I'm working on a side project http://chicagotechcal.com to help try and coordinate events which hopefully will reduce overlaps. I hate missing awesome events like a HN meetup.
Jake, I'm glad you did ChicagoTechCal. I've been meaning to do something like that ever since we had Chicago Startup Weekend overlapping Flourish Conf, and only a week after PyCon. I'm sorry about the overlap; Chicago has at least one person going to interview at YC, and we wanted to have the meetup before he leaves on Wednesday morning. We've already announced Tuesday night as the next meetup, so we should probably leave it, but we'll check the calendar next time to avoid an overlap.