Show HN: Meet.hn – Meet the Hacker News community in your city
I just published https://meet.hn, a map to find hackers in your city.
How it works?
Demo of the signup process: https://x.com/meet_hn/status/1834918518904746329
1. Fill the form: username, city+country
2. Copy the text generated in the box below the form, and paste it in your HN description.
3. Click "Add me on the map"
Optionnaly (it's recommended!) you can add links to your socials as well as some tags to showcase your interests.
Why does it exist?
I created this because, despite its harsh reputation on the internet, I love the HN community. I have fewer than a handful of friends who are as curious and eager to think and reflect as the people on HN. Also, the city I currently live in is more focused on industry than on technology and entrepreneurship, which are core to HN.
This led me to want to meet the HN community IRL. After trying `site:news.ycombinator.com/user toulouse` on Google and getting only one result, I decided to create meet.hn.
My first goal with this is to meet at least one HN member in my city: Toulouse, France. If you are ever in the area, hit me up! I'm sirobg at https://meet.hn/city/fr-Toulouse
Additional details:
- meet.hn has a twitter page: https://x.com/meet_hn. If you meet IRL thanks to meet.hn, don't hesitate to tag it with a picture, it would mean the world to me.
- the code is open source: https://github.com/borisghidaglia/meet-hn
- meet.hn integrates with https://at.hn/ from @padolsey (https://padolsey.at.hn/), registered on meet.hn at https://meet.hn/city/cn-Beijing
Finally, many thanks to these people for their help and/or feedbacks! Ordered alphabetically:
- https://x.com/JulienDuquesne1
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/lbasseto/
I hope you will enjoy this! Please share any feedback in the comments.
386 comments
[ 0.30 ms ] story [ 402 ms ] threadMy 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
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.
Another way is auto complete for the city with just country preselected.
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...
> 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?
- country-city does not work well in the US because we have many duplicated city names in different states
- what harsh reputation? :)
- 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".
I think that is a feature, not a bug.
I think we're probably going to get a blog post from you a couple weeks from now titled "falsehoods programmers believe about cities"!
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
Feature Requests:
- Mastodon support in the social dropdown
- Auto complete on the location selector
- 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!
also orcid or google scholar
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.
- 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.
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
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.
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.
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.)
If this does mean something it's even more hilarious!
[0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Za%C5%BC%C3%B3%C5%82...
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!
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
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?)
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.
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.
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.
Nice idea, good luck with the top spot on HN!
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!
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.
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.
Not saying there aren't any, buy I would avoid conflating old and wise together.
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).
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.
> 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 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 irony is that a lot of our city names came from Europe.
I guess it could be worse and I’d end up in the Isle of Wight.
Reused names isn’t just an American thing.
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.
Oh and Shakespeare isn’t from East London
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.
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.
And a person, who wrote a song about name confusion, but wrt Springsteen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EW1Frr4OcRc
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wigwag_(magazine)
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/wigwag-the-magaz...
(The Simpsons character is named after the street.)
No he didn't.
742 SW Evergreen Terrace. Somewhere around here: https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=742%20sw%20evergr...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenville
There's even more than one "Las Vegas".
Similiarly in the UK 'Downs' is an old english word for hill so I'm always amused by a local 'Highdown Hill' ("HighHill Hill").
City, State, Country
Also not clear if your mapper was expecting “United States” or “United States of America”
<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>
Hasselt, 47551 Bedburg-Hau, Germany
and
Hasselt, 54533 Oberkail, Germany
Once
Now there is a proper location search box with address suggestions and stuff.
Also, you generate invalid URLs for cities that have spaces in them, like Saint Petersburg.
> 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!
meet.hn/city/in-New Delhi
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.
Great work
delta.chat contact field, the best of the decentralised free software messengers
Easy to have multiple identities for public and private use
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).
And thanks for the comment - made me look outside my immediate surroundings on the map!
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