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Bob Beck (OpenBSD) on why vi should stay vi (2006)

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=115820462402673&w=2
1•birdculture•1m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Glimpsh – exploring gaze input inside the terminal

https://github.com/dchrty/glimpsh
1•dochrty•2m ago•0 comments

The Optima-l Situation: A deep dive into the classic humanist sans-serif

https://micahblachman.beehiiv.com/p/the-optima-l-situation
1•subdomain•2m ago•0 comments

Barn Owls Know When to Wait

https://blog.typeobject.com/posts/2026-barn-owls-know-when-to-wait/
1•fintler•2m ago•0 comments

Implementing TCP Echo Server in Rust [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjOBZ_Xzuio
1•sheerluck•3m ago•0 comments

LicGen – Offline License Generator (CLI and Web UI)

1•tejavvo•6m ago•0 comments

Service Degradation in West US Region

https://azure.status.microsoft/en-gb/status?gsid=5616bb85-f380-4a04-85ed-95674eec3d87&utm_source=...
2•_____k•6m ago•0 comments

The Janitor on Mars

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1998/10/26/the-janitor-on-mars
1•evo_9•8m ago•0 comments

Bringing Polars to .NET

https://github.com/ErrorLSC/Polars.NET
2•CurtHagenlocher•10m ago•0 comments

Adventures in Guix Packaging

https://nemin.hu/guix-packaging.html
1•todsacerdoti•11m ago•0 comments

Show HN: We had 20 Claude terminals open, so we built Orcha

1•buildingwdavid•11m ago•0 comments

Your Best Thinking Is Wasted on the Wrong Decisions

https://www.iankduncan.com/engineering/2026-02-07-your-best-thinking-is-wasted-on-the-wrong-decis...
1•iand675•11m ago•0 comments

Warcraftcn/UI – UI component library inspired by classic Warcraft III aesthetics

https://www.warcraftcn.com/
1•vyrotek•12m ago•0 comments

Trump Vodka Becomes Available for Pre-Orders

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kirkogunrinde/2025/12/01/trump-vodka-becomes-available-for-pre-order...
1•stopbulying•14m ago•0 comments

Velocity of Money

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_of_money
1•gurjeet•16m ago•0 comments

Stop building automations. Start running your business

https://www.fluxtopus.com/automate-your-business
1•valboa•20m ago•1 comments

You can't QA your way to the frontier

https://www.scorecard.io/blog/you-cant-qa-your-way-to-the-frontier
1•gk1•22m ago•0 comments

Show HN: PalettePoint – AI color palette generator from text or images

https://palettepoint.com
1•latentio•22m ago•0 comments

Robust and Interactable World Models in Computer Vision [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9B4kkaGOozA
2•Anon84•26m ago•0 comments

Nestlé couldn't crack Japan's coffee market.Then they hired a child psychologist

https://twitter.com/BigBrainMkting/status/2019792335509541220
1•rmason•27m ago•1 comments

Notes for February 2-7

https://taoofmac.com/space/notes/2026/02/07/2000
2•rcarmo•29m ago•0 comments

Study confirms experience beats youthful enthusiasm

https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/07/boomers_vs_zoomers_workplace/
2•Willingham•36m ago•0 comments

The Big Hunger by Walter J Miller, Jr. (1952)

https://lauriepenny.substack.com/p/the-big-hunger
2•shervinafshar•37m ago•0 comments

The Genus Amanita

https://www.mushroomexpert.com/amanita.html
1•rolph•42m ago•0 comments

We have broken SHA-1 in practice

https://shattered.io/
10•mooreds•43m ago•3 comments

Ask HN: Was my first management job bad, or is this what management is like?

1•Buttons840•44m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: How to Reduce Time Spent Crimping?

2•pinkmuffinere•45m ago•0 comments

KV Cache Transform Coding for Compact Storage in LLM Inference

https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01815
1•walterbell•50m ago•0 comments

A quantitative, multimodal wearable bioelectronic device for stress assessment

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-67747-9
1•PaulHoule•52m ago•0 comments

Why Big Tech Is Throwing Cash into India in Quest for AI Supremacy

https://www.wsj.com/world/india/why-big-tech-is-throwing-cash-into-india-in-quest-for-ai-supremac...
3•saikatsg•52m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

The World Of dBASE (1984) [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYU3CQomE5M
27•TMWNN•9mo ago

Comments

actionfromafar•9mo ago
The video quality is great. U-matic tape? (Or LaserDisc? That would be expensive to press, but the snow 19 minutes in looks like disc-rot.)
jansan•9mo ago
Hey, we have a great product that everyone likes. Let's push a totally buggy and unfinished version IV out in a hurry and see how customers will react...
pjmlp•9mo ago
dBase III Plus was my introduction to the world of database programming, followed by Clipper Summer '87, and then the C++ OOP influence on Clipper 5.x.

Also it took a while to get my head around SQL, after starting this way, and the way they did record navigation and search.

dardeaup•9mo ago
Pretty much the same for me. FoxPro followed dBase III Plus in my case and then on to Clipper 5.x.

It was delightfully easy to build fully functioning text mode applications. I especially liked the picture clauses on form reads. When I later learned about curses it was a huge disappointment. curses/ncurses with tips from the xBase world would be great for those that need to write terminal applications.

kragen•9mo ago
What were those like? I never used any xBase. How was it different?
dardeaup•9mo ago
To display text it was as simple as:

@ row, col say "First Name:"

to draw a box:

@ top_row, top_left to bottom_row, bottom_right

there was built-in support for menus.

there were commands to save the screen to variable and then restore the screen.

main_screen = savescreen

restscreen(main_screen)

Everything was really simple. Forms were super easy. There was a command of the form:

@ row, col say "First name:" get first_name @ row+1, col say "Last name:" get last_name read

kragen•9mo ago
Interesting. So you put a series of commands one after the other on the same line of code with no delimiters?
dardeaup•9mo ago
No, sorry, that was me not formatting properly with my comments.

Each statement would be on a separate line:

    @ x, y say "First name"
    @ col2, y get first_name
    @ x, y+2 say "Last name"
    @ col2, y+2 get last_name
    read
kragen•9mo ago
I see. So that would generate a form that you could tab around in and enter data into?
mercurialuser•9mo ago
Yes. Going back to the top or confirming tha data when exiting the last field was a setting. You may have multiple commands on one row but you have to separate them with a ;
marcodiego•9mo ago
Clipper continued popular in Brazil until early 2000's. It was sometimes called 'software de locadora' (video-rental software) or 'software de farmácia' (drugstore software) since they were so often used in these two cases. During the late 90's there was a wave of replacement of such software with applications made in Delphi.

For some time, this world was fully proprietary in Brazil and you had to pay big bucks for tools or resort to unlicensed copies (piracy). Since the second option was unavailable for the public sector and bigger companies, this created an horrible dependency on proprietary inferior software tools that took around a decade to heal. It is a good thing Linux was so successful in some many points of the stack.

An anecdata: a few years ago I bought something in a drugstore that was running a Linux desktop with DosBox running something in Clipper. I also saw Linux desktops accessing something running in Clipper, in apparently a DOS (virtual?) machine, remotely through telnet. Funny but somewhat ugly reality that is fortunately becoming extinct.

Things only got marginally different (better) when during the first decade of the 2000's systems started to go on-line, mostly with LAMP winning against ASP and then, more recently, with the advent of Android apps coupled with cloud services.

mercurialuser•9mo ago
You can still compile dbase/Clipper programs with Harbour, github hosted, open source, Clipper 5.2 compatible compiler that runs almost everywhere, from native windows 64 bit to mac, raspberry, linux, embedded appliances, anywhere there is a c compiler available.

The language has been slightly expanded and with external libraries you may have gui programs (win32, qt, gtk) l, connect to databases (sqlite, mariadb,postgres...) create PDF, excel files.

I have a program started in 1986 on dbase III, then ported to Clipper and now to Harbour...

lakkal•9mo ago
I'd never heard of Harbor (https://harbour.github.io/), thanks!

I still work on software that started out in dBase II in 1986 or so, then went to FoxBase+ when I started in 1988, then Foxpro and now Visual Foxpro.

matheusmoreira•9mo ago
My father uses Clipper software in his company to this day. I know some Delphi programmers as well.
pjmlp•9mo ago
Delphi is still alive enough in Germany to keep an yearly conference going.

https://entwickler-konferenz.de/en/

shallichange•9mo ago
Same story here. I was 12.