Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

Agreed - the results don't make much sense. And some topics don't even show up. "Startup" or "Startups" doesn't get any results, even tho there are many such Meetups. The results for Entrepreneurship are: Top 10 Cities1. Pinellas Park,FL,US2. Gainesville,FL,US3. Greenwich,CT,US4. Piscataway,NJ,US5. Vadodara,IN6. Bern,CH7. Liverpool,28,GB8. San Marcos,CA,US9. Chapel Hill,NC,US10. El Paso,TX,US. Which might be relevant in terms of Meetups, but no way in heck I'm moving to ANY of those cities because of their entrepreneur communities.

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com