
Show HN: HackerNewsers,com, find other hackers near you - phpnode
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:<p>http://www.hackernewsers.com/<p>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.
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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!

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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?

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

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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!

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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/>

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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>

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RiderOfGiraffes
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.

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

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

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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...

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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.

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Chirael
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 :(

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

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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 :)

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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.

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pinksoda
A random salt? Are you sure about that?

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

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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.

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

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samratjp
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
:-)

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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

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nnash
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.

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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

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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

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philh
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.

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

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icey
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.

~~~
phpnode
fixed :)

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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

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vkdelta
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!

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

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

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sharpemt
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.?

~~~
phpnode
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

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niels_olson
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"

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marilyn
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!

~~~
phpnode
fixed this, it now updates the map too thanks

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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.

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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.

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perplexes
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?

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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

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

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

when trying to access the homepage?

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

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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?

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Hopka
It works now.

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phpnode
great thanks

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DotSauce
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?

~~~
phpnode
register and add them yourself :)

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

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thesethings
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!)

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raju
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

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cwilson
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.

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

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fuzzythinker
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..

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

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GeneralMaximus
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?

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

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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...

~~~
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.

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ezrider4428
This is pretty awesome. When this site fills out it will be interesting to see
what the actual demographics of the site are.

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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?

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kilian
Sure, Zoetermeerder here :)

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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 :)

~~~
phpnode
fixed :)

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

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

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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)

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

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

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

phpnode++

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

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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

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

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

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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.

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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.

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

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phpnode
a few minutes, i cache it

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

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dublinclontarf
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.

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

~~~
dublinclontarf
Fixed.

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Ernestas
Maybe have page with statistics of most ticked skills?

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svag
Nice site phpnode.

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livando
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?

