Hacker news directory - find hackers at your school | Hacker News Reader

Hacker news directory - find hackers at your school

hndir.com

49 pointsjmtame51 comments

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.

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?

all very good suggestions. i can probably implement this mid next week (we really, really like homework at illinois.edu).

on a side note, if any fellow hackers want to help me with this project, shoot me an e-mail (jtame2@illinois.edu). cheers.

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.

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?

I just graduated. I don't think you're going to hurt anyone's feelings if you accept any email address and let folks specify their school. This is a great idea though and I hope it gets use.

I don't think you're going to hurt anyone's feelings if you accept any email address and let folks specify their school

Agreed. I attend a Jr. College that doesn't give email accounts to its students (or if it does, I was never informed).

Please ditch the .edu requirement.

Allow any email address.

I'm at mcmaster, which has a mcmaster.ca address. I don't think it's possible to match on email address to allow all schools, so just ask for the school that someone attends. If you let some non-students through, what does it matter?

Matching *.ac.?? will enable a lot of European schools and universities. Not all cctlds have the .ac second-level domain though. Some countries have 3-letter second-level domains, so I have no idea whether .edu.[CC] exists anywhere.

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.

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

yeah, you can use facebook connect to get the school networks associated to a user. might help simplify your reg process.

Same problem here-- I'm at York University in Toronto, which is @yorku.ca.

Indeed, my university (in Australia) uses email@uts.edu.au, which is invalid. Interesting idea though - I like the upfront note/forethought about the cache settings.

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?

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.

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.

edit> the login and adding schools issues were fixed (or so appear to be).

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.)

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

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.

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?

I get that too. Bug?

email me (jtame2@illinois.edu) with your full e-mail and i can add it in, at least until i figure out what's wrong with in_array.

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

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

Chico State aka CSU Chico

hmm.. what about the domain your school uses? (all of the stuff after the "@" sign)

mail.csuchico.edu

Monash University

Same here.

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.

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

Ugh, privacy issues...

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

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.

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.

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

yarp. We need a hacker news wiki!

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.

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.

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

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 ... =(

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

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

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

Can I view the schools without logging in?

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

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

You cannot unregister.

This is awesome

Reply on news.ycombinator.com