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

Hacker News Discussion ↗

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.