HN Explorer

Show HN: HackerNewsers,com, find other hackers near you

221 points by phpnode ↗ HN
There's been lots of discussion recently about finding other HNers to talk to / bounce ideas off / work with, some Google spreadsheets were set up to share details but they were soon vandalised. I had a spare afternoon yesterday (which turned into a long day) and here's the result:

http://www.hackernewsers.com/

It's only open to people with HN accounts, it lets you post your biography, location, skills etc. Anyway, I hope you like it and find it useful.

111 comments

[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 182 ms ] thread
phpnode
Clickable Link:

http://www.hackernewsers.com/

thehodge
looks like your from York, I'm thinking about doing a northern HN meetup thing (as we can't all get to london) if your interested?
sjwalter
You call that Northern? It's not northern if I have to fly over 3000 km south to get there! :)
phpnode
yeah sounds good to me, hopefully a few other notherners will come out of the woodwork too
limist
Great work, especially for 1 afternoon/day, and I like the account verification process too - it's quick and effective. Look forward to meeting more HNers via your site!
phpnode
thanks for your comments, hopefully enough people will see this and join so it becomes a useful resource.
limist
BTW, do you have plans to integrate some geocoding/geonames capability? And how about having a map overview like,

http://djangopeople.net/

phpnode
The map on the home page shows all the registered users, currently just the two of us lol, it groups them in to hot spots, but it's hard to see until there's more users. The registration form is geocoded, it just wasn't working correctly, fixed now.
limist
Thanks for the clarification. Well I'm certainly happy to be the first guy to join in this dance. :)

http://sivers.org/ff

dublinclontarf
One point I'd like to make, don't use the same password for this as you do for HN. Now I don't think anything bad is likely to come of this it's just not a great idea thats all(using the same password that is).
phpnode
This is a fair point, that being said, i do generate a random salt + hash the password properly.
pinksoda
A random salt? Are you sure about that?
dublinclontarf
I assume this is a joke? Being that with computers we can only generate pseudo random data, amirite?
pinksoda
You can't use a "random" salt (such as one generated from the rand function) because then you can't calculate the hash later to verify they entered the correct password, unless of course you store that "random" salt in the database, which would defeat the purpose if your database is compromised.

Typically hash's are calculated using something like: $hash = sha1($password."secretcode".$username); - none of which are random.

If you were to add a random number into that like this: $rand = rand(1,99); $hash = sha1($password.$rand);

Now you can't do if($hash1 = $hash2) { loginSuccess(); } because you will never know what random salt was generated for the original hash.

dublinclontarf
>unless of course you store that "random" salt in the database, which would defeat the purpose if your database is compromised.

Not true, a plain hash can be compromised with a brute force attack. To do this all the entries in the dictionary(used in the attack) must be hashed using the same hash algorithm.

If each password entry is hashed with a random salt(with the salt being kept for password comparison) the attacker must rehash the entire dictionary(not a computationally cheap thing to do) including the random salt, for each and every password.

This doesn't make it impossible to brute force a hash+salt, but makes it a LOT more expensive and time consuming.

At least this is my understanding of the whole point of random salted hash.

phpnode
this is my understanding too, even if someone breaks into the db and gets the list of salts and passwords, they can't use rainbow tables because of the "random" salts, so finding the plain text passwords becomes computationally too expensive to accomplish.
lionhearted
This looks cool, I'm way into this. Unfortunately didn't work for me and I didn't do anything particularly screwy:

> CDbCommand failed to execute the SQL statement: SQLSTATE[42S02]: Base table or view not found: 1146 Table 'hackernewsers.userSkills' doesn't exist

I'm in Hong Kong until early August if anyone is around and wants to grab a coffee. Vietnam after that, probably China sooner or later... also if anyone is doing general Asia travel and wants a perspective, it's what I've been doing this year while working off laptop. Drop a line, I'm friendly, email is in profile.

phpnode
Hi, how did you get to that error? Was it from the registration page? I've made a change, could you tell me if it's still occuring? thanks.

edit - never mind, it appears to be fixed now, thanks

thomas11
Fantastic site. I like the aggregating map, did you make that yourself?

I've almost given up finding fellow hackers in Geneva, CH, but who knows...

phpnode
i used it before on one of my other sites, http://trackmycv.com IIRC the original example came from the official google maps examples
damienfir
Il y a en effet pas beaucoup de monde dans le coin.

Nyon, CH

thomas11
Ah, mais apparemment il y a qn! Interested in a meetup? My email is in my profile. I wrote to three users a while ago whom I found on hackrtrackr, but got no replies. There's also PeterHammar and Pollux (Nyon), of whom I have no contact info.
shaddi
Very cool! I really liked the registration process, very smooth. I also like that you made it clear that I could delete my account if I wanted on the front page, before registration: that made me much more likely to sign up.

One point: your Google map uses custom icons, which are cool I suppose but I'd prefer the standard ones for the sake of consistency. More importantly, I'd like to see an info box appear when I click an icon on the map: it took me a bit to realize that full info was being displayed below. Otherwise this is a great tool!

RossM
Annoying as I made something similar with the same objective last night - but a much better implementation than mine (largely because most of the time was spent figuring out PHP's crap SQLite3 class). May have to take you on :)
phpnode
heh i did wonder if someone else would have the same idea, it was motivation to get it done quickly :)
bambax
I get htmlspecialchars() [function.htmlspecialchars]: Invalid multibyte sequence in argument

when trying to access the homepage?

http://i.imgur.com/K390I.jpg

phpnode
interesting, investigating now.
Hopka
I get the same error.

Safari, Firefox & Chrome on Mac OS X.

phpnode
could you guys tell me if it's fixed now please?
damienfir
So what's the technology behind your website ?

For an afternoon only, that's quite a nice job.

Edit: didn't see the FAQ (Yii PHP framework)

phpnode
If you've registered already, and you're still logged in there's a chance i've lost your password. If so you should see a message telling you so in your account page. If you don't see the message, don't worry about it.
davidw
This isn't the first time someone came up with one of these. I don't recollect the URL of the previous one though. What often happens is people put their data in, and then, with time, it just sits there because it's not a site that's actively linked to from this one.
phpnode
yeah i thought this might have happened before, so i took some steps to make it a bit stickier. 1. this seems to be a hot topic right now 2. the domain is reasonably easy to remember 3. it's quick to register 4. to activate your account you have to link back to it from your hn profile page, yes you can remove this link after but hopefully most people will leave it to help spread the word.

ask me in 6 months if it worked :)

davidw
It's nicely done, no arguing with that. I just sort of wish PG would find a way to incorporate this or something like it into the official site. Or something along those lines...
edanm
I hadn't thought of leaving that link in my profile for that. Perhaps you could make it clearer that that's a good idea? E.g., in the verification, say "Leave the link so people can see find you in the world easily and see your skillset".
draegtun
Inspirational stuff... makes me what to get off my lazy arse and start some of my pet projects!

phpnode++

polynomial
Does this have the ability to update location in real time? I travel a lot and would be interested both in seeing stats for HN in some of the cities I visit and as displaying my current location.
phpnode
not at the moment, although you're free to update your location as often as you want. My reasoning is 99.9% of users will work primarily out of one location.
bnoordhuis
Awesome, I signed up.

On a tangential note: any hackers in the greater Rotterdam area (or maybe Amsterdam or Utrecht) up for a beer sometime?

kilian
Sure, Zoetermeerder here :)
dlib
Rotterdam here
slindstr
What did you use to auto populate my city? A while back I tried using a Google Javascript API but it was always pretty far off - your site (which looks great btw) got it exactly right
phpnode
I'm using the geoip city lite db from maxmind.com. It's free
ezrider4428
This is pretty awesome. When this site fills out it will be interesting to see what the actual demographics of the site are.
jah
Is there a way to add an "interests" or/and "areas of expertise" section to our profile, and have those show in the search results?
phpnode
at the moment theres only skills and they don't show in the search results, although i might go change that now. I'm open to feedback for additional features to add
Ernestas
Maybe have page with statistics of most ticked skills?
csl
Suggestion: Can you please require (re)CAPTCHA or similar when sending mail to people?
phpnode
possibly, but i do everything i can to avoid captchas. Only registered users can send emails at the moment.i could implement a minimum karma before people can send you emails, but that seems a bit.. rude. for now i'll just rate limit it
csl
Guess it's ok as long as you need to be registered. Great site, by the way!
david927
This has been done before here: http://www.hackrtrackr.com
Goosey
I think this adds on nicely to hackrtrackr which appears to only be useful for geo-locating yc-readers. This looks to be built much more to satisfy that "community of people who can pick each other's brains" need.

A more blunt assessment.. Hackrtrackr is a toy that isn't that useful, this has the potential to seriously improve the lives of many people here.

yock
Neat! I signed up. One question, why do you only ask for city and not city and state?
phpnode
you can actually add city and state there, in fact you could enter your home address but i wouldn't recommend that. maybe i should make that clearer.
lylejohnson
More to the point, you should at least enter the city and state. I wasn't paying attention at first and simply provided my city name (Madison) and noticed it was finding hackers in Wisconsin that were (for example) "75 miles away." When I realized it thought I was in Madison, WI, I edited my city to read "Madison, AL" and it started providing some more relevant results.
tomh-
There is a bug in your code, my hn account ends on "-". Your routing system doesn't seem to recognize this..

Other than that, looks nice :)

d0m
Pretty nice. One suggestion (or bug I'm not sure): If I search in a city in Canada, I get result from usa.. is it possible to configure the "range distance" ? It's a huge difference if it's a 30min distance or a 10 hours or 3 days distance.. :D (But when I talk about range distance, I mean it in miles or somthing)
phpnode
i thought about that, all i'm doing at the moment is sorting by distance, irrespective of country. When more people are using the site it might make sense to change it, but right now most search results would be empty for anything under 300 miles
pietrofmaggi
Pretty awesome, I signed up.

Can you show up distance even in km? miles don't give much information to me. May be you can choose from imperial units and standard ones by people country...

alexkay
> May be you can choose from imperial units and standard ones by people country

It's quite simple really: US - miles, the rest of the world - kilometres