolulu! Aloha!
I love this! Everything worked great for me. Thanks for making it.
I am trying to register from Warsaw, Poland - but I always get a 'City not found' error - I've tried Warszawa, Polska and Warszawa, Poland too.
It reports the error already at the first letter and never changes.
I am using Firefox and I get lots of Javascript errors.
I am curious how the three users that are visible on the map registered.
*Update:* the Openstreetmap call that is used seems to be correct: https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search?city=Warsaw&count... - this leads to the right data - so I guess the page is updated after I fill up the correct name, but some Javascript error blows up the process.
This is the primary candidate:
Uncaught (in promise) TypeError: x is undefined NextJS 17 h cache validationFunction p t setTimeout handler*8245/Q/< a_ aR sF sF sM sU o4 iV sU uR uM page-55b4fe444b2a460b.js:1:1221 p NextJS AsyncFunctionThrow self-hosted:811 NextJS 13
*Update:* It also failed in Chrome. With the following error in web console:
Uncaught (in promise) TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'split') at page-9fc22f2169c430e1.js:1:1223 at async validationFunction (page-9fc22f2169c430e1.js:1:56767) at async p (page-9fc22f2169c430e1.js:1:47487)
Cool idea!
Location must be pre-defined (country, state/province, city) and should not be entered by aspiring HN community members.
I don't want to read the whole code to understand why the generated text is pasted in the HN description, or is it just a marketing tactic?
So, what do you do once you’re on the map and so are other people?
It could be also great to add a karma ranking per city.
Pretty cool, missed out on a fun lawsuit by not naming it meta.hn.
tried to input "Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia" and it says it is not valid unfortunately.
Can this be fixed?
Unable to add Hong Kong. Keeps erroring out with city not found
Sorry for this, I will investigate. In the meantime, I managed to add myself to: https://meet.hn/city/cn-Yuen-Long-District using "HK, China"
Thanks for reporting!
Hey I know you!
mark my words, this will be worse than the reddit meetups.
I think it depends on how you use HN. I try to contribute positively in the comments and enjoy the learning aspect of the HN community. Shit posters might not want to join the train.
I tried a reddit meetup once.
Once
Solitaire is only game in town. Greetings everybody.
This doesn't like the city of Saint Louis.
Added, thanks for creating this.
Hong Kong is not recognised :/
trying to move to mcmurdo station broke it! so I moved to hawaii
undefined-McMurdo-Station
probably best to just allow us to enter GPS coordinates
This website doesn't check whether your profile link matches the city you typed in their website. It means you can place any other user wherever you want as long as they have a link in their profile (moved you to Taiwan as a test).
It's also a big buggy since you show up in both places now.
Doesn't seem to work for Hong Kong
the first thought was, there are no other hackers in my city ... let's wait and we will see :)
Remind me of indiehacker meetups
Did you get permission from HN to do this?
There's no way I'd join something like this without the official stamp.
Who is HN?
What makes something official? Should HN run it?
HN is a community. This is a community effort. And it can be vetted or modified or subscribed to by that community.
How about a way to do this without sharing your username? I feel like many people want to keep their online profiles private.
Yeah it'd be good to be able to create a separate user name. I like the anonymity of HN
very cool! I'm surprised there are no signups in SF yet. I'm sure many will come.
> very cool!
Thank you very much!
> I'm surprised there are no signups in SF yet.
Surprised as well! So much so that I signed up in SF myself to make sure it was working as expected
people are still sleeping
Greetings from Kharkiv, Ukraine.
you should probably use some kind of API to help people input their city/country.
I do, I'm using nominatim from openstreetmap. I used a simple API call for the sake of simplicity, but now that the product is out, I'll probably switch to something more robust.
gotcha... maybe the API was slow... i didn't get address suggestions when inputting y city's name
I like this.
I know this might sound petty, but the thing preventing me from signing up is your comfort level dispersing information through x.com. You said "meet.hn has a twitter page", but sadly, twitter is dead and has been replaced by something sinister. I can't support them, even tangentially.
Imho, your take isn’t as “petty” as it is goofy and unproductive. I’m saying this as someone who has rejected social media entirely and deleted it off of my devices like 10 years go.
Similar to the parent, I associate x urls with an increasingly unwelcome retail district.
I don't think it's petty, goofy or unproductive to feel uneasy in a once-open place that put up walls, gates and signal-heavy signage.
But even before our present-day Compoundia, Twitter was losing it's way. Prioritizing engagement over users is a bad road.
I also strongly dislike X being used as the primary host of public information not because of any moral disagreements with the company, but because of how inaccessible it's becoming.
Information should be accessible to anyone anywhere on any device, with or without an account. X doesn't fit that role.
Same reason I hate when companies have a Facebook page and nothing else.
Noted, appreciate your opinion.
The OP says in the signup that if you meet up in person and tweet a photo, he'll re-tweet you through the meet.hn x handle. Sounds benign, and it mostly is.
I'm just personally uncomfortable supporting an otherwise good cause wherein x.com gets more attention and data about the good folks on HN, because I really don't trust them and their data governance.
At some point you need to be pragmatic about minuscule concessions for a net positive action. Otherwise you would be unable to do anything at all.
Twitter/X keeps spamming me with NSFW things so I deleted it
didn't know there was an .hn tld, very cool!
as a socially anxious person, i just found out there's only 2 of us in my country, and i'm the other one
Believe it or not but I'm also a (medically) anxious person!
Hopefully on the path of getting better. Meeting people one by one or in small groups (for example at the gym) has helped a lot for me.
As a socially anxious person you may want to be asking about the 9876543 people that didn't declare themselves, and what are they hiiding from you.
Done.
I'm in Dubai.
Very cool!
Thank you very much!
Love the idea! I've wanted to meet fellow HNers to nerd out with for a while :D
Congrats on shipping and good luck