This kinda reminds me a bit of Retool, a SaaS tool I've used quite extensively since a coworker used it to build analytics and customer service data dashboards. It's great, but their mobile layouts kind of suck, so maybe there's something here.
Maintaining a balance between power users and new users is inherently a struggle. "Low Code" type tools are tough for me in industry as you often quickly find the rough edge that is the critical path for your needs.
I loved HyperCard when I was a kid. It encouraged programming in a visual way. I'm not sure there were that many applications built on it, aside from the games Myst and You Don't Know Jack. Maybe that's good enough?
Slashdot was somewhere between a well curated tech subreddit and Hacker News.
It had its own in-jokes like: This is finally "the year of the Linux Desktop" and Jonathan "CowboyNeal" Pater, the site's moderator who often posted polls and commented.
In the late 2000s, most migrated their Slashdot reflex to Digg - and then eventually the YC-backed Reddit when there was a disastrous rollout of Digg v4 (in 2010)
Reddit then became less of a technology-focused site as it gained popularity, and HN became the defacto "tech news" aggregator with a well rounded comment section that resembled the early days of Slashdot, Digg, and Reddit.
Lyra Energy | lyra-energy.com | Hybrid, Los Angeles, CA | Full-time & Contractors
Lyra is a Los Angeles based technology company launching an electric two-wheeler vehicle platform. The tight-knit team here is composed of seasoned veterans from the EV manufacturing industry in California with expertise in high power battery, thermal, and electronics development.
- Firmware Engineer (CONTRACTOR) comp depends on experience
We’re looking for a Senior Firmware Engineer to continue to shape the core embedded systems that power our vehicles. In this role, you’ll take ownership of firmware development for connected vehicle systems, battery management systems, and infotainment. Your work will directly impact the first generation of Lyra vehicles going to market and help define the software and hardware stack that will scale with the company. You’ll be joining an established team with deep experience from the EV industry, and work closely with electrical, mechanical, and software engineers.
Email me stan (at) lyra-energy.com if you're interested. I'm our Head of Software, so reach out to me directly and tell me how your experience might match what we're looking for. Please include "Hacker News June 2025" in the subject line.
I wouldn’t say that. JetBrains is incredibly bloated and has significantly less community support.
I’ll agree on Teams being crap though, mostly for how dumb it is that they’ve rewritten it multiple times and created a confusing slate of weird versions like “Teams (work or school)”
the military gets what it wants in DC, and the pilots were too comfortable and on different radio systems (helo can’t hear airplanes and vice versa, air traffic control is their intermediary)
A disaster waiting to happen in retrospect. Similar issues at other airports like runway incursions, especially at crowded small airports like SFO and LaGuardia with antiquated runway layouts.
Having had some former coworkers that ended up at various dating platforms, dating is fascinating, I still think dating is something that needs a better modern solution than what “the apps” offer. Every dating app has a few fundamental flaws. There’s the human element too.
What worked for me was hacking Tinder circa 2014 by faking my geolocation and hypertargeting certain places and neighborhoods I knew would be up my dating alley and spamming posts on social media sites like Reddit and Craigslist.
It’s tough because some people don’t even know what they’re looking for in a partner.
there was still angst then, it just was more targeted in single directions, not like now where the angst is aimlessly directed at society, sponsored by squarespace
Let's recap the past: Taxis were borderline unusable in almost all American cities before Uber (except for NYC)
I certainly didn't love their ruthless business practices, but let's not delude ourselves and admit that Uber or Lyft wouldn't exist if they didn't break the laws around taxi medallions.
Sometimes laws do more harm than good (by limiting supply and slowing innovation) and it requires creatively skirting regulations.
Things were always possible to improve the taxi industry. Smartphones had been around a few years. But it would've taken the industry 20 years to implement it correctly. In the same way that rampant music and movie piracy in the early 2000s hastened the development of iTunes and Netflix's subscription model way of doing business.
Uber shows the driver's name, their photo, and has a process for flagging drivers. Public safety is important to their business. As someone who's driven an Uber and Lyft and been through their process, I've seen it firsthand.
It's not like "medallions" worked - I remember driving in multiple taxis in pre 2010 days where the photo DID NOT MATCH UP to the driver. My high school physics teacher who grew up in Brooklyn in the late 1970s told stories about how he learned how to drive by illegally working and driving taxis around as a 15 year old.
Right now, we're just going through the same thing with AI again, and Silicon Valley is applying it's ethos of the past few decades.
There are reasons why in various industries, China is "winning the race", so to speak.
Regulations exist, but sometimes people who creatively ignore the "regulations" can win the tide of the public. It's one of America's best (and incredibly divisive) cultural capabilities.
the good news is most of their good engineers had already gone to vw rivian and other companies in LA.
sad, but it shows the need for great leadership.
bad idea: moving to texas
bad idea: lack of focus. build ONE vehicle
investors have soured on EV capital, shortsighted pivot to AI, even though the industry will boom once we have another energy crisis and another boom in nuclear and renewables in 5-15 years.
somewhat related, the xpeng helicopter thing at CES was an exact rip off of the quirky canoo light bar design, so maybe the ethos of this car will live in a Chinese copy.
They lack the alarmism of CNN, but the way that outlets like NPR were so comfortable to tow obvious political lines during the pandemic (such as even entertaining the possibility of a “lab leak” hypothesis, painting it to be insanely conspiratorial and/or racist, despite the Wuhan lab being supported by NIH grants) — the most clear and dangerous version of manufactured consent I’ve seen in American media this generation.
Most media outlets (including NPR) begrudgingly accepted this as a strong likelihood for the initial source of the virus only a year or two later, once they had political approval.
Journalists and editors in these larger institutions no longer have any courage to actually be a “fourth estate” or think independently of government.
Agreed. I was a longtime listener since I had fond memories of my dad listening in the car growing up, but it’s borderline unlistenable now. Emblematic of the drastic change this generation in the aims of journalism, where everything in public life has become politicized, and the goal is no longer to inform and engage listeners, but to persuade and influence.
Leukemia and certain cancers were often a death sentence as recently as 1990. Now the survival rate over five years is like 65%+
You can cherry pick a lot of data, but in general the trend line of lifespan and health outcomes has improved the modern average person’s life significantly.
The average person also was pretty likely to die in a motor vehicle accident in 1970, so much so that in CDC reports would just name the accident section “Motor Vehicle Accidents”
I don’t disagree that the public health response to things like obesity are mostly societal issues and lifestyle induced, nor a major problem, but I would still rather live today with unfettered access to knowledge on how to even approach these health issues, than live in the past.
- I've had an electric car for 5 years now. My car has been significantly less maintenance than any I've owned. How is that throwing it away in a landfill? If you're concerned about waste, think about the amount of C02 emitted by a single gas car during the 100,000 miles I've driven it already.
- The US and Canada already has a nascent lithium mining and exploration industry, a few sites of which are already open or scheduled to soon, such as in Thacker Pass, Nevada or in Quebec. It's not our fault that a huge portion of the US government continues to ignore how valuable rare earth mining is to the next century ~ (Add other things like nuclear to the list too)
Maintaining a balance between power users and new users is inherently a struggle. "Low Code" type tools are tough for me in industry as you often quickly find the rough edge that is the critical path for your needs.
I loved HyperCard when I was a kid. It encouraged programming in a visual way. I'm not sure there were that many applications built on it, aside from the games Myst and You Don't Know Jack. Maybe that's good enough?