frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Geosmin: The distinct earthy or musty odor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geosmin
1•gurjeet•3m ago•0 comments

Laguna XS.2 and Laguna M.1 by Poolside

https://poolside.ai/blog/introducing-laguna-xs2-m1
1•ashvardanian•3m ago•0 comments

Greece to ban anonymity on social media

https://www.euractiv.com/news/greece-to-ban-anonymity-on-social-media/
3•01-_-•4m ago•0 comments

Creating a Color Palette from an Image

https://amandahinton.com/blog/creating-a-color-palette-from-an-image
1•evakhoury•5m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Is it just me or is Claude Code getting worst?

2•e-nouri•6m ago•0 comments

Union accuses Apple of unlawful discrimination against represented workers

https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/union-accuses-apple-of-unlawful-discrimination-against-represen...
2•01-_-•7m ago•0 comments

Supabase is patching defaults fast; here's the audit that drove it – DIE ZEIT

https://www.zeit.de/digital/datenschutz/2026-04/vibe-coding-websites-ki-datenschutz-supabase
1•chelm•7m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Credit card super app – track credits, find lounges, add offers (iOS)

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/perkycredits/id6755416376
1•pwillp•8m ago•0 comments

My Nix Config Is Intimate

https://www.scd31.com/posts/nix-files-are-intimate
1•evakhoury•9m ago•0 comments

Show HN: We put ZK attribute proofs inside x402 payment headers

1•aggre•9m ago•0 comments

Longevity Science Is Overhyped. But This Research Could Change Humanity

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/27/magazine/cell-rejuventation-biotech-longevity-research-altos-l...
1•marojejian•9m ago•1 comments

Why Spotify has no button to filter out AI music

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd7jpg4w181o
1•Brajeshwar•9m ago•1 comments

Tell HN: WA Real Estate Agent Sees Mass Exodus of Entrepreneurs

2•silexia•10m ago•0 comments

Laguna XS.2 and M.1

https://poolside.ai/blog/laguna-a-deeper-dive
2•tosh•10m ago•1 comments

PostLearn: Towards a Learned Index for PostgreSQL

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3805687.3806257
1•cernocky•11m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Create Professional Excel Files with AI Agents

https://zspreadsheet.com
1•Zavora•11m ago•0 comments

GitHub RCE Vulnerability: CVE-2026-3854 Breakdown

https://www.wiz.io/blog/github-rce-vulnerability-cve-2026-3854
2•bo0tzz•13m ago•0 comments

A Brief History of Lab Notebooks

https://www.asimov.press/p/lab-notebooks
1•cratermoon•14m ago•0 comments

Continuing the story of early DOS development

https://opensource.microsoft.com/blog/2026/04/28/continuing-the-story-of-early-dos-development/
3•oldnetguy•14m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Loom – A Markdown knowledge graph for better coding-agent execution

https://github.com/z3z1ma/agent-loom
1•z3z1ma•14m ago•0 comments

Forcing dark mode in PDFs for Firefox

https://drgrizz.xyz/firefox_pdf_dark.html
3•Davidbrcz•14m ago•1 comments

Affordability Still Dominates Americans' Financial Worries

https://news.gallup.com/poll/708905/affordability-dominates-americans-financial-worries.aspx
2•cbg0•15m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Mvndvs TERRARUM – A Renaissance-style 3D world map

https://world.gjlmotea.com/
1•gjlmotea•15m ago•0 comments

Israel sent "Iron Dome" system and troops to UAE for Iran defense

https://www.axios.com/2026/04/26/israel-iron-dome-uae
2•janandonly•15m ago•0 comments

Warp (terminal) is now open-source

https://twitter.com/zachlloydtweets/status/2049154460039979268
1•swah•16m ago•0 comments

VPinPlay – VPinball rating, playtime and score tracking

https://www.vpinplay.com/
1•bentaho•16m ago•0 comments

Sony silently rolls out 30-day online DRM check-in for PlayStation digital games

https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/playstation/sony-rolls-out-30-day-online-drm-check-in-fo...
1•gloxkiqcza•17m ago•0 comments

Barge rescue attempt for Timmy the whale in Germany gets go-ahead

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/28/timmy-whale-barge-rescue-attempt-germany
1•Tomte•17m ago•0 comments

Securing the Git push pipeline: Responding to a critical remote code execution

https://github.blog/security/securing-the-git-push-pipeline-responding-to-a-critical-remote-code-...
1•samtrack2019•17m ago•0 comments

Cybersec is a thankless job: expanding workload and shrinking pay packet

https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/27/from_a_massive_skills_gap/
7•rustoo•17m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

I Miss Visual Basic

https://micro.webology.dev/2025/05/11/i-miss-visual-basic/
19•speckx•11mo ago

Comments

lysace•11mo ago
There has been so much VB love here lately. Here are some counterpoints:

In the 90s, when you saw that a Windows app needed Visual Basic DLLs, you kind of knew that the app in question was very likely created by a complete amateur.

The best apps tended to be tiny and written in C by wizards.

pvg•11mo ago
Some miss old handy tools, others miss the old gatekeeping.
lysace•11mo ago
Gatekeeping or not, it was a useful indicator. There was so much crap.
rbanffy•11mo ago
I’ve seen terrible programs written in all sorts of languages.
lysace•11mo ago
And there were no patterns, particulary between 1992-1995, for MS Windows apps?
tptacek•11mo ago
Bracketing this with '92-'95 makes the claim so much funnier.
rbanffy•11mo ago
One thing VB allowed was horrible visual design. When you wrote a Windows app in C or C++, you are happy when the button appears in the UI and you leave it alone at that point. VB allowed people to customise their buttons with all sorts of colours and patterns no sane UI designer would attempt.
pvg•11mo ago
Same with Hypercard, perhaps even more so since Hypercard let you respond to UI gestures the standard UI didn't really use like mouseovers.
rbanffy•11mo ago
HyperCard, at least initially, didn’t have color, so it somewhat limited how horrendous the UI could be.
tptacek•11mo ago
[Nobody][1] [ever][2] [wrote][3] [crap][4] [in][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sendmail] [C][6].
guidedlight•11mo ago
Most apps in the 90’s/early 00’s were tiny. They did one thing well.

It’s in that context, VB did really well. The thing that VB didn’t do well is scale due to language limitations, but for tiny apps it didn’t matter.

mattl•11mo ago
When you go to a modern website and you see it downloads 900kb of JavaScript just to show you the homepage, how do you feel about that?

I was a VB developer for a few years. I'm trying to remember the name of the tool we used to bundle VB applications into a single binary. It wasn't a Microsoft tool.

lysace•11mo ago
> When you go to a modern website and you see it downloads 900kb of JavaScript just to show you the homepage, how do you feel about that?

That shipping sites like that should cause you to pay some kind of tax. Use that tax income to invest in software security.

mattl•11mo ago
I saw a thread the other day on creating a website without JavaScript and so many people were saying it couldn’t be done.
rbanffy•11mo ago
I like the idea of an IDE with integrated GUI builder. We had a couple - I used NetBeans to make Java ME applications for phones.

Shouldn’t be too hard to build a framework that loads a GUI definition and auto-binds UI events to functions according to a naming convention. I wouldn’t be surprised if there isn’t already such a thing for Python.

guidedlight•11mo ago
VB UI’s tended to be fixed and designed for a world where everyone ran a 4:3 640x480 VGA monitor. This made VB’s UI builder very easy to achieve good results.

I’m not sure the same approach would work today.

rbanffy•11mo ago
Just replace pixels with millimetres and we are safe.

At some point it got anchors in the widgets so you could position it at a distance of another control or the window border (at least). The same effect can be done with layout managers and other tricks.

jenkstom•11mo ago
Why not Delphi? And why not Lazarus?
mattl•11mo ago
> Why not Lazarus?

I've never heard of this or if I have, I don't remember it.

It's an open source IDE that's Delphi compatible. The author of the article is trying to make a Mac app.

* Downloads are from an ad-ridden SourceForge page.

* I download Lazarus I don't get a nice little Mac app... I get a folder full of stuff

* Starting the app, macOS tells me “lazarus” is damaged and can’t be opened. You should move it to the Trash.

* On the project screenshots page, ReactOS is shown before macOS and macOS screenshots are from a while ago.

Contrast that experience with... VSCodium, the open source community version of VSCode.

* Download is from GitHub, no ads.

* Downloads a disk image with a familiar pattern

* Drag the VSCodium app bundle to my Applications folder

* I get prompted if I want to open it as it's something downloaded... and VSCodium opens (slowly at first) -- up pops a message saying I've downloaded the x86 version by mistake and I should download the ARM64 version and there's a link to do it... downloading the correct version and it opens instantly.

--

All of this to say... with any project, open source or proprietary there is a sense of native/correctly packaged for your OS that's obvious, and if a project doesn't do that I wonder if anyone is using it for that OS.

TrackerFF•11mo ago
VB.NET works just fine, no? Granted it is 13-14 years since I last time touched VB.NET, but slapping together apps in visual studio was a breeze. If something serious hasn't happened since then, it should still be easy.
gschizas•11mo ago
Modern VB.NET (and C#) suffer from overcomplication, from trying to do too much. And at the same time, not doing enough.

There are (at least) three ways to make a desktop application (Classic Windows Forms, XAML and other, more different XAML, for what used to be Metro/Windows Store apps). Not all functionality overlaps between them.

There are a plethora of (paid) custom controls which reimplement the wheel for all of those (because Microsoft didn't bundle in some elementary Windows controls)

That being said, I personally miss LightSwitch.

neonsunset•11mo ago
You are confusing platform-specific(!) GUI frameworks with the languages themselves, which have been long "divorced" from the platform they initially targeted.
jperoutek•11mo ago
VB.NET is still a supported platform by microsoft, with the GUI builder and everything. We still use VB.NET exclusively at my current job, for better or for worse. With the addition of tools and libraries like DevExpress, its honestly not a bad setup.
mattl•11mo ago
IIRC, VB.NET disregarded the 20+ years of VB developers for the most part.
nom•11mo ago
VB will always have a special place in my heart.

  On Error Resume Next
dyl000•11mo ago
I was a real big fan of vb.net! Built so much with it.
sph•11mo ago
I started with VB6, but I was not a great fan of the language. Soon, I moved to MSVC++6 with MFC, and even though it had its own RAD system for designing dialogs, it was so half-arsed and limiting compared to Visual Basic. You couldn't even change the foreground colour of a label!

I still remember the envy when I found out Delphi developers were not subject to these silly restrictions, and their GUIs were always so colourful.