6 ms·
Show HN: HackerNewsers,com, find other hackers near you
There's been lots of discussion recently about finding other HNers to talk to / bounce ideas off / work with, some Google spreadsheets were set up to share details but they were soon vandalised. I had a spare afternoon yesterday (which turned into a long day) and here's the result:
http://www.hackernewsers.com/
It's only open to people with HN accounts, it lets you post your biography, location, skills etc. Anyway, I hope you like it and find it useful.
- phpnode 16y agoClickable Link: http://www.hackernewsers.com/ http://www.hackernewsers.com/
- thehodge 16y agolooks like your from York, I'm thinking about doing a northern HN meetup thing (as we can't all get to london) if your interested?
- limist 16y agoGreat work, especially for 1 afternoon/day, and I like the account verification process too - it's quick and effective. Look forward to meeting more HNers via your site!
- phpnode 16y agothanks for your comments, hopefully enough people will see this and join so it becomes a useful resource.
- limist 16y agoBTW, do you have plans to integrate some geocoding/geonames capability? And how about having a map overview like, http://djangopeople.net/ http://djangopeople.net/
- phpnode 16y agoThe map on the home page shows all the registered users, currently just the two of us lol, it groups them in to hot spots, but it's hard to see until there's more users. The registration form is geocoded, it just wasn't working correctly, fixed now.
- limist 16y agoThanks for the clarification. Well I'm certainly happy to be the first guy to join in this dance. :) http://sivers.org/ff http://sivers.org/ff
- dublinclontarf 16y agoOne point I'd like to make, don't use the same password for this as you do for HN. Now I don't think anything bad is likely to come of this it's just not a great idea thats all(using the same password that is).
- phpnode 16y agoThis is a fair point, that being said, i do generate a random salt + hash the password properly.
- pinksoda 16y agoA random salt? Are you sure about that?
- dublinclontarf 16y agoI assume this is a joke? Being that with computers we can only generate pseudo random data, amirite?
- pinksoda 16y agoYou can't use a "random" salt (such as one generated from the rand function) because then you can't calculate the hash later to verify they entered the correct password, unless of course you store that "random" salt in the database, which would defeat the purpose if your database is compromised. Typically hash's are calculated using something like: $hash = sha1($password."secretcode".$username); - none of which are random. If you were to add a random number into that like this: $rand = rand(1,99); $hash = sha1($password.$rand); Now you can't do if($hash1 = $hash2) { loginSuccess(); } because you will never know what random salt was generated for the original hash.
- dublinclontarf 16y ago>unless of course you store that "random" salt in the database, which would defeat the purpose if your database is compromised. Not true, a plain hash can be compromised with a brute force attack. To do this all the entries in the dictionary(used in the attack) must be hashed using the same hash algorithm. If each password entry is hashed with a random salt(with the salt being kept for password comparison) the attacker must rehash the entire dictionary(not a computationally cheap thing to do) including the random salt, for each and every password. This doesn't make it impossible to brute force a hash+salt, but makes it a LOT more expensive and time consuming. At least this is my understanding of the whole point of random salted hash.
- lionhearted 16y agoThis looks cool, I'm way into this. Unfortunately didn't work for me and I didn't do anything particularly screwy: > CDbCommand failed to execute the SQL statement: SQLSTATE[42S02]: Base table or view not found: 1146 Table 'hackernewsers.userSkills' doesn't exist I'm in Hong Kong until early August if anyone is around and wants to grab a coffee. Vietnam after that, probably China sooner or later... also if anyone is doing general Asia travel and wants a perspective, it's what I've been doing this year while working off laptop. Drop a line, I'm friendly, email is in profile.
- phpnode 16y agoHi, how did you get to that error? Was it from the registration page? I've made a change, could you tell me if it's still occuring? thanks. edit - never mind, it appears to be fixed now, thanks
- thomas11 16y agoFantastic site. I like the aggregating map, did you make that yourself? I've almost given up finding fellow hackers in Geneva, CH, but who knows...
- phpnode 16y agoi used it before on one of my other sites, http://trackmycv.com http://trackmycv.com IIRC the original example came from the official google maps examples
- damienfir 16y agoIl y a en effet pas beaucoup de monde dans le coin. Nyon, CH
- thomas11 16y agoAh, mais apparemment il y a qn! Interested in a meetup? My email is in my profile. I wrote to three users a while ago whom I found on hackrtrackr, but got no replies. There's also PeterHammar and Pollux (Nyon), of whom I have no contact info.
- ablutop 16y ago69 miles north ...
- dublinclontarf 16y agowoops, broke it. Here's the pastie with the error and what I was doing. http://pastie.org/1047130 http://pastie.org/1047130 Otherwise it's nice, I like it.
- phpnode 16y agothis should be fixed now, please could you check, many thanks.
- dublinclontarf 16y agoFixed.
- shaddi 16y agoVery cool! I really liked the registration process, very smooth. I also like that you made it clear that I could delete my account if I wanted on the front page, before registration: that made me much more likely to sign up. One point: your Google map uses custom icons, which are cool I suppose but I'd prefer the standard ones for the sake of consistency. More importantly, I'd like to see an info box appear when I click an icon on the map: it took me a bit to realize that full info was being displayed below. Otherwise this is a great tool!
- RossM 16y agoAnnoying as I made something similar with the same objective last night - but a much better implementation than mine (largely because most of the time was spent figuring out PHP's crap SQLite3 class). May have to take you on :)
- phpnode 16y agoheh i did wonder if someone else would have the same idea, it was motivation to get it done quickly :)
- bambax 16y agoI get htmlspecialchars() [function.htmlspecialchars]: Invalid multibyte sequence in argument when trying to access the homepage? http://i.imgur.com/K390I.jpg http://i.imgur.com/K390I.jpg
- damienfir 16y agoSo what's the technology behind your website ? For an afternoon only, that's quite a nice job. Edit: didn't see the FAQ (Yii PHP framework)
- csl 16y agoIf you need to know this in the future, check out BuiltWith: http://builtwith.com/hackernewsers.com http://builtwith.com/hackernewsers.com
- phpnode 16y agoIf you've registered already, and you're still logged in there's a chance i've lost your password. If so you should see a message telling you so in your account page. If you don't see the message, don't worry about it.
- davidw 16y agoThis isn't the first time someone came up with one of these. I don't recollect the URL of the previous one though. What often happens is people put their data in, and then, with time, it just sits there because it's not a site that's actively linked to from this one.
- phpnode 16y agoyeah i thought this might have happened before, so i took some steps to make it a bit stickier. 1. this seems to be a hot topic right now 2. the domain is reasonably easy to remember 3. it's quick to register 4. to activate your account you have to link back to it from your hn profile page, yes you can remove this link after but hopefully most people will leave it to help spread the word. ask me in 6 months if it worked :)
- davidw 16y agoIt's nicely done, no arguing with that. I just sort of wish PG would find a way to incorporate this or something like it into the official site. Or something along those lines...
- edanm 16y agoI hadn't thought of leaving that link in my profile for that. Perhaps you could make it clearer that that's a good idea? E.g., in the verification, say "Leave the link so people can see find you in the world easily and see your skillset".
- draegtun 16y agoInspirational stuff... makes me what to get off my lazy arse and start some of my pet projects! phpnode++
- polynomial 16y agoDoes this have the ability to update location in real time? I travel a lot and would be interested both in seeing stats for HN in some of the cities I visit and as displaying my current location.
- phpnode 16y agonot at the moment, although you're free to update your location as often as you want. My reasoning is 99.9% of users will work primarily out of one location.
- bnoordhuis 16y agoAwesome, I signed up. On a tangential note: any hackers in the greater Rotterdam area (or maybe Amsterdam or Utrecht) up for a beer sometime?
- slindstr 16y agoWhat did you use to auto populate my city? A while back I tried using a Google Javascript API but it was always pretty far off - your site (which looks great btw) got it exactly right
- phpnode 16y agoI'm using the geoip city lite db from maxmind.com. It's free
- ezrider4428 16y agoThis is pretty awesome. When this site fills out it will be interesting to see what the actual demographics of the site are.
- jah 16y agoIs there a way to add an "interests" or/and "areas of expertise" section to our profile, and have those show in the search results?
- phpnode 16y agoat the moment theres only skills and they don't show in the search results, although i might go change that now. I'm open to feedback for additional features to add
- Ernestas 16y agoMaybe have page with statistics of most ticked skills?
- csl 16y agoSuggestion: Can you please require (re)CAPTCHA or similar when sending mail to people?
- phpnode 16y agopossibly, but i do everything i can to avoid captchas. Only registered users can send emails at the moment.i could implement a minimum karma before people can send you emails, but that seems a bit.. rude. for now i'll just rate limit it
- csl 16y agoGuess it's ok as long as you need to be registered. Great site, by the way!
- david927 16y agoThis has been done before here: http://www.hackrtrackr.com http://www.hackrtrackr.com
- Goosey 16y agoI think this adds on nicely to hackrtrackr which appears to only be useful for geo-locating yc-readers. This looks to be built much more to satisfy that "community of people who can pick each other's brains" need. A more blunt assessment.. Hackrtrackr is a toy that isn't that useful, this has the potential to seriously improve the lives of many people here.
- yock 16y agoNeat! I signed up. One question, why do you only ask for city and not city and state?
- phpnode 16y agoyou can actually add city and state there, in fact you could enter your home address but i wouldn't recommend that. maybe i should make that clearer.
- lylejohnson 16y agoMore to the point, you should at least enter the city and state. I wasn't paying attention at first and simply provided my city name (Madison) and noticed it was finding hackers in Wisconsin that were (for example) "75 miles away." When I realized it thought I was in Madison, WI, I edited my city to read "Madison, AL" and it started providing some more relevant results.
- tomh- 16y agoThere is a bug in your code, my hn account ends on "-". Your routing system doesn't seem to recognize this.. Other than that, looks nice :)
- phpnode 16y agofixed :)
- d0m 16y agoPretty nice. One suggestion (or bug I'm not sure): If I search in a city in Canada, I get result from usa.. is it possible to configure the "range distance" ? It's a huge difference if it's a 30min distance or a 10 hours or 3 days distance.. :D (But when I talk about range distance, I mean it in miles or somthing)
- phpnode 16y agoi thought about that, all i'm doing at the moment is sorting by distance, irrespective of country. When more people are using the site it might make sense to change it, but right now most search results would be empty for anything under 300 miles
- pietrofmaggi 16y agoPretty awesome, I signed up. Can you show up distance even in km? miles don't give much information to me. May be you can choose from imperial units and standard ones by people country...
- alexkay 16y ago> May be you can choose from imperial units and standard ones by people country It's quite simple really: US - miles, the rest of the world - kilometres
- livando 16y agoLooks like a cool site! Anyway you can add some blinking texts and some scrolling marquees, and some really cool things that I've already built and feel like bragging about?
- theycallmemorty 16y agoHow long should it take for me to show up on the map? I don't seem to be on there.
- phpnode 16y agoa few minutes, i cache it
- samratjp 16y agoGood work for an afternoon's effort. The only problem I see is that all these HN add-ons are hard to track for everyone unless if they were on to see this on the front page. What we really need is an Evergreen HN - where one could track such add-ons and perhaps greatest hits. Of course, it wouldn't hurt to have top news of the week/month/year for those who live on an ent time scale :-)
- icey 16y agoThis is pretty cool. I like your signup process. It would be nice if the pins on the Google map were clickable after drilling down to the city level.
- phpnode 16y agofixed :)
- DotSauce 16y agoMy skill-set is poorly represented here. The only things currently relevant to me are Marketing related. What about... writing, front-end development, sales, networking, branding, research?
- phreeza 16y agoMy nearest neighbor has -7 karma. nice...
- thesethings 16y agoGreat job, just registered. (Heya Northwesters, I feel all alone as a blue dot in Portland. Seattle? Portland? Eugene? I know you're out there. Represent!)
- philh 16y agoAs a student, I move between two places a lot. I would guess this is fairly common among HNers. Being able to give multiple locations might be worthwhile. (For now I gave my uni location on the basis that I spend more time there.) Also, it might just be my particular biases, but I would be inclined to add "mathematics" as a skill, or possibly category. I have no idea what to put for "career name" though.
- phpnode 16y agoMathemagician, I'm considering this multiple location business, it does make things a bit more complicated.
- svag 16y agoNice site phpnode.
- cwilson 16y agoLooks like HN killed HackerNewsers. Anyone else having trouble getting to the site? You might look at a beefier server and adding a proxy in front of Apache.
- phpnode 16y agois it still down for you? seems to be running quite quickly here considering
- perplexes 16y agoWhen searching for people near me, I try clicking on the blue spots in the map, and I expect a list of people in the area to come up, or the list below to change. Is that not the case?
- altuzar 16y agoReally nice! Somehow when I search for Mexico (country), some Texas users appear. Anyway, quite useful.
- niels_olson 16y agoObviously these aren't staying in the cultural memory. Maybe a link to a community-maintained list of trackers should be added as one of the links at the bottom, along with "Lists | RSS | Search | Bookmarklet | Guidelines | FAQ | ...etc"
- marcamillion 16y agoAwesome idea...doesn't help me much though...seems I am the only one from Jamaica on HN...which is kinda depressing.
- raju 16y agoVery nicely done. Great signup process. Unfortunately, not too many HN'ers around me (Columbus, OH). I will keep an eye out and see if it changes. Again, great work. Thanks
- RiderOfGiraffes 16y agoSuggestion - add to the karma listing how long someone has been registered with HN. Absolute Karma is less use than dK/dt. Someone may have Karma 100, but only been registered for 10 days and hence be accruing Karma quickly, as opposed to someone registered for 100 days, hence not active, or not getting much karma. Just a thought.
- phpnode 16y agogood idea, looking into this now
- AndyKelley 16y agoOr they might actually be developing a business and not getting any karma.
- RiderOfGiraffes 16y agoIt's still information. Interpret it how you choose.
- RiderOfGiraffes 16y agoHmm. For some reason it's called me a physicist. Not sure why ...
- GeneralMaximus 16y agoI see all your pages end with .html. Are you generating static pages for everyone behind the scenes or did you just name them that way?
- phpnode 16y agoNo the pages are dynamic, although partially cached.I just added a .html suffix
- sharpemt 16y agoMy only suggestion might be to add some finer granularity to location. I zoom into Boston and just see one blob - when it might be nice to see zip-code level granularity. I try to change my location to Cambridge MA, but it stays in Boston. Maybe handle geocoding zip codes etc.?
- phpnode 16y agoyou could actually enter your street level address or zipcode in the city box, i figured most people don't want to do this though so left it labelled as city
- marilyn 16y agoI love it. One suggestion: When you click on a pagination button on a Find Hacker News Users listings page, the page should either reload, or scroll to the top. The way it is now, it feels like it isn't answering my request for the next page. Great work!
- phpnode 16y agofixed this, it now updates the map too thanks
- nnash 16y agoI really like all of the community things that have been coming out of HN lately. The HN yellow pages has already produced a cool freelance offer for me (just added my info to it earlier today), and this site is definitely much more robust than a google docs page. I'm sure great things will come out of this for everyone.
- Chirael 16y agoIt's confusing to have the search check boxes below the registration section like it is now; it makes it seem that the check boxes are part of the profile one is filling out. I spent time going through the entire list checking boxes off, only to get to the bottom and see a Search button when I expected a Submit or Register button. Now I've spent all that time checking off boxes, I really don't feel like doing it again :(
- phpnode 16y agoyes thats a bit annoying, changed it to show either the registration form or the hacker search depending on your logged in status
- fuzzythinker 16y agoSeems like whenever I click on a drop that is 2+, it keeps zooming in until it reduces to a single profile, losing all other profiles..
- phpnode 16y agoYeah, thats happening because all the points are exactly on top of each other, seeing what i can do to fix it now.
- ihanif 16y agoWow.. great job done, withe ease of use. It's also an eye opener for me, to add some salt to my Karma.
- vkdelta 16y agoI got this error while registering on your site. I am concerned after seeing this. Sorry, we screwed up Looks it looks like i've lost your password, hopefully the bug that is causing this is fixed now. Please re-enter your password in the form below and hopefully you'll never see this message again, but if you do, please Contact phpnode sorry! note to self. get beta testers!