Top all-time · #4729
Manas Technology Solutions
Company blog · manas.tech/blogprogramming
Manas Technology Solutions is the company blog at manas.tech, writing about programming. Since 2016, 16 different Hacker News readers have linked it 28 times, most often “Nikola Motor Company: Crystal powered dashboards on the trucks of the future”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-11-03, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (13) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Manas's blog mainly as a source for Crystal language adoption, especially its post on Nikola Motor Company using Crystal in production, and a post on linear algebra in Crystal.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 13 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
We build unconventional software for unconventional organizations, people and contexts.
Most-linked posts?
- Nikola Motor Company: Crystal powered dashboards on the trucks of the future6 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2020-06-09
- /join/2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-05-04
- /projects/crystal/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-03-23
- /2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-06-15
What Hacker News says?
- tooling: there is a VS Code plugin for Crystal ( https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=crystal-... ). There is also syntax highlighting for most popular editors, if you prefer a text-editor to a fully-loaded IDE. - no multi threading: Crystal has lightweight green threads for lightweight concurrency. However, Crystal does have experimental native multi-threading guarded by a compiler flag. The ultima…
Comment linking /projects/crystal/
on “Crystal 1.0 – What to expect”Submitted Nikola Motor Company: Crystal powered dashboards on the trucks of the future as a story · 4 points
HN discussionCrystal is sponsored by https://manas.tech/ and the company actively provides paid support to a number of commercial clients. Breaking changes have been really low lately. I have a couple of shards that work on 1.0 as well as they did on 0.27 or so (that's 10 major dev releases ago). And with 1.0 there is a guarantee to not have breaking changes until 2.0. I don't agree to the other points too, but that's more subje…
Comment linking /
on “Crystal 1.0 – What to expect”Submitted How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site? as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> The current state of Crystal is basically a language for PoC during the week-end, it's far from being ready. That is changing, earlier this year, the Crystal team are working on getting the language stable for 1.0 [0] Companies are already now using Crystal in production, most recently Nikola Motor Company [1]. Surely they wouldn't choose crystal if it was a 'half baked' language. [0] https://crystal-lang.org/2020…
Comment linking /blog/2020/02/11/nikola-motor-company/
on “RBS, Ruby’s new type signature language”Submitted Why Crystal CodeCamp? as a story · 3 points
HN discussionManas.Tech | Full-Stack Engineer | REMOTE (Europe-based) | https://manas.tech Manas.Tech is a team of doers, and what we do is unconventional software. From firefighting drones to city planning tools, and from biotech to Crystal ( https://crystal-lang.org/ ), a programming language for humans and computers. We are looking for more doers, particularly full-stack engineers (leaning heavier towards backend), REMOTE (Eu…
Comment linking /join/
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2021)”Submitted Crystal Compass – Direct Support from the Crystal Team at Manas.Tech as a story · 2 points
HN discussionManas.Tech is a team of doers, and what we do is unconventional software. From firefighting drones to city planning tools, and from biotech to [Crystal]( https://crystal-lang.org/ ), a programming language for humans and computers. We are looking for more doers, particularly full-stack engineers (leaning heavier towards backend), REMOTE (Europe based). Reach out at https://manas.tech/join/
Comment linking /join/
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2021)”Submitted From a DB to JSON with Crystal as a story · 2 points
HN discussionManas.Tech is a team of doers, and what we do is unconventional software. From firefighting drones to city planning tools, and from biotech to Crystal( https://crystal-lang.org/ ), a programming language for humans and computers. We are looking for more doers, particularly full-stack engineers (leaning heavier towards backend), +REMOTE (Europe based). Reach out at https://manas.tech/join/
Comment linking /join/
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2021)”Submitted Static is Back as a story · 2 points
HN discussionCrystal started way before Ruby's static type system[0]. Matz even mentioned Crystal as a study case while explaining what Ruby's static type system would be like - back in 2016[1]. [0] https://manas.tech/blog/2016/04/01/the-story-behind-crystal/ [1] https://youtu.be/1l3U1X3z0CE?t=1755
Comment linking /blog/2016/04/01/the-story-behind-crystal/
on “Crystal 1.1.0”Submitted Recover a transferred GitHub repo's wiki as a story · 1 points
HN discussionYes (and they still are). They wrote a blog post on using Crystal a year ago as well. [0] https://manas.tech/blog/2020/02/11/nikola-motor-company/
Comment linking /blog/2020/02/11/nikola-motor-company/
on “Crystal 1.1.0”Submitted Why do we care about HTTP request methods? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionhttps://manas.tech/blog/2015/10/30/linear-algebra-in-crystal...
Comment linking /blog/2015/10/30/linear-algebra-in-crystal-from-lapack.html
on “Crystal in Production: Diploid”Nikola had some trouble in the past, but it's actually doing remarkably well. They have electric trucks on the streets right now, with Crystal on board. Read more at https://manas.tech/blog/2020/02/11/nikola-motor-company/
Comment linking /blog/2020/02/11/nikola-motor-company/
on “Crystal Programming Language”> Crystal's biggest problem is that it doesn't have the support of a company I thought it was supported by Manas ( https://manas.tech/ ).
Comment linking /
on “Crystal 0.25”I came across this article from one of the Crystal project sponsors which is Nikola Motor Company (NKLA) that uses Crystal for their dashboards on their electric trucks this year. https://manas.tech/blog/2020/02/11/nikola-motor-company/
Comment linking /blog/2020/02/11/nikola-motor-company/
on “Go vs. Crystal Performance”To add some context, back when Reporting Wheel was developed the target audience mainly used feature phones. Even today, we run IVR and SMS campaigns instead in lots of countries (instead of using WhatsApp/Vibe/etc or even using a mobile-friendly web app) due to the smartphone penetration still being relatively low. (I work on Manas.Tech, the partners of InSTEDD that developed the Reporting Wheel and today run natio…
Comment linking /projects/surveda/
on “IT Without Software”(Disclaimer: I work at Manas.Tech, partners of InSTEDD that developed the Reporting Wheel, although I haven't joined the company back when they did it) Hi there! If you've liked the Reporting Wheel, you can see a couple of screenshots (and link to the source code) of the tool built to generate the wheels in Manas' site[0]. We work on lots of projects in unconventional contexts like this one. Feel free to lurk around…
Comment linking /join/
on “IT Without Software”https://manas.tech/blog/2020/02/11/nikola-motor-company/
Comment linking /blog/2020/02/11/nikola-motor-company/
on “Crystal 1.2.2 Is Released”Apparently some of the software in Nikola vehicles was written in Crystal [1]. [1] https://manas.tech/blog/2020/02/11/nikola-motor-company/
Comment linking /blog/2020/02/11/nikola-motor-company/
on “Troubled electric truck maker Nikola files for bankruptcy”> If you are using Crystal, or have taken a look at the language, what are you thoughts on the language? Maybe ask Nikola Corporation? [0] [0] https://manas.tech/blog/2020/02/11/nikola-motor-company/
Comment linking /blog/2020/02/11/nikola-motor-company/
on “Ask HN: The Crystal programming language – what are your impressions?”Clojure (Nubank) Elm (NoRedInk) Crystal (Manas) They hired the Clojure and Elm language creators and extensively use the language. Crystal was created by a (small) company AFAIK[0] and still back it. [0] https://manas.tech/projects/crystal/
Comment linking /projects/crystal/
on “Ask HN: Which programming language(s) are big companies backing?”