A way to find other Y Combinator readers in your area | Hacker News Reader

A way to find other Y Combinator readers in your area

hackrtrackr.com

55 pointsdottertrotter38 comments

How about a little custom(?) microformat on our "about" sections that you fetch and refresh every X days? That solves the authentication and updating problems. That's not my idea either. It's what the Perlmonks starting doing maybe 7 years ago.

http://tinymicros.com/pm/index.php?goto=BigMonkMap

More inspiration from the Perl Mongers:

http://www.pm.org/groups/map.html

Good idea. I've added it to my user page, except that I am using degrees rather than degrees.minutes.seconds. (Doesn't that make more sense?)

There might be a bit of a problem though: there's no easy way to enumerate user IDs except by crawling the threads. Maybe for simplicity we should still have to add our usernames to HackrTrackr if we want to be included.

I think this combination is a great idea. Thanks guys. I'll rework some stuff to make this possible. I really appreciate all the suggestions that have been made over the past 24 hours. I thought only a few people where going to sign up and already 130 have submitted their user names. Also based upon the suggestions, I'm going to add a location based forum, as well as rework the interface to show the selected user's information in a pop up bubble, with a link to the state list instead of instantly redirecting people. Thanks, again for the suggestions and please feel free to keep them coming.

http://microformats.org/wiki/location-formats

For the rest of the world and/or the US, just let people type in a location that works on google maps (city, country/zip code/even street address). Then geocode it with Gmaps API, and use that lat/lon to display thereafter.

Or use the MaxMind Geolite City database

I use the real one, and it still doesn't have enough coverage to just use it and not look back. I would advocate using it for a default string, though.

Recently there have been quite a few posts on here, from people trying to find other hackers in their area to meet. Because the posts tend to get long and drawn out I created this. It's simple and just a start, but it should provide us a base for finding others in our area. If people use it, I'm thinking about adding a location based forum section.

Feature request: clicking on a marker causes a bubble to show up (like GMaps) instead of navigating the page away from the map.

yeah, I thought about that, but I wanted to list all the others in the state as well as the one you selected, and I thought that list could get to long for the bubble pop up.

Decouple the "look at a single user" action from the "look at all users in a region" action. Maybe add a link in the bubble that takes you to a page with all the users in the same state?

You might consider asking for a zip code rather than a city. I personally live in an unincorporated area of Saint Louis county, and I was quite tempted to name one of the three surrounding suburbs (all of which are politically considered a city). While the decision to just put down "Saint Louis" came easily, I'm wondering how much internal debate I would have had had I lived in an unincorporated area in the middle of nowhere.

And then, of course, there's also the reason that just typing in a zip code is easier.

You forgot the UK.

And the rest of the world

You forgot about Poland.

Need some wood?

He's referring to this: http://www.youforgotpoland.org/mjames/yfp/

Well, this:

http://www.youforgotpoland.org/mjames/yfp/slides/youforgotpo...

I see.

Now, I'm embarrassed to admit I feel like this: http://www.youforgotpoland.org/mjames/yfp/slides/youforgotpo...

This being a bit of a geek site, I'd thought they were actually referring to this: http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2006/10/27/880411....

"... find other Y Combinator readers in your area ..."

Didn't work for me. Does anyone below the equator get listed? ~ Melb, Aus. Is there any other way to submit your location aside from form submit? What about a set of lat/lons, or selection by clicking on the map, or a drop down for instance?

There's gotta be more ways to enter than just by IP. I can understand the reasoning as it's verifiable but it should probably used to weight user entry of data.

Didn't work for me either, but this comment thread did. ~ Melb, Aus.

"... but this comment thread did. ~ Melb, Aus. ..."

brings it to about 4 I think.

there is no way to delete entries -- i created 3 by accident -- and also no way to delete entries when you don't want you location connected your username anymore.

I realize that it is lacking in some features, but I wasn't sure it would be used, so I only spent a few hours making it. More to come.

And I'll go ahead and delete the first two users you created.

I made two can you delete my second?

dottertrotter made hackrtrackr. That's poetic.

Doh! It couldn't find the location for my IP, and it only allows me to pick my state, but not my city (the textbox that should allow me to enter my city is oddly vanished).

Reading from Barcelona, Spain... It does not work :(

I'm in BCN. Think we might be the only two, or ..... :-)

First on the list after you :) My city is wrong because the city ajax dropdown list appeared only after I had already clicked OK.

sorry, bout that, I meant to add a loading notice. Just add yourself again and I'll remove the first one.

Feature request: on the state/country view, allow announcement postings of some sort. For example, in the Philadelphia area we are starting a hackathon group (http://www.groupomatic.com/haqsm3vj), and new people putting their info in would benefit from knowing about it.

Feature request: give us a text box that we can use to zoom into an area we type in. That is, if I just type in Pennsylvania, it will take me to that area. This will be even more needed when you start from the world view. And/or capture the click event through the GMaps API and recenter and zoom in one tick every click.

Feature request: validate usernames by issuing a HTTP GET to http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=%s

I'm from Montreal in Canada so it's impossible for me to be found on hackrtrackr!

Our club is a little more exclusive than I thought.

cmon gotta be able to delete users. this is not considered a "feature".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com