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Comment by nilkn | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious about how this actually works, geometrically. Example:

A <----> B <----> C

Those are three people. Imagine each segment is 1 mile long. So A can see B; B can see C; but A can't see C. If B and C are having a conversation, does A see B talking to someone who effectively does not exist?

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I'm already seeing this happen on a consistent basis, it's making the chat basically unreadable. Seems like a major oversight.

does A see B talking to someone who effectively does not exist?

No, why would you want them to see who else they're talking to? What messaging application allows you to see who other people are privately conversing with??? Not a popular one, I assure you that.

This is likely referring to public conversation.

I'm not sure who, but clearly one of us has not understood the purpose of the app under discussion here. My impression is this facilitates public, pseudo-anonymous conversation with anyone in a 1 mile radius of yourself.

No, I assumed it just arranges private chats with people nearby, like Chatroulette with geo features.

Oh, so I am not alone in expecting Chat and IM be a different concept. I would actually like seeing a public Chat among everyone, as it was in good 2000's.

turns out you're right. anybody have suggestions on how to fix this?

Why not group people into free-form clusters based on user density? So, if you have 5 people that are effectively in the same building, and 3 people that are outside of it in various directions, group those 3 into the 5. This has the effect of forming virtual chat rooms that come and go.

Not sure what you're using on the backend, but if it's PostGIS... here you go: http://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/11567/spatial-cluster...

How about a 1 mile (square) zone, rather than 1 mile away from you? So you just cut everything up into mile-square slices, and you can talk with everyone in your slice... Concept is basically the same, but should overcome that issue.

Make A see only see C's reponses to B.

i think you might be right... hadn't thought of that

I experienced this problem first hand this morning...

a solution could be the geohash

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