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Kinetic typography: the what, why, and how

https://www.linearity.io/blog/kinetic-typography/
1•argee•40s ago•0 comments

Symposia AI

https://www.trysymposiaai.com/landing
1•CarlosEdu•1m ago•1 comments

Solving CartPole in 8 Weights

https://cartpole.neocities.org/
1•georgehotz•2m ago•0 comments

Magical Realism: "Northern Exposure" 25 Years Later (2015)

https://www.rogerebert.com/streaming/magical-realism-nothern-exposure-25-years-later
1•walterbell•3m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Wyndup – share a live countdown with your podcast guest

https://wyndup.net
1•ardwino•7m ago•0 comments

Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes, simplified: zone awareness, restarts, and mTLS

https://www.elastic.co/search-labs/blog/elasticsearch-kubernetes-zone-awareness-restarts-mtls
1•eigenBasis•7m ago•0 comments

Jane Street's approach to AI adoption throughout their SDLC [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUYP4C29yCw
2•devdoshi•9m ago•1 comments

Brovan: Binary user-mode emulator for x86_64

https://github.com/AdvDebug/Brovan
1•AdvDebugy•10m ago•0 comments

WikiProject Editor Retention

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Editor_Retention
1•sshh12•12m ago•0 comments

A Compression Tool for LLM Reads. Est. 60-95% Fewer Tokens

https://github.com/chopratejas/headroom
1•botacode•12m ago•0 comments

North America's largest commuter rail system faces a potential shutdown

https://apnews.com/article/lirr-new-york-commuter-rail-strike-union-eefab0d1f91470934fb89bd1809d0a94
2•petethomas•15m ago•1 comments

Random.website

https://random.website
2•npilk•15m ago•0 comments

Humanoid robots won't surprise us when they arrive

https://philipotoole.com/humanoid-robots-wont-surprise-us-when-they-appear/
2•otoolep•19m ago•0 comments

Thorchain halts trading after $10M cross-chain exploitRUNE token drops 12%

https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2026/05/15/thorchain-halts-trading-after-usd10-million-cross-chain-...
1•LUZUVYY•23m ago•0 comments

Engineer creates starwars inspired air bike

https://volonaut.com
1•nirkalimi•24m ago•0 comments

How to bypass Anti-Bots in 2026

https://roundproxies.com/blog/how-to-bypass-anti-bots/
2•majorchord•26m ago•0 comments

Python by Example Using Cloudflare Dynamic Workers

https://www.pythonbyexample.dev/
2•adewale•26m ago•1 comments

Lost in Translation: Text Message Spoofing via Email [pdf]

https://sumanthvrao.github.io/papers/rao-oakland-2026.pdf
2•yechs•27m ago•1 comments

New quantum algorithm solves "impossible" materials problem in seconds

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/05/260512202355.htm
2•maxloh•27m ago•0 comments

What Is Rails-Way?

https://paweldabrowski.com/farewell-to-rails-way/what-is-rails-way
2•thunderbong•30m ago•0 comments

SpaceX targets June 11 IPO pricing, picks Nasdaq for historic market debut

https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2026/05/15/spacex-targets-june-11-ipo-pricing-picks-nasdaq-for-h...
1•LUZUVYY•30m ago•0 comments

Auto Rebaser v2 – browser-side GitHub PR housekeeping, now multi-account

https://github.com/bradygrapentine/auto-rebaser
1•bgrapentine•34m ago•0 comments

Legacy Update for Windows 8.1 for x64-based Systems

https://legacyupdate.net/download-center/download/51025/update-for-windows-8.1-x64-kb3132080
1•kristianp•35m ago•0 comments

NextEra and Dominion in talks over tie-up to create $400B US utility giant

https://giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/actions/redeem/7f0f2008-4160-45f9-8c93-80f8b4318669
3•alephnerd•38m ago•0 comments

Is China using fentanyl as a weapon against the United States?

https://en.unav.edu/web/global-affairs/esta-china-usando-el-fentanilo-como-arma-contra-estados-un...
5•Stevvo•44m ago•5 comments

China's unfinished buildings have created stranded assets with substantial costs

https://www.cell.com/one-earth/fulltext/S2590-3322(26)00050-3
2•littlexsparkee•44m ago•0 comments

Gaps in AI Development Closing 2.1B in Pain

https://news.novonavis.com/builders
1•capagg•49m ago•1 comments

Volkswagen Detects CI Server Tests and Ensures They Pass (2015)

https://github.com/auchenberg/volkswagen
3•birdculture•49m ago•0 comments

'No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Package Manager Where This Regularly Happens

https://kevinpatel.xyz/posts/no-way-to-prevent-this/
14•alligatorplum•52m ago•0 comments

Picollo: Modern HDR histogram and PMU counters for .NET

https://hotforknowledge.com/2026/05/15/introducing-picollo/
1•buybackoff•52m ago•1 comments
Open in hackernews

I Miss Visual Basic

https://micro.webology.dev/2025/05/11/i-miss-visual-basic/
19•speckx•1y ago

Comments

lysace•1y 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•1y ago
Some miss old handy tools, others miss the old gatekeeping.
lysace•1y ago
Gatekeeping or not, it was a useful indicator. There was so much crap.
rbanffy•1y ago
I’ve seen terrible programs written in all sorts of languages.
lysace•1y ago
And there were no patterns, particulary between 1992-1995, for MS Windows apps?
tptacek•1y ago
Bracketing this with '92-'95 makes the claim so much funnier.
rbanffy•1y 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•1y 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•12mo ago
HyperCard, at least initially, didn’t have color, so it somewhat limited how horrendous the UI could be.
tptacek•1y ago
[Nobody][1] [ever][2] [wrote][3] [crap][4] [in][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sendmail] [C][6].
guidedlight•1y 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•1y 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•1y 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•1y 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•1y 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•1y 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•1y 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•1y ago
Why not Delphi? And why not Lazarus?
mattl•1y 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•1y 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•1y 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•1y ago
You are confusing platform-specific(!) GUI frameworks with the languages themselves, which have been long "divorced" from the platform they initially targeted.
jperoutek•1y 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•1y ago
IIRC, VB.NET disregarded the 20+ years of VB developers for the most part.
nom•1y ago
VB will always have a special place in my heart.

  On Error Resume Next
dyl000•1y ago
I was a real big fan of vb.net! Built so much with it.
sph•1y 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.