Show HN: Meet.hn – Meet the Hacker News community in your city

Hacker News Discussion ↗

A new community tool, meet.hn, lets Hacker News users add themselves to a world map by embedding a small marker string in their HN profile, making it easier to find and meet fellow readers by location. Commenters like the concept but quickly run into real‑world complexities of geography and identity: duplicate city names (especially in the US), diacritics, non‑ASCII characters, and varying address formats all expose bugs and design trade‑offs around geocoding, URLs, and privacy. Many propose enhancements such as Mastodon and website fields, proximity‑based or meetup features, and even an official HN “meet” tab, while others weigh the benefits of in‑person connection against concerns about doxing, spam, and ageism in tech meetups.

Overall reception

  • Many commenters like the idea and UX, and several immediately added themselves and nearby cities.
  • People appreciate that data is stored in their existing HN profiles instead of a new account system.
  • Some note that this is the first HN-related project that made them move from “lurker” to participant.

Onboarding & verification

  • Users must paste a generated token into their HN “about” field; the app checks the HN API to verify consent and parse profile data.
  • Confusion is common: people miss the paste step, mis-capitalize usernames, or have trailing spaces, leading to “no about section” or “no data found” errors.
  • API lag causes delays; the app uses a timer to avoid hammering the HN API.

Location handling & geography issues

  • Initial “City, Country” input was too rigid:
    • Duplicate city names (especially in the US and Europe).
    • Cities with diacritics, apostrophes, or spaces breaking URLs or routing to undefined or 404.
    • Some cities/regions (e.g., Hong Kong, North Korea, McMurdo Station) exposed edge cases like missing country codes.
  • The developer iteratively moved to:
    • Using OpenStreetMap’s Nominatim, then a more flexible search.
    • Storing lat/lng plus a label, e.g., /city/lat,lng/Name.
    • Fixes for spaces, non-ASCII, multiple languages, and places without provinces.
  • Several suggest prebuilt lists (GeoNames), autocomplete, or clustering by metro area rather than strict cities.

Bugs & technical issues

  • Reports include:
    • City links that reload the homepage or 500/405 errors.
    • CORS/JS errors in Firefox and inconsistent behavior across browsers.
    • Cached old locations, duplicated pins, and broken handling of non-ASCII city names.
    • Early vulnerability where users could move others by mismatching form city and profile city (later fixed).

Privacy, safety & abuse concerns

  • Some worry about doxxing, swatting, and the creation of a public, geo-tagged directory.
  • Others argue everything is opt-in and based on publicly visible HN bios; risks are limited.
  • Suggestions include:
    • Hiding names unless viewer is local or meets karma/age thresholds.
    • Limiting how often one can change location; ideas like GPS verification are debated as both overkill and bypassable.

Feature requests & extensions

  • Frequent asks:
    • Mastodon/fediverse, Discord, personal websites, email, ORCID/Google Scholar, delta.chat.
    • Freeform or richer interest tags, and better handling of non-social links.
    • Meetups tooling: per-city “propose a meeting” buttons, notifications when nearby users join, nearby-users lists, and clustering/heatmaps.
    • “My location” button using browser geolocation.
  • Some want anonymity options (separate nickname, city-level only, or no direct link to HN handle).

Integration with HN and longevity

  • Several suggest HN itself should have a “meet” tab or built-in messaging to encourage real-world connections.
  • Concern that interest may drop after the front-page spike; tighter integration or recurring threads might sustain usage.