May be overthinking this but I'm geniunely curious how that was done practically speaking? Standard git branch and merge or everyone sitting around deciding what prompt to write?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47619199

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

My great-grandparents owned a small summer cottage which my grandma inherited. After COVID, my family stopped visiting so much and it fell in disrepair. With no one to care for it, my grandma decided to sell it.

On a whim, I did some digging and found that the cottage was actually listed as “culturally significant” by the Massachusetts Historical Commission. It had 150 years of incredible history we never knew. I put together a nice report, presented it to my family, and well now I’m writing this from that very cottage with a 5th generation (my son) next to me.

From that experience, I started HomeLore to help other people learn the history behind their homes and hopefully inspire a passion like mine. The concept is pretty simple.. we research homes (incl ownership, architecture, history, images, etc) and package the results into a beautiful, shareable online report that reads more like a narrative than a spreadsheet.

The idea of a “carfax for homes” seems so obvious but likely hasn’t been done due to lack of unified data. I keep costs low ($29) but still donate 50% of all proceeds to the local historical orgs I use in hopes of improving their infra or making them more interested in data. Hence the .org tld.

Would love to hear thoughts, find collaborators, or just chat with anyone about their homes stories! Find it at homelore.org

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47323971

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

I do wonder if the problem is not so much having a place to find LAN events but actually just having enough people put on LAN events in the first place. It feels like a thing of the past with how much less people interact in person these days. It's a shame because LANs are awesome!

Have you thought about ways to make it easier for people to host LAN events? Or does this solve that as well? I guess a solution would require matching random people together. Happy to discuss more - nick at onthe.town

It's like a carfax but for your home, although the intention is more to create an interesting historical narrative that inspires people to care about the history of their home rather than as a tool for inspecting home issues before buying.

My target customer is realtors who want to inspire buyers to take on historic homes that may need a lot of work. Also home owners themselves of course.

My memory is that Souminth was really open to other people’s contributions and questions, no matter their credentials. He was a great leader who felt approachable to the open-source community.

But I do love your idea and it's something I'm pursuing. We are matching people to meet at venues (restaurants, golf courses, etc) and it makes sense for venues to pay to be selected. That money would go to organizers and the events could be free. It's just a harder B2B problem to convince companies to sponsor communities.

Ultimately, clubs will have the flexibility to be run in multiple ways - from free, to business-sponsored or attendee-funded, to even onthetown-sponsored as you suggest.

It's largely based on platform-izing the extremely popular Timeleft app that simply matches 6 random people for dinner. With onthe.town, anyone can create a Timeleft-like app around any concept they're interested in. Some clubs people have created include a golf club (get matched with 3 other people to play golf with), a vinyl record sharing club, a lunch club for biotech networking, and a club to meet other parents for dinner.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44576293

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

But I just don’t see it from the tool owner’s perspective. My suburban aunt has two chainsaws sitting in the garage that she doesn’t use anymore. An extra $150 a month isn’t enough to deal with the hassle of coordinating meetings, dealing with damage, etc. And she definitely wouldn’t be giving a free tank of gas, PPE, etc like Home Depot does. She would gladly drop it off at a local spot, make passive income, maybe go grab it herself once a year when she needs it.

Ps - great website design. Looks beautiful on mobile and works really well. What are you using on the frontend?

We have so little in common interest wise, but we bonded over just being in the same place repeatedly. I'm not in contact with anyone from my engineering program. That says a lot to me about shared interests as a (non-)driver of lasting friendships compared to shared EXPERIENCE, but I'm just one person.

Obviously "frat culture" has an extreme negative connotation, but I will just say that not every fraternity is full of gym bros... they exist for every type of guy and I truly think the socially awkward guys I know who joined fraternities made significantly more meaningful relationship than the cool, good-looking guys who didn't.

Little about me just for kicks - I'm early 30s, married, recently moved to Boston with a great tech job and a really solid group of friends from college that I unfortunately don't live close to anymore. I've made some good friends since moving here but it has all been through someone taking a herculean level of initiative to plan things and invite people to stuff. I want to lower that friction to have consistent IRL interactions with interesting people - whoever those people might be for a given person.

Happy to hear what you have to say - email is in my bio - although I doubt we'd have a meaningful conversation if you write me off as trying to sell something instead of taking the more gracious interpretation that I want to help other guys build strong friendships (and build them for myself).

Do you really develop lasting friendships on the course or in rec league sports? I just haven't had that experience and the popularity of those activities is sky rocketing (see: running clubs) while the problem doesn't seem to be getting any better.

That consistent, shared experience what I'm trying to build. But I can appreciate the feedback that it comes across as "auditioning" as that's not the point. The goal is to get people in the same place on a consistent basis. I also believe that consistently hanging out with people who are generally interesting / agreeable is a lot more important than matching humor or hobbies.

How would you position this with that goal in mind, especially considering that some filtering needs to take place since many people won't necessarily click like you say. I'm not going to find someone whose humor matches mine by dumb luck.