71–80 of 139 posts
It would be cool if the "radius" automatically scaled to ensure there are not too many or too few people in the chat. This could be accomplished with a Voronoi diagram.
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?
It would be cool if the "radius" automatically scaled to ensure there are not too many or too few people in the chat. This could be accomplished with a Voronoi diagram.
hmm, the 1 mile radius is important to me. psychologically, knowing that the people you're talking to are within walking distance is exciting
So, talked with some folks about an idea similar to this a few months ago. As the conversation evolved, they came up with "tagging" a given chat room to denote what was in it, and letting people choose their own names...some kind of "handle" on the identified "channel". The proposed messaging fabric would use servers hosted in the cloud, each functioning as sort of a repeater to their client mobile devices. A sort of…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
hmm, the 1 mile radius is important to me. psychologically, knowing that the people you're talking to are within walking distance is exciting
Less exciting if there's no one using the app within that radius though, no?
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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't you think calling this a "little app" and "toy campus app" is a little bit condescending? And that dismissing it as a simple rehashing of other ideas is not actually constructive? How many successful new products/services in the last decade aren't just rehashes of existing ideas? I'd say kudos to the author for actually rolling up your sleeves and making this idea happen; it's way harder and more admirable IMO…
Would you like me to give you some Ruby code that would emulate this functionality? I am fairly sure the size of the program would be less than 300 LOC, tops. That is indeed a "little app". The 30-something line regex parser Pike wrote ( http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spr09/cos333/bea... ) ? Also a "little app". There is no shame in solving a small problem, solving it well, and solving it concisely. As f…
"Don't get me wrong, it's a nifty little app.
You probably learned a lot! That said, it's still
just a toy campus app."
I'll bite your offer for you to mock it up in Ruby real quick. The problem with the "it's easy and I could do it" dismissal is that, even though you could, you didn't.
Maybe you can team up with this guy[1]. You can probably even reuse his repo[2].
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=678501 [2]: http://code.google.com/p/hackerexchange/
I almost created one of these, except for news. Hyper-local news is largely missing - I was going to mash up Twitter, Instagram, and in-app updates to help people get a sense of what's happening immediately around them. This is actually a great idea to solve this problem though. The news use-case is for city life. When you hear a gunshot or a car accident occurs on your street or you see smoke off in the distance or…
The chicken and egg problem can be pretty frustrating with an app like this. There needs to be a critical mass of users in a certain area for it to be reliable, which is easier in some places than others. Best of luck though.