

Hacker news directory - find hackers at your school - jmtame
http://www.hnDir.com

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raffi
I really like this, so here are my suggestions:

1\. When a user joins, if their email address doesn't match an existing
school, immediately prompt them for what their school is. It took me some head
scratching to realize I had to add my school.

2\. When I try to join a school, don't give me an error saying "fill out your
profile first", let me fill out the profile at that time and show my school as
selected. This part confused me.

3\. Your form validation must die! I put in Dec. 2008 for graduation and then
it spit back "must be 4 characters", consider putting something in parentheses
to let me know this and shrink the width of the field.

4\. Consider letting folks add links to their personal homepages, facebook or
linked in profiles.

Good idea, I only point all this out because I like it enough to care.

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breck
Awesome feature! I wish I had it while I was at school. Probably would have
made some great connections. It would be great if someone could add this
functionality to the core site. Maybe someone who's name starts with P and
ends with aul?

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paulgb
Cool, but .edu is almost exclusively used by U.S. schools only.

If you whitelist @uwaterloo.ca, I know that there are a few uwaterloo students
on HN.

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jmtame
I don't mean to limit it to us schools only, I just threw this together last
Saturday. How do you suggest I make this work for all hackers at all schools?

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paulgb
Unfortunately, not all countries have a standard TLD for schools. I think the
only way around it is with a whitelist of domains, but I'm not sure where the
list would come from. Maybe someone has created it already? Either that, or
use the facebook API.

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silencio
Even facebook in the beginning took that approach by limiting the schools you
could sign up for.

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Zev
Why is it that you can generate automatic passwords that are > 20 chars in
length for us, but we can't enter passwords that are > 20 chars in length?

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mnemonik
Hmmmm. I entered my email and hit create account, got the email with my
password, and tried to login but it says the username/password do not match.

Looks like a cool idea though, I would like to be able to sign up.

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jmtame
it appears i have more than a few bugs with this, as some of the user
passwords are mysteriously resetting =[ i'm going to add a reset pass
function, and try to understand what's going on. i probably posted this on yc
news a bit too early, as i have a proficiency exam monday that i still have to
study for and haven't bug-tested this thoroughly. ack

edit> there is a reset pass function on the login page, but i need to track
down this mysterious bug.

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noahlt
Great idea. Love the colors (even though usually I hate light-on-dark).

I wonder, though: is it possible to ask Facebook to query for the intersection
of users at my school and in an arbitrary (for instance, "hacker news")
Facebook group? (I wouldn't be surprised if it's not, but it would definitely
be an excellent feature for Facebook to consider.)

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dottertrotter
you can see members of news.ycombinator.com by region at
<http://www.hackrtrackr.com>

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jmtame
someone told me about that, and another suggested using facebook for all of
this, but i like being able to see what skills, startups, and club
affiliations a person has too.

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nolanbrown23
I tried to add my school, but it says my school already exists. On the main
page, my school isn't listed and there is no "+Join" link on any of the
schools. WTF?

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jmtame
what schools are you trying to join? (feel free to reach me at
jtame2@illinois.edu)

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coffeemug
My email is slava [at] cs.sunysb.edu

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chedigitz
Pretty cool!

signed up & added Temple University.

Beacame a lil frustrated with the "join" form, every time it goes through the
error validation, it clears all the previously typed information forcing me to
re-enter. I Did it twice, on the third gave up. I'll try later.

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tokenadult
What about a user who is a student or faculty member who prefers an email
address without a school-related top domain?

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rw
Ugh, privacy issues...

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chris11
Yeah, it would be nice if there were no required fields to join a school.
Great site though.

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daveambrose
Interesting but I think this would be helpful if I could click the school,
view the contents inside it and see which HN handles are associated with this.

For instance, I added "Georgetown University" as my alma mater and wasn't able
to see inside the link. (Granted, I'm the first person to join under this
school).

I wanted to view New York University since it's right down the block from me
and I want to meet more hackers here in in NYC, but I wasn't able to see which
HN users attended the school.

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pclark
right now, access is limited to users who have .edu accounts only. please sign
up by clicking "login" above.

glad there aren't hackers outside _US_ schools.

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thorax
I guess we'll have to start one for people who aren't in school?

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pclark
yarp. We need a hacker news wiki!

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krschultz
I like it, though more than just schools would be good in the future. It is a
little frustrating that I can look outside my startup's window and see NYU but
since I'm at another school so I can't meet the person who signed up from NYU.
I think you will ultimately need a Facebook like network setup if you want to
go seriously with this.

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kaens
I bookmarked this, as I haven't attended college as of yet, but will probably
be in a college as of fall of this year or spring of 2009.

Sounds like an interesting tool at the least.

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shalmanese
Have you thought about adding facebook connect integration and scraping from
their networks page? This seems like the perfect app for fb connect
integration.

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apsurd
This would be such a useful service to me, I'd love to use it...we all could
use a team setting, but alas I don't have a .edu email ... =(

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unalone
What do you get as an advantage for being part of this? I set up my school:
now what is there to do?

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endtime
Would you mind obfuscating mailto links? My school has a decent spam filter,
but even so...

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namcos
You might want to add support for UK universities, just check for ac.uk as
well as .edu.

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jah
Can I view the schools without logging in?

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dill_day
It looks like you can still view their pages.

For example the people above wanting to view NYU:
<http://www.hndir.com/index/school/view/14>

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chris11
It's now fixed. I get sent to the home page when I'm not logged in.

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greml1n
You cannot unregister.

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espadagroup
This is awesome

