
Show HN: Use Meetup.com Data to Find Your Ideal City - ponderingHplus
https://cole-maclean.github.io/meetupcityfinder/
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erex78
This is cool and a nice idea / UI, but it seems to bubble up populations
centers. Needs to normalize for population somehow.
([https://xkcd.com/1138/](https://xkcd.com/1138/))

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ponderingHplus
Yup that's definitely true, population centers rank highest for most topic
lists (especially New York where meetup.com was founded)

The original use-case I envisioned for something like this is someone deciding
which cities they might like to move to by choosing cities that have a lot of
people with shared interests. So should the metric for that be total people
that are part of a topic, or the % of total city population engaged in that
topic? I've currently chosen the former, but interested in what others might
think.

Thanks for the feedback,

-pH+

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theli0nheart
I agree with erex78. The former measurement doesn't tell me much; I already
know what cities have the most people.

The latter measurement better indicates the probability of a chance encounter
with someone who has your shared interests.

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ponderingHplus
Yeah that's a good point. I like scribu's point that it can be somewhere in
between. I'll have to think on that a little.

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baccheion
Usually (taken from erf/error based on sample size), something grows
proportional to the square root of the sample size. If using raw sample sizes,
you can apply a square root to that sample size before using it (meters its
impact).

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timothycrosley
I think meetup.com is a fairly poor data source for these kind of questions -
even if the data was normalized. Interested in Coffee? Seattle is better then
NY, but is way less likely to have meetups dedicated to it since they are just
baked into the culture - so theres a higher probability that the unrelated
meetup you will be hosted at a local coffee shop.

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pimlottc
This is probably one of things where you only count positive results -
presence of meetups on your topic is probably a good thing, but the lack of
them doesn't necessary mean anything.

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timothycrosley
Well my point is that positive, doesn't actually mean positive - there could
be more meetups about coffee because there are less good coffee places to
consume it. To illustrate this point: I would intuitively expect there to be
more pro life meetups in a liberal area and more pro choice in a conservative
one - since the norm is baked into society and people don't feel the need to
meet up about what everyone agrees to. A much better approach would be to use
existence of business that support said aspect of a city.

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danso
Very cool. I haven't looked at what Meetup has available for an API but I've
rarely ever seen its data used as a way to find out about a city, even though
it's a great way to (manually) look up interests. You'd miss out on things
that are on Eventbrite (but no reason why you couldn't combine their data...),
but otherwise, it seems like a solid way to at least find hotspots for
interests, particularly regional cities (i.e. not New York/SF/Chicago) that
have, for whatever reason, an especially strong group.

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ponderingHplus
I published a quick writeup to accompany the visualization here: [http://cole-
maclean.github.io/blog/Meetup.com%20City%20Finde...](http://cole-
maclean.github.io/blog/Meetup.com%20City%20Finder/)

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vxNsr
I feel like this should be the link instead and you can have a fairly
prominent link on the post pointing to the app

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ponderingHplus
I'm curious what the interest would have been had I linked to the article over
the graphic. Unfortunately I'm not sure how I could test that without having a
time machine.

Thanks for reading the writeup!

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Splendor
I put in "fishing, hiking, & skiing" and the #1 recommendation is NYC.

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lumberjack
Doesn't work very well for people who don't want to live in the US. For every
topic there are exponentially more American meetup groups so even if I insert
tons of topics related to my country and only my country the top picks are
still in the US.

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erikb
Actually that's part of what I do manually. However, in Berlin (my favorite
city so far) meetup seems to go down. Fewer events in general, fewer
interesting ones, and more events where nobody shows up. 2012 it was awesome,
but in 2016 fun is hard to come by. I don't know, maybe they increased the
payment in the meantime or something or maybe I'm just getting too old.

~~~
alexissantos
Funnily enough, Berlin is at the top of my list. (And it's also my favorite
city so far.)

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initram
If I double-click on the globe, it zooms in, and then I can't rotate the globe
anymore. I also don't see how to zoom back out!

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cheriot
Cool! I've used meetup to meet people while traveling and it's gone really
well. I've thought about making a tool for that. Did you scrape meetup, use
their api, or is there a data dump available?

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ponderingHplus
I used their API, it's actually quite well documented and their rate limits
seemed generous to me. Here's a writeup I did for collecting the data:
[http://cole-maclean.github.io/blog/Meetup.com%20City%20Finde...](http://cole-
maclean.github.io/blog/Meetup.com%20City%20Finder/)

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DogPawHat
Looked up my home city of Dublin, Ireland. Apparently we're number one for
"sober activities". Which both surprises and doesn't surprise me at the same
time (Plenty of people tired of Irish pub culture using it as an alternative
place to find social events)

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arcticfox
I can't tell if this is getting hammered right now or I'm not using it
correctly. I put a topic in and nothing happens...

It did work for one topic after a while, but I'm not sure if I was just lucky
or did something different.

Great idea though, I hope I can get it working later!

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ponderingHplus
It's a pretty large dataset for d3 to be loading, so it can take quite a
while. It also seems to struggle on firefox. I have alot to learn about web
app optimizations and building for multiple browsers and devices. And
generally anything frontend :p.

Try waiting quite a while before interacting with it. An example topic "data
science" should initialize the map data eventually.

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dbcurtis
In my case, Mac El Cap, FireFox will briefly load a topic and immediate reset
the page. Safari appears as a giant no-op.

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angryostrich
If I put in anything mah jong related it removes all the previous topics and
resets the page. I've tried with 'mahjongg' and 'mah jong'. Though 'mahjong'
seems ok, it just doesn't pull anything.

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chewxy
I put in all my interests (and current meetup groups) and Brisbane was in the
top 10 list. The funny thing is I moved FROM Brisbane to Sydney (for better
jobs)

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baccheion
Usually (taken from erf/error based on sample size), something grows
proportional to the square root of the sample size. If using raw sample sizes,
you can apply a square root to that sample size before using it (meters its
impact).

Also, perhaps you could do something like establish an overall average and
standard deviation "percentage interested" in each topic, then compare the
percentage in a given location with the expected. The farther the percentage
from the expected (in either direction), the more that location gets pulled up
or down. For example, maybe every location is equally good if you're
interested in "breathing air", but then maybe one has a slightly higher
concentration, making it more relevant.

Also, as you are combining several interests, you are trying to maximize
coverage and uniqueness (maximum number of interests present in the maximum
amount, with stronger interests given more weight (though you don't ask anyone
to rank interests), such that locations having them getting a boost). That is,
one location shouldn't dominate the rankings due to a much higher likelihood
of having one interest, while having the other interests being "averagely
represented" or worse.

That is, maybe the proper way to combine the standard deviations for each
place is through multiplication (take the absolute value, then "multiply in"
if standard deviation is positive or "divide in" if standard deviation is
negative). This will ensure that below average "satisfaction of interests"
divide/lower the ranking score and that positive "SOIs" multiply/increase it.

Also, it's good to pull the ranking score from a mean/center/expectation with
each "interest score", rather than just blindly averaging/kludging them in.
The standard deviation approach achieves this, but I'm mentioning it
explicitly such that you can consider it in the event something other than
standard deviations are used.

There could also be something done to boost a city with meetups for a rare
interest (the smaller the overall percentage, the more weight a location
gets). For example, if 2% overall are interested in Cricket and 20% in design,
then a city with an overall percentage of 3% cricket should be boosted more
than a city with an overall percentage of 30% design, even though the
proportion "above the norm" is the same, as Cricket is "hard to find" or a
rarity.

Also, if you could factor in the area of a city, then that could enhance the
scores further (5k out of 5 million people in New York means something
entirely different than 5k out of 5 million in a sprawling suburbia, as
population density makes it more likely the 5K in New York will be
accessible).

See what I'm getting at?

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ponderingHplus
Thanks for the detailed response! I think you and others on here are right,
there's a better way to do the ranking so the results closer represent what
we're looking for. I think I need to better define what question we actually
want to answer with this data and then establish the metric that best measures
that, and your ideas definitely give some hints for some directions that
measurement can go. I especially like the idea of "boosting" cities that have
a rare topic the user is interested in. Thanks again for the interest!

-pH+

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cloudjacker
amazing representations of the midwest, from that data

