249 pointsby theanirudha year ago20 comments
  • woleiuma year ago
    Are we intentionally reusing project names now? Lynx [1] is a fairly popular tui browser. I guess it doesn’t support ssl or tls, so is now obsolete? W3M [2] is a decent tui alternative that does. Or if you use kitty, awrit [3] is nice, with images and mouse support (it renders chromium in a terminal window)

    [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)

    [2] https://w3m.sourceforge.net/

    [3] https://github.com/chase/awrit

    • huxproa year ago
      The Lynx project was originally named independently without thinking this far ahead. Since so much code and so many users already rely on it, we decided to stick with the name rather than change it just for open-sourcing.
      • DannyPagea year ago
        Open-sourcing is/was the perfect time to change it. Otherwise it might be even more painful if a name change is needed later.
        • bangaladorea year ago
          And why exactly would a name change be needed later?

          Names are just names, many people have the same names, and projects can too.

          • giancarlostoroa year ago
            Every Go developer knows how awful a bad name can be. Just try to google anything Go related, you need to type "golang" instead.
            • reactordeva year ago
              A go developer doesn’t Google go, they go to pkg.go.dev to get go’ing.

              /s

          • aaploka year ago
            Plenty of people have the same name, but if you call your child Brad Pitt, it will be interpreted as a reference to the famous guy bearing that name, and nobody will believe it is a coincidence.

            Lynx doesn't have a large user base (I think) but it is installed by default on many linux distros. Having to install two programs with the same name is a pain which is only resolved by renaming one of them (at the distro or the user level).

            • bangaladorea year ago
              Bit misleading. The analogy is closer to naming your child "Genevieve" when another Genevieve exists in the school. Lynx is a fairly common and well understood word.

              > Lynx doesn't have a large user base (I think) but it is installed by default on many linux distros. Having to install two programs with the same name is a pain which is only resolved by renaming one of them (at the distro or the user level).

              This is a fault of the distros. At some point keeping niche software will cause issues and conflicts.

              • aaploka year ago
                > This is a fault of the distros. At some point keeping niche software will cause issues and conflicts.

                I am not sure I agree with this argument. This gives a vibe of "make place for me, away with the old guard!"

                What if someone called their program "vi" with the argument that noone uses vi anymore?

                Besides, who decides what is niche and what isn't? Is a program like lynx which offers better accessibility features than mainstream browsers not worth distributing because it's niche?

                Blaming the distros for already having software named like what you decide to call yours isn't terribly cooperative.

                Figurative "you" of course, not meaning OP here.

                • bangaladorea year ago
                  You took my argument and basically butchered the main point.

                  Everyone and their brother knows what "vi" is. Many (presumably millions) use it.

                  How many people would know what Lynx is. My guess is very few.

                  > Is a program like lynx which offers better accessibility features than mainstream browsers not worth distributing because it's niche?

                  Its trivial to understand why this is a bad argument (appeal to emotion)

                  • aaploka year ago
                    > How many people would know what Lynx is. My guess is very few.

                    And mine is that it's more than you think. Especially when compared to the number of people who know what vi is. Neither of us have figures to prove our points. My indirect argument was that the fact that lynx is included by default hints that I am not entirely wrong. Your response to that is essentially that distros packagers don't know what they are doing. I won't get in a debate on the competency of people and accept this opinion as yours.

                    > You took my argument and basically butchered the main point.

                    This was absolutely not my intention. If I misunderstood your point, please correct me and tell me how I should have read it.

                    > Its trivial to understand why this is a bad argument (appeal to emotion)

                    No. The argument for including software that have specific accessibility features is not to appeal to your emotions. The reason for having accessible software is that, as niche as it may be it is useful. No one should care how non-disabled users feel about this, and certainly no one should care whether you or I think this is too niche.

          • michaelmiora year ago
            Generally agreed. I think unique names for projects are nice, but unless the projects have very similar goals, I think having the same name isn't really a big deal.
          • nailera year ago
            SEO.
        • BrouteMinoua year ago
          [flagged]
      • spl757a year ago
        $ apt-cache dump | grep '^Package' | awk '{print $2}' | wc -l && apt-cache dump | grep '^Package' | awk '{print $2}' | uniq | wc -l

        152007

        152007

        You can call it lynx all day long, but it won't be lynx in the Ubuntu repositories as that name is taken, and as you can see above, there are no duplicates.

        • sanxiyna year ago
          Since it is a library, it won't be named lynx anyway even if there is no name collision. D3 is packaged as libjs-d3, for example.
          • spl757a year ago
            Yeah that's true.
        • Kwpolskaa year ago
          Oh no!

          Anyway...

      • jaredwienera year ago
        Try running NextJS on your NeXT
    • fngjdflmdflga year ago
      >Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

      Name collisions are so common that the guidelines tell us not to talk about them. Why would you assume that this is intentional? And then the rest of your post is just about different tui browsers? How is this the top comment?

      • woleiuma year ago
        oops, sorry!
        • fngjdflmdflga year ago
          Likewise sorry for writing what was on re-reading a rude comment.
    • nemothekida year ago
      >Are we intentionally reusing project names now? Lynx [1] is a fairly popular tui browser.

      The kids who built this are probably younger than the Lynx project and likely don't know it exists.

    • Klonoara year ago
      Project name reuse has been a thing since the dawn of projects.
    • tpoachera year ago
      It's not even a good name for a cross platform tiktok network.

      I would have stolen a name like Transmission, or Bing instead.

    • classichasclassa year ago
      Lynx absolutely supports TLS (2.8 and later, possibly earlier).
      • zimpenfisha year ago
        > Lynx absolutely supports TLS

        And has done (in various forms) since at least 2001!

    • jakerepsa year ago
      I can't tell if this is satire or a hidden advertisement for various tui browsers? A project that is a "popular tui browser" (for the literally dozens of people that use tui browsers?) does not have ownership claim to the name of a big cat genus which has 4k+ other results on GitHub with the same name.
      • FuriouslyAdrifta year ago
        Lynx pre-dates Mosaic... "As of 2025, it is the oldest web browser still being maintained"

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)

      • jjmarra year ago
        It's not even the only TUI browser pronounced that way. See: links

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_(web_browser)

      • mftrhua year ago
        Lynx is a well-known project which has been around for far longer than Github even existed - since 1992, in fact - which is in any case irrelevant, since it's not developed on GitHub: the commits for ThomasDickey/lynx-snapshots are snapshots of the code from the website proper.
        • jakerepsa year ago
          Removed the star count as any sort of “evidence” to popularity - the point still stands though. It feels absurd to claim a name being “reused,” or implied stolen, when the name is a generic animal name.
          • whstla year ago
            Bikeshedding about names, article titles and tangential annoyances is HN’s favorite pastime, and an easy way to get karma. As old as the hills.
            • v9va year ago
              I believe it's spelled as "pastime" :)
      • woleiuma year ago
        i am not affiliated with any of the projects, its just what i use.
    • jamespoa year ago
      Just tried to browse the web on my Atari Lynx.
    • Apocryphona year ago
      Indeed, they should rename it to Jaguar.
    • Creator44a year ago
      [dead]
  • polyranda year ago
    I remember listening to a Syntax FM[0] with Zack Jackson from ByteDance, which mentioned this framework briefly. Some quotes and notes from that part of the podcast:

    - All ByteDance products, even native apps, are web-based

    - They have an in-house framework called "Lynx" which is essentially their version of React Native[1]

    - "All apps are Lynx apps. Everything is a Lynx app. It's all backed off the same stack."

    - This approach allows them to maintain a unified architecture while having specialized teams focus on different aspects (algorithms, compiler, kernel, etc.)

    [0]: https://syntax.fm/show/860/module-federation-microfrontends-...

    [1]: The one being released, in the podcast they confirmed they would be open-sourcing it this year

    • suzakusa year ago
      I work at ByteDance (though not for long). Most of the "sexy" part of the app is native, or C++ crossplatform for things that would normally be in C++. I'm not sure I'm allowed to share what Lynx is used on, but it's a small subset of the app.
      • suzakusa year ago
        I went to watch the podcast – he's heavily overplaying how much cross platform web dev is used on the native platforms. He doesn't seem to be in the biggest channels for both iOS and Android developers (the largest 'IOS'/'Android' release/global channels).
      • NoahKAndrewsa year ago
        Makes sense, the announcement blog said it was only specific screens, such as search.
      • polyranda year ago
        Thanks. What do you mean with "native" (vs. C++)?

        What I assumed from the podcast is that there's a lot of internal reusable tools in C++, and the web-based stuff is mostly about the UI layer.

        Is there a lot of WASM to use both at the same time?

        • suzakusa year ago
          Native as in Swift/Objective C (iOS) or Kotlin/Java (Android). Probably 99% of the UI (and lower layers, outside of specialty cases!) is based in that. C++ is used for typical high performance cases; e.g. Video rendering (though there's more than that).

          There's a lot of internal tools. I don't know what they're written in. I would not be surprised if it's Lynx, but I'm a mobile developer on the TikTok app, and haven't ever looked into it.

          I haven't come across any WASM in my time here, but I'm not in a position to declare that it doesn't exist.

  • hnlurker22a year ago
    Apple and Google need to talk. They need to collaborate on something truly native to put an end to these bloated frameworks. My goodness the amount of engineering work being put into terrible mobile experiences is worse than how much Nasa is spending to look for water in space.

    Any mobile app designers out there think TikTok has good UX? I mean scrolling video is great, but everything else?

    • wiseowisea year ago
      Google already did the talking for both of them. It’s called Flutter.
      • swiftcodera year ago
        Ah, yes, the framework from the dominant browser vendor, that happens to eschew everything good about the browser, to achieve marginally-improved typography, by rendering the whole site in a canvas tag. That should certainly be our #1 model for cross-platform development.
        • wiseowisea year ago
          I don’t advocate for using web target, Flutter is much nicer than whatever clusterfuck Apple and Google call native toolkits.
      • ashishba year ago
        Does Google use Flutter for building Gmail, Google or other major mobile apps?
        • efxzsha year ago
          Yes they do. Google Pay or Google Earth are using Flutter. They also contribute to Kotlin Multiplatform and use it for Google Workspace (gmail, drive, etc)
          • hnlurker22a year ago
            Flutter and Kotlin Multiplatform are two different frameworks. Flutter is mainly for cross platform UI. KM is mainly for common-core (or common business logic). My point still stands that these are all bloated and ugly.

            Google products are an absolute mess. They create android, KM, and Flutter for mobile development. They also created MLKit, MediaPipe, and TensorFlow for AI. They're all over the place with their solutions

        • Alifatiska year ago
          Look for the headline "Flutter at Google"

          https://flutter.dev/showcase

    • endofreacha year ago
      > Any mobile app designers out there think TikTok has good UX? I mean scrolling video is great, but everything else?

      You wouldn't ask a doctor if she thinks crack is great, right?

      • conductra year ago
        Silly nitpick but wouldn't this be more like asking a crack dealer if this particular crack is great? No matter what their answer, the fact there is a crack epidemic tells you the real answer. People aren't always wanting top shelf crack, some times the hood crack is the good crack.
    • nsonhaa year ago
      "We should repeat the same code in multiple languages" is a pretty weird thing for professional pride. Try to be a better engineer instead of promoting gate keepers' platforms and give up "quality" as their responsibility.
  • xnxa year ago
    TikTok is impressively multi-device. It works well on Android, iPhone, Android TV, and web.

    Compared to Instagram, where the web version has always been behind the mobile version, TikTok really seems to make each device version the best possible.

    • vips7La year ago
      I'm pretty sure for Instagram it's by design, not because of their technical stack.
      • serial_deva year ago
        Instagram web is so bad that it’s the only logical explanation.
        • kridsdale1a year ago
          I have worked in the Instagram ios source. It is FUCKING AWFUL.

          They’re impressive in their business success given their code quality.

          • vips7La year ago
            I don’t think I’ve ever worked anywhere that had decent code quality
          • qingcharlesa year ago
            There isn't even a real iPad app (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
            • swiftcodera year ago
              Worth considering that this is an explicit business decision (not enough iPad users to justify the development effort), versus a technical one. There were various builds with proper iPad layout floating around internally, but no one ever got the management buy-in to polish it enough to ship.
      • noveltyaccounta year ago
        They want you to use the app because it's harder to adblock in apps than on the web.
  • diggana year ago
    Got curious enough to wanting to give it a go, so on the quickstart page it says:

    > Lynx Explorer is a sandbox for trying out Lynx quickly.

    And then it asks me to use either the iOS Simulator or the Android Simulator, which based on experience, neither are made for anything resembling "quickly".

    Anyone know if there are any "pure-web" instructions around? Skimmed around the docs, website and repository but didn't find anything that looked like it was made for just web setup.

    • hkalbasia year ago
      > iOS Simulator or the Android Simulator, which based on experience, neither are made for anything resembling "quickly".

      It's not adb / avd or some device emulator. It's an app that you install on your device, and then it can load your app from your development device using a link. I was able to run it in 5 minutes without having android studio or any other android development kits on my laptop.

      • Oxodaoa year ago
        Thats neat. It makes me think of expo [0] that does it in the same way, pretty useful to try stuff quickly, but forces to go though their servers.

        [0] https://expo.dev/

  • andrewstuarta year ago
    I recently looked closely at cross platform mobile mobile development.

    Despite distrusting Google and despite knowing react I chose flutter.

    I want something fast with close to total cross platform compatibility.

    Net Maui is not well spoken of. React native seems slow.

    The only real choice fir my needs is flutter.

    Let’s see how long it holds up.

    • steveva year ago
      Try ReactLynx first.
  • Nelkinsa year ago
    I see there's Lynx for Web[0]. Does that also adhere to the two-threads model (one for UI, one for background)? Also, is this something that React/Native may adopt itself one day? Curious to know if this is a technique that may be adopted by the React ecoystem itself, or if it's just too far outside the bounds of what React is supposed to handle.

    [0] https://github.com/lynx-family/lynx-stack/tree/main/packages...

  • gorbyparka year ago
    Seems interesting. Coming from the react native world, competition is good! This seems to have a from scratch layout engine, which is pretty exciting. It looks like it supports some of the more recent/advanced CSS features. It also has a javascript engine based on QuickJS.

    I can't wait for a more technical deep dive into how this works and compares to react native.

  • pjmlpa year ago
    I see very little native on that.
  • klabb3a year ago
    Native now means mobile only? That’s a depressing state of affairs. Cross platform and then not even mentioning you’re limited to 2 out of the 5 more popular OSs. Just say you rewrote React Native if that’s all.
    • SparkyMcUnicorna year ago
      Also supports the web, and it looks like they might intend to support more platforms.

      `readonly platform: 'Android' | 'iOS' | 'macOS' | 'pc' | 'headless';`

      > Not only is the core engine of Lynx framework-agnostic, but it's also agnostic to host platforms and rendering backends ... expand to even more platforms, such as Desktop, TV, or IoT devices.

  • qq99a year ago
    > However, Lynx isn't limited to React

    I think this could be huge! I'd love to see a SolidJS version

    • synergy20a year ago
      the code examples etc though is 100% react at this point. for me I would like to see a vue.js version.
  • tommicaa year ago
    Quickly tested it out, and gotta say that I enjoy being able to write just normal CSS to style things. The getting started process is really speedy.
  • henninga year ago
    https://lynxjs.org/ doesn't scroll smoothly.
    • exikyuta year ago
      What browser/platform?

      Flutter apps don't scroll at 30/60fps on my aging Mate 20 Pro, but that website is fine for me in Chrome.

      • spookiea year ago
        To be completely honest there is no reason for anything 2D on the web to run badly on any machine over 200 bucks released in the last 15 years.
      • henninga year ago
        Chrome on a 2019 Intel Mac.
  • x1unixa year ago
    Interesting if Lynx uses host OS widgets like RN does or renders stuff itself like Flutter.
  • mytenthaccounta year ago
    Support for CSS transitions (and animations) on a native UI thread would be huge. React Native Renanimated is cumbersome and painful to use everywhere.

    Sadly I finally ditched my MacBook for a Linux PC since Expo/EAS has liberated me from needing Xcode. I won’t be able to try this out for iOS development.

    • a year ago
      undefined
  • kseca year ago
    So it is basically a rebranded React Native? Or completely different?

    Or could someone ELI5 / TL;DR? The whole blog post is basically saying how good Lynx is and what problem it solves without telling me much technical details.

  • rubicksa year ago
    No. No, it isn't. Lynx is a browser I use in the terminal. This is something else.
  • hackapea year ago
    [dead]
  • ChrisArchitecta year ago
    Not to be confused with Lynx Browser: The Land That Time Revived https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43119238
  • KaoruAoiShihoa year ago
    Would be interested in using this if not for the lack of LLM support.

    Can you also explain what the advantages are over React Native?

    • lyu07282a year ago
      > Would be interested in using this if not for the lack of LLM support.

      I'm not even in the anti-LLM crowd, but that sentence made me shake my head in disgust

      • gejosea year ago
        How so?
        • whoknowsidonta year ago
          Primarily because the sentence doesn't even make any sense? It seems like rage bait.
    • hooverda year ago
      Lynx doesn't support LLMs or there's not documentation?
      • alaqa year ago
        I bet they mean LLMs don't know the syntax, and won't be helpful in writing code for it.
        • swiftcodera year ago
          By this criteria, we can literally never release any new programming languages or frameworks ever again...

          If LLMs are going to be as useful as they claim, they have to be smart/flexible enough to adapt to new information.