Show HN: Meet.hn – Meet the Hacker News community in your city

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.

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?

There are multiple cities in the U.S. with the name of my city, so unfortunately this doesn't work for me.

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

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 type in "Kraków, Poland", I get meet.hn/city/pl-undefined. Does your code handle diacritics correctly?

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

- 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? :)

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? :)

Let me set a karma that other users must meet before seeing my username.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

  â U+00E2 LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH CIRCUMFLEX
  ã U+00E3 LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH TILDE

> 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

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>

> 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.

Great idea. I think it would be cool if you couldn't just add socials but a personal webpage and email (with mailto link).

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.)

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.

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).

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.

Thank you for letting me be the 1st hacker on my island ;)

https://meet.hn/city/fr-Petit-Bourg

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--

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.

I have not checked all cities, but Berlin seems to be a strong contender for HN's capital. Do any cities have more hackers?

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.

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’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

Nice work! I live in a rural area, would be great to know the local HNers!

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

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).

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Very nice. Please add an AP option like a Mastodon account, Pixelfed, etc. No way am I using x anymore.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 ;)

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.

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.

Great idea! Interest-based communities have a lot more trust so things like meeting up, transacting, or dating can happen with less friction.

I added myself, I hope it catches on!

I would suggest to add website option for socials

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.

Great idea, I've added telegram group for hackers in Valencia if anyone wants to meet :)

Thank you very much, I saw a user from Guangzhou, China, which is only a few hundred kilometers away from me.

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.

Awesome! I've been hoping to find something like this. Would be great if I could add a Mastodon profile.

I think the list of hackers should show everyone in any of the icons that are currently visible.

This is great, it couldn't find my actual city, so i used the closest one that was available lol.

It's really annoying how it changes the map zoom/centre when you click on a pin.

Not working for me. Tried ~10 times.

Nice! You could add a feature to organize and host a meeting or contact people in some way. :-)

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?

Pretty cool, missed out on a fun lawsuit by not naming it meta.hn.

It could be also great to add a karma ranking per city.

Unable to add Hong Kong. Keeps erroring out with city not found

tried to input "Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia" and it says it is not valid unfortunately.

Can this be fixed?

mark my words, this will be worse than the reddit meetups.

Solitaire is only game in town. Greetings everybody.

This doesn't like the city of Saint Louis.

Added, thanks for creating this.

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

Hong Kong is not recognised :/

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

How about a way to do this without sharing your username? I feel like many people want to keep their online profiles private.

Did you get permission from HN to do this?

There's no way I'd join something like this without the official stamp.

very cool! I'm surprised there are no signups in SF yet. I'm sure many will come.

Greetings from Kharkiv, Ukraine.

you should probably use some kind of API to help people input their city/country.

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.

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

Done.

I'm in Dubai.

Very cool!

Love the idea! I've wanted to meet fellow HNers to nerd out with for a while :D

Congrats on shipping and good luck

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