

Ask HN: Anyone interested in meeting other HNers? - ashraful

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.<p>The website is http://www.hackerlunch.com<p>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.<p>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?
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megamark16
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.

~~~
ashraful
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.

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roel_v
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...)

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dstein
_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).

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HackrNwsDesignr
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?

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Skywing
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.

~~~
ashraful
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.

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do
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.

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symkat
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.

~~~
silencio
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.

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ramanujam
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.

~~~
pamelafox
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/>

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ashraful
Clickable: <http://www.hackerlunch.com/>

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brunoc
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

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kleinsch
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.

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scottw
Most of us aren't interested:

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

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

~~~
do
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.

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

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

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

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haasted
A few pop up now and then, actually.

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venturebros
anybody in or near tampa?

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klbarry
Anyone in NYC want to meet?

