I am in a similar boat (living in China) and HN is really my only way of keeping in touch with the startup/hacker community and "socialising". I really wish there was a IRC channel/website dedicated to people in our situation who are looking to socialise or collaborate together on projects/startups. I was thinking about this problem recently and one idea that I came up with was to build a "MVP league" that would comb…
There is #startups in freenode, and there are lots of programming channels, and if you hang in them long enough you can start socializing with folks in there.