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Show HN: HackerNewsers,com, find other hackers near you
221 points by phpnode on July 16, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 111 comments
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.




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!


Clickable Link:

http://www.hackernewsers.com/


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?


You call that Northern? It's not northern if I have to fly over 3000 km south to get there! :)


yeah sounds good to me, hopefully a few other notherners will come out of the woodwork too


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!


thanks for your comments, hopefully enough people will see this and join so it becomes a useful resource.


BTW, do you have plans to integrate some geocoding/geonames capability? And how about having a map overview like,

http://djangopeople.net/


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.


Thanks for the clarification. Well I'm certainly happy to be the first guy to join in this dance. :)

http://sivers.org/ff


Suggestion - add to the karma listing how long someone has been registered with HN. Absolute Karma is less use than dK/dt. Someone may have Karma 100, but only been registered for 10 days and hence be accruing Karma quickly, as opposed to someone registered for 100 days, hence not active, or not getting much karma.

Just a thought.


Or they might actually be developing a business and not getting any karma.


It's still information. Interpret it how you choose.


good idea, looking into this now


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.


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 :)


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...


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".


This has been done before here: http://www.hackrtrackr.com


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.


It's confusing to have the search check boxes below the registration section like it is now; it makes it seem that the check boxes are part of the profile one is filling out.

I spent time going through the entire list checking boxes off, only to get to the bottom and see a Search button when I expected a Submit or Register button.

Now I've spent all that time checking off boxes, I really don't feel like doing it again :(


yes thats a bit annoying, changed it to show either the registration form or the hacker search depending on your logged in status


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 :)


heh i did wonder if someone else would have the same idea, it was motivation to get it done quickly :)


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).


This is a fair point, that being said, i do generate a random salt + hash the password properly.


A random salt? Are you sure about that?


I assume this is a joke? Being that with computers we can only generate pseudo random data, amirite?


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.


>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.


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.


My nearest neighbor has -7 karma. nice...


Good work for an afternoon's effort. The only problem I see is that all these HN add-ons are hard to track for everyone unless if they were on to see this on the front page. What we really need is an Evergreen HN - where one could track such add-ons and perhaps greatest hits. Of course, it wouldn't hurt to have top news of the week/month/year for those who live on an ent time scale :-)


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?


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


I really like all of the community things that have been coming out of HN lately. The HN yellow pages has already produced a cool freelance offer for me (just added my info to it earlier today), and this site is definitely much more robust than a google docs page. I'm sure great things will come out of this for everyone.


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.


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


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...


> 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


As a student, I move between two places a lot. I would guess this is fairly common among HNers. Being able to give multiple locations might be worthwhile.

(For now I gave my uni location on the basis that I spend more time there.)

Also, it might just be my particular biases, but I would be inclined to add "mathematics" as a skill, or possibly category. I have no idea what to put for "career name" though.


Mathemagician, I'm considering this multiple location business, it does make things a bit more complicated.


This is pretty cool. I like your signup process.

It would be nice if the pins on the Google map were clickable after drilling down to the city level.


fixed :)


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)


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


I got this error while registering on your site. I am concerned after seeing this.

Sorry, we screwed up

Looks it looks like i've lost your password, hopefully the bug that is causing this is fixed now. Please re-enter your password in the form below and hopefully you'll never see this message again, but if you do, please Contact phpnode

sorry!

note to self. get beta testers!


Hi please can you tell me exactly what you did before this occured, i thought i'd squashed this bug but clearly not.


I tried logging on to HN and adding the weblink. Was using Firefox on OSX.


My only suggestion might be to add some finer granularity to location. I zoom into Boston and just see one blob - when it might be nice to see zip-code level granularity.

I try to change my location to Cambridge MA, but it stays in Boston.

Maybe handle geocoding zip codes etc.?


you could actually enter your street level address or zipcode in the city box, i figured most people don't want to do this though so left it labelled as city


Obviously these aren't staying in the cultural memory. Maybe a link to a community-maintained list of trackers should be added as one of the links at the bottom, along with "Lists | RSS | Search | Bookmarklet | Guidelines | FAQ | ...etc"


I love it.

One suggestion: When you click on a pagination button on a Find Hacker News Users listings page, the page should either reload, or scroll to the top. The way it is now, it feels like it isn't answering my request for the next page.

Great work!


fixed this, it now updates the map too thanks


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.


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.


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.


When searching for people near me, I try clicking on the blue spots in the map, and I expect a list of people in the area to come up, or the list below to change. Is that not the case?


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


I'm using the geoip city lite db from maxmind.com. It's free


I get htmlspecialchars() [function.htmlspecialchars]: Invalid multibyte sequence in argument

when trying to access the homepage?

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


I get the same error.

Safari, Firefox & Chrome on Mac OS X.


could you guys tell me if it's fixed now please?


It works now.


great thanks


interesting, investigating now.


My skill-set is poorly represented here. The only things currently relevant to me are Marketing related.

What about... writing, front-end development, sales, networking, branding, research?


register and add them yourself :)


I did not even notice the big yellow box until a few minutes later, sorry. Maybe you could add it below the list.


Great job, just registered. (Heya Northwesters, I feel all alone as a blue dot in Portland. Seattle? Portland? Eugene? I know you're out there. Represent!)


Very nicely done. Great signup process. Unfortunately, not too many HN'ers around me (Columbus, OH). I will keep an eye out and see if it changes.

Again, great work. Thanks


Looks like HN killed HackerNewsers. Anyone else having trouble getting to the site?

You might look at a beefier server and adding a proxy in front of Apache.


is it still down for you? seems to be running quite quickly here considering


Seems like whenever I click on a drop that is 2+, it keeps zooming in until it reduces to a single profile, losing all other profiles..


Yeah, thats happening because all the points are exactly on top of each other, seeing what i can do to fix it now.


I see all your pages end with .html. Are you generating static pages for everyone behind the scenes or did you just name them that way?


No the pages are dynamic, although partially cached.I just added a .html suffix


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...


i used it before on one of my other sites, http://trackmycv.com IIRC the original example came from the official google maps examples


Il y a en effet pas beaucoup de monde dans le coin.

Nyon, CH


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.


69 miles north ...


This is pretty awesome. When this site fills out it will be interesting to see what the actual demographics of the site are.


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?


Sure, Zoetermeerder here :)


Utrecht represent =)


Also Rotterdam


Rotterdam here


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 :)


fixed :)


Awesome idea...doesn't help me much though...seems I am the only one from Jamaica on HN...which is kinda depressing.


Really nice! Somehow when I search for Mexico (country), some Texas users appear. Anyway, quite useful.


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)


If you need to know this in the future, check out BuiltWith: http://builtwith.com/hackernewsers.com


Wow.. great job done, withe ease of use. It's also an eye opener for me, to add some salt to my Karma.


Inspirational stuff... makes me what to get off my lazy arse and start some of my pet projects!

phpnode++


Suggestion: Can you please require (re)CAPTCHA or similar when sending mail to people?


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


Guess it's ok as long as you need to be registered. Great site, by the way!


Neat! I signed up. One question, why do you only ask for city and not city and state?


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.


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.


How long should it take for me to show up on the map? I don't seem to be on there.


a few minutes, i cache it


Hmm. For some reason it's called me a physicist. Not sure why ...


woops, broke it.

Here's the pastie with the error and what I was doing. http://pastie.org/1047130

Otherwise it's nice, I like it.


this should be fixed now, please could you check, many thanks.


Fixed.


Maybe have page with statistics of most ticked skills?


Nice site phpnode.


Looks like a cool site! Anyway you can add some blinking texts and some scrolling marquees, and some really cool things that I've already built and feel like bragging about?




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