vpontis

Thanks for that feedback! We are still pretty early on discovery so we don't support cities other than the cities listed there for public discovery.

We do have many events happening in Seattle tho so we should add discovery there in the next couple months .

Context / Plug: I'm a founder of a Meetup competitor / successor called lu.ma

I think Meetup got in a hard position because they didn't have very many paid events and their communities tended to churn off of Meetup. It's hard to make money as a community organizing tool so they tried a bunch of different ways of making money, including charging guests + showing irrelevant ads which both don't work.

Also, Meetup was in a very weird spot before the pandemic. They were bought by WeWork and then sold off in the WeWork crunch. I doubt any of the original team is still there.

Anyway, lu.ma is free to use for free events so if there's anything I can reach out with, feel free to ping me at victor@lu.ma

Hi! I'm a founder of lu.ma which a lot of Meetup hosts have migrated to in the past year. We're kind of a mix between Meetup + Eventbrite. You can see some tech events we've featured here — lu.ma/explore

I'd love to see if I can help you get your community up and running again. Feel free to reach out - victor@lu.ma

In terms of funding / sponsorships, I think it's certainly harder than the market a few years ago since there is just less free money for tech / startups, but we've seen a lot of new tech communities thrive. Also, a lot of people are willing to pay to attend events!

Luma | lu.ma | REMOTE | Full-time | Software engineer, designer

We're hiring software engineers who want to build a delightful events and community platform. We've had over 5M guests register for events in the last year :)

Tech Stack: React, Typescript, Node, Postgres

We're also building a crypto community layer with Solana.

Email victor@lu.ma — I'm a co-founder :)

lu.ma | Software Engineer — Web / iOS | Full-time | New York or REMOTE | https://lu.ma/jobs

At Luma, we're building the best place to make new relationships online. Thousands of online classes, fitness trainers, and professional groups use Luma to bring together their community with fun events, seamless chat, and a community home.

We're a small team of 5 people where everyone has a huge impact. We deploy 10x a day and use modern technologies — Typescript, Next.js, React, Postgres.

I'm one of the founders, feel free to reach out victor at lu.ma

We're working on helping sell tickets for and build community around Zoom events: https://zmurl.com

We started 2.5 months ago and have seen ~ 10k events of all kinds.

We're hiring engineers :) - victor@zmurl.com

Hi HN! I started working on ZmURL during quarantine since I was tired of sending around ugly Zoom links that don't provide any context.

Curious to hear what you think :)

---

Funny story: my co-founder Dan and I actually met on Zoom a year ago and we've only met in person once.

A year ago, I was raising money. I met with an investor who liked me but didn't like my startup... He said I should chat with Dan and work with him.

Dan was living in Beijing so we set up a Zoom call and hung out for an hour. I liked him but we decided not to work together.

We stayed in touch and COVID derailed our other plans. So we started ZmURL.

Licecap / Zappy

Or Loom -> MP4 -> ezgif

There's a lack of good GIF making tools

Thanks for the suggestion! We'll keep track of all suggestions here :)

This is really cool! I've had to do the same thing with PGBouncer for Postgres + serverless and it's a pain.

Would love to see this come out for Postgres and come to Google Cloud :)

For UI, react-native is really good for sharing code between platforms

Could you expand on this? I'm anti-NIMBY but I don't understand your comment.

I don't think anti-NIMBY's are necessarily anti-trees or anti-parks?

Praying isn't working. Now, I'll try sobbing :(

Gosh, this was so scary... I thought someone had hacked in and deleted everything...

I hope they come back. This is still pretty scary

You called out the red error screen and that's something that they explicitly called out as fixed in this version of React Native.

And it looks like they are a lot faster about responding to PRs now.

Tt seems to me like they are doing a good job improving React Native!

I really enjoyed this article.

Summary

Coyotes are too clever because they know that people shaking jars full of coins can’t hurt them. Thus the animal control patrol has to get called and when they don’t shoo, the animal control person who loves animals has to shoot the coyote.

Coyotes are winning the mini-game of each human interaction, but they are losing the meta-game of what society will do if coyotes aren’t scared.

Personal Connection

This reminds me of a turning point that I had in high school. When I was young, I would get in trouble and try to get around the rules each time I got in trouble. /“Well, technically…”/

But at some point I realized that most of the time you aren’t getting in trouble because you are breaking the rules. You are getting in trouble because you are making the rule makers unhappy. Once I had that realization I was able to focus on relationships with the rule makers and figure out what they actually cared about. This allowed me to break the rules just as much but without getting in trouble.

Awesome! If you end up making something, send it over :). I'd love to check it out.

It's not!

We have some info on the connector here: https://cobattery.com/connector

Apple doesn't actually let you buy a chip that will allow for the right angle connector that we have. So we decided to design our own. It was a pretty time intensive process and we had to search for a while for a good factory. But we are happy with the way it turned out.

Our batteries come with some compliance testing. I'm not sure what other testing we have done for other components. But the batteries are the important one.

Hmmm, it's actually much more simple than that. We want to provide a good product that makes people's lives better. The warranty is a forcing function.

In my opinion, if we can't make money while ensuring people's CoBattery cases works, we shouldn't be in business.

Wow, you paid attention to the details! Yea, the screenshot was just for the purpose of the post.

We did some of the original design in OnShape and some of it in SolidWorks. I didn't want to recommend SolidWorks for cheap work because at the time we only got it free because we were students.

We've found that it isn't that hard to start off a design in OnShape and then move it into SolidWorks as things get more complicated. It isn't ideal, but it's definitely cheaper.

The circuit is actually really simple in our case. It is just a voltage converter and then an adapter for the lightning connector.

Getting the custom lightning connector and chip was more of an ordeal though! I'll see what I can dredge up on that process.

That's a great idea!

Wow, that is an important point that I did not know about. Luckily we do have the resources to pay for OnShape, so all of our files are private and have been private.

That's a good point! I guess the iteration cycle has gotten an order of magnitude quicker and cheaper with 3D printers.

That's awesome! Open Philanthropy reminds me of https://80000hours.org/.

In their relationship disclosure:

> OpenAI researchers Dario Amodei and Paul Christiano are both technical advisors to Open Philanthropy and live in the same house as Holden. In addition, Holden is engaged to Dario’s sister Daniela.

This is so tangled. I don't mean it as a criticism as I'm sure a lot of SV investments would have a much longer Relationship Disclosure sections. So props to them for including this.

I haven't tried it, but it definitely looks cool!

Thanks for the kind words yial!

We've found that a big reason people upgrade is due to a failing battery. So if that's why you are upgrading, I would just save $$ and get CoBattery now ;).

Yea, so I think scale, both in volume and in number, is a huge variable.

Our cases are relatively small so they can be printed in a couple hours. And during the development phase, we are going through hundreds of prototypes. (The fit has to be just right, so if a part is 5% off, we scrap it and reprint.)

Also, I love that you mention the fiddling as an annoyance. My co-founder loves fiddling w/ 3D printers so outsourcing all of our printing would take away that hobby :).

Thanks!

Yea, as I said in the post, I think it's drastically easier to start a hardware company now vs 10 years ago. And it's still pretty hard, ha! So I can just imagine what you went through.

Yep, the battery is "exposed" in that we don't have a cover over the battery. But each battery does have protection.

And you aren't the target market, yet! Making cases for just iPhone made things easier, but we are hoping to expand to the most popular Android phones.