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Ask HN: Anyone interested in meeting other HNers?
38 points by ashraful on Jan 5, 2011 | hide | past | favorite | 32 comments
I created a website that lets HN-ers post their lunch plans and allows others to join in. I submitted it to HN a week ago but it did not get much attention, so I'm submitting it again hoping that it'll fare better this time.

The website is http://www.hackerlunch.com

You can basically post a lunch plan, where you introduce yourself, mention your location, and write something interesting about yourself, and other HN-ers who find you interesting will be able to contact you and maybe join you for lunch.

This is essentially my first project (I'm a designer and I just learned PHP enough to build this), so it would be really motivating to get some feedback on this. Regardless of whether you would be using it or not, what do you think of the site? Should I spend more time on it?




I joined the Hacker News LinkedIn group a while back and reached out to a few guys from Kansas City. We had a nice lunch and chatted about projects, work, HN, and kids. I jokingly called it the first official meeting of the Kansas City Hacker News Group. We should really do that again, it was pretty cool. Not that there's anything wrong with a niche website for coordinating those lunches, but for me it's easier to just keep it simple.


Group meetups are great but I envisioned the site to help one-one meetups.

Since only two people are involved, less time is spent on planning and deciding on a date. At least so I thought.


As a fellow KCer, I agree! So do a few others: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2046160

I'll join the linked group.


Wow, sorry I missed a KC meetup. Hope to make it next time. :)


Every couple of weeks something like this shows up: a map with HN users, a Linkedin or Facebook group, a website with various twists, ... Did any of them every get any traction? This fragmentation is hurting all attempts at facilitating more interaction between readers (in as far as it's necessary...)


a map with HN users

Start here. All you need to do is match up HN usernames with their geo-cooredinates, and dump the coordinates into a Google map.

Then at least you'd have an idea where the clusters are, and can work from there on how to setup a meeting (maybe via Meetup.com which is pretty good for this task btw).


how would you get the geocoordinates of hacker news users? I don't see it in the about profile, do you mean asking them for it?


Map with HN users? Hackernewsers.com


Interesting point about the fragmentation. Perhaps integrating all these HN services could be helpful...


Let's set up a website that integrates all of them ;)


i've been working on one ;)


In the grand scheme of things, the user base of HN is relatively small. Now, divide that into a much smaller number and that's the potential user base for your site. My point with this is that targeting only HN users for something like this will result in what you're seeing - not much attention.

I say this because HN (and online forums, message boards, etc, in general), in my opinion, helps to solve a problem that existed prior to its existence. That problem being that there are a lot of people with the knowledge and ability to help each other with tech and business, but they're all spread out so it's difficult to meet in person. Message boards like Stack Overflow, Quora and HN help bridge that separation. Your site, on the other hand, is attempting to tackle that issue head on by providing a way to help people setup in person meetups, except that you have an added difficulty in the fact that you're pitching it to a crowd of people using a service that allowed them to come together because they're all spread apart in the first place! (whew)

Now, obviously your idea works elsewhere - meetup.com. They're focusing on a much broader target market, though. Perhaps for your idea to work you could include ways to help HNers make it possible to meet up in person? Perhaps locate cheap plane ticket pricing, or groupon-esque deals for restaurants and let them make reservations. Those are just some less informal ideas, but I think something along those lines might be helpful to your service.


Targeting HN only was just because the crowd here are much more civil and polite, and seem to be responsible and smart people who I would actually be interested in meeting. And also because I have seen a lot of people expressing a desire to meet others on many threads here.

About the idea of helping people meet by allowing them to find deals, etc. That's a good idea and I did think of that, but the current version of hackerlunch.com is just an MVP. I launched it not so that people use it, but more to find out if people are even interested in meeting "strangers from the internet". If I find that there is an interest, then I'll be working on a more full-fledged website with more advanced features.


I agree with this. HN's user base is too small (relatively speaking) for something like this work.

I think something like http://www.meetup.com/ or http://www.nerddinner.com/ would work better.


You really need to add searching capabilities or categorize listings by country/state to avoid scrolling every post to find something in my area that interests me.


Interesting project. A few of the immediate problems I see:

1) It looks far more like people just posting an introduction about themselves. Let's say that a month from now you have 200 posts on it, and I'm looking to see if anyone wants to get lunch in Santa Monica. This doesn't appear terribly easy, and being lazy I'm not going to spend more than about 1 minute trying to find people.

2) I don't see that any of these expires. If I post for lunch in an hour and a half or so, it will live on forever. This is much more an event and time-based thing, yet the records live on more like a blog/news/announcement section.

Dates, times, and locations should be displayed well, a search by city would be most useful as well.


If you are really looking for lunch in Santa Monica, there was talk of two LA-based groups of interest to HNers mentioned in the past that I remember (and never be able to attend, which saddens me but my schedule is what it is...)

http://promenade.thursdaylunch.com/ - exactly a lunch in santa monica :)

http://www.meetup.com/Los-Angeles-Hacker-News/ - a broader meetup group

And if you're ever up for Tuesday evening dinners with Cocoa developers (any level of knowledge/experience, but devs only please, no headhunting and marketing stuff), there's NSCoder Night in Santa Monica that I regularly attend, feel free to contact me for details.


The posts are actually for people to let others know that they are interested in having lunch with other HN-ers. The actual lunch plan will need to be decided privately (ie. you can send a message to the user if you're interested in having lunch, and you can decide on a day/time when you are both free)


It would be nice to add location info to each entry rather than expecting the person to mention it in the content. This could also be helpful to create a tag cloud or location based filters in the future.


I would suggest having folks enter their city, geocoding it, and then saving that lat/long into the database so it can be visualized as a map later.

Here's some HTML/JS code for a form + map: http://pastebin.com/57nw4awx

And then you can follow this tutorial to create the map showing all the submissions: http://www.hackerlunch.com/


Clickable: http://www.hackerlunch.com/


I end up meeting other HNers when I go to user group meetups, Barcamps, StartupCamps, etc... In most large cities I imagine the same thing happens.

But about your site - it looks fine to me, although I would make the 'cards' smaller and over a couple of columns because it takes a lot of space this way. Also, I'd make the "Location" a field rather than something you put in the description because it's going to get difficult to find a relevant entry very quickly.

If the hacker lunch idea doesn't work out, you can turn it into a hacker friendly cooking/food site for lunch ideas. :D


Hacker News DC Meetup has had a lot of success bringing the community together. I'd encourage anybody in the DC area to check it out - http://meetup.hackernewsdc.org/. I see no reason why people shouldn't do it in other cities as well. Having a happy hour once every month or two is a great way to meet new people and talk about current issues in person.


Most of us aren't interested:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=943722


Just a thought, why not just use http://www.meetup.com/ ?


This is not really a valid use case for meetup.com, which is good for recurring, topical meetings.

Plus, its not free to start a new meetup.


Ha - I remember seeing something similar for Reddit a few days ago. Did you make that too?


Good idea, but it seems you already got some trolls..


Would love to but not many HN'rs in Copenhagen!


A few pop up now and then, actually.


anybody in or near tampa?


Anyone in NYC want to meet?




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