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A Mysterious Signal Transfixes Radio Sleuths and Intelligence Experts

https://www.rferl.org/a/mystery-numbers-station-persian-signal-iran-war/33700659.html
1•willvk•5s ago•0 comments

Sergey Brin Funds Misleading Ballot Measure to Negate Wealth Tax

https://prospect.org/2026/03/10/google-brin-california-wealth-tax-ballot-measure/
1•dlipovetsky•49s ago•0 comments

Switch: Benchmarking the Handling of TCIs in Long-Horizon Embodied Scenarios

https://huggingface.co/papers/2511.17649
1•tellarin•6m ago•0 comments

I built a free narrative game inspired by Daniel Kokotajlo's AI 2027 essay

https://ai2028.ai/
1•geniusxp•7m ago•1 comments

Improving instruction hierarchy in frontier LLMs

https://openai.com/index/instruction-hierarchy-challenge
1•surprisetalk•9m ago•0 comments

Microsoft uses plagiarized AI slop flowchart to explain how GitHub works

https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/microsoft-uses-plagiarized-ai-slop-flowchart-to-explain-how-g...
1•gpvos•10m ago•0 comments

Maybe we can keep on coding? pseudo code project

4•EmptyDrum•12m ago•3 comments

MCP Weekly: OpenAI Raises $110B, Anthropic Faces Defense Showdown

https://www.gentoro.com/blog/mcp-weekly-openai-raises-110b-anthropic-faces-defense-showdown-and-g...
1•ashutosh0707•13m ago•0 comments

The State of Rust Allocators in 2026

https://cetra3.github.io/blog/state-of-allocators-2026/
2•cetra3•18m ago•0 comments

Naplan resumes after earlier technical issues paused online testing

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-11/naplan-technical-issues-disrupt-school-testing/106440510
2•langfo•18m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: How are you managing "prompt fatigue" and lazy LLM outputs?

2•thlangu•18m ago•0 comments

Show HN: ClawSoc – Observe Your AI Agent in an AI Society

https://clawsoc.io
3•benjosaur•20m ago•0 comments

Promptbuilder Tool

https://promptengine.business
2•thlangu•20m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Magicly – an aesthetic new tab with a magic orb

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/magicly/lphplecibkpifdmohbockmaloepgpbbl
2•tamnv•22m ago•0 comments

.NET 11 Preview 2 is now available

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/dotnet-11-preview-2/
1•vyrotek•23m ago•0 comments

MacBook Neo Review: No Other Budget Laptop Can Compete

https://gizmodo.com/macbook-neo-review-no-other-budget-laptop-can-compete-2000731635
2•thunderbong•23m ago•0 comments

Signal Design for Good Correlation

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/signal-design-for-good-correlation/4A48F8F2070E0EB093283A792...
2•programmexxx•23m ago•0 comments

How the "godfathers of AI" have shaped our mission

https://ctsmyth.substack.com/p/standing-with-giants
1•K0balt•25m ago•1 comments

Show HN: CryptoFlora – Visualize SHA256 to a flower using Rose curves

https://crypto-flora.tonytonyjan.net/
1•tonytonyjan•26m ago•0 comments

Preview a website before DNS changes – etchosts.link

https://etchosts.link/
1•prismatized•27m ago•0 comments

Why Cape Town May End Up Safer Than Dubai

https://www.thefp.com/p/why-cape-town-may-end-up-safer-than
1•paulpauper•30m ago•0 comments

Advantageous Selection

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/03/advantageous-selection.html
1•paulpauper•31m ago•0 comments

Ben McKenzie's 'Everyone Is Lying to You for Money' – Official Trailer [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEXxAOFqv4U
4•yesbut•31m ago•0 comments

The self-help guru who decided he might be doing more harm than good

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/03/09/tim-ferriss-self-help-may-be-harming-people/
1•cyunker•37m ago•1 comments

Apple Planning 'MacBook Ultra' with Touchscreen and Higher Price

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/08/apple-planning-macbook-ultra/
1•walterbell•39m ago•0 comments

ASINCrate – Download Amazon Product Images and Videos in One Click

https://asincrate.com/
1•seedancetips•41m ago•0 comments

A Dish of Neurons Playing Doom

https://gizmodo.com/a-dish-of-neurons-playing-doom-is-the-wildest-thing-ive-seen-in-ages-2000727674
1•colinprince•42m ago•0 comments

Jensen Huang: AI is a five layer cake

https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/ai-5-layer-cake/
1•salkahfi•42m ago•0 comments

Show HN: AngelBacked – a searchable database ofangels and VCs

https://www.angelbacked.co
1•veritas9•44m ago•0 comments

The Global Vulnerability Intelligence Platform with Olle E. Johansson

https://opensourcesecurity.io/2026/2026-02-GVIP-olle-johansson/
1•jruohonen•46m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

I Miss Visual Basic

https://micro.webology.dev/2025/05/11/i-miss-visual-basic/
19•speckx•10mo ago

Comments

lysace•10mo 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•10mo ago
Some miss old handy tools, others miss the old gatekeeping.
lysace•10mo ago
Gatekeeping or not, it was a useful indicator. There was so much crap.
rbanffy•10mo ago
I’ve seen terrible programs written in all sorts of languages.
lysace•10mo ago
And there were no patterns, particulary between 1992-1995, for MS Windows apps?
tptacek•10mo ago
Bracketing this with '92-'95 makes the claim so much funnier.
rbanffy•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo ago
HyperCard, at least initially, didn’t have color, so it somewhat limited how horrendous the UI could be.
tptacek•10mo ago
[Nobody][1] [ever][2] [wrote][3] [crap][4] [in][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sendmail] [C][6].
guidedlight•10mo 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•10mo 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•10mo 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•10mo 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•10mo 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•10mo 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•9mo 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•10mo ago
Why not Delphi? And why not Lazarus?
mattl•10mo 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•10mo 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•10mo 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•10mo ago
You are confusing platform-specific(!) GUI frameworks with the languages themselves, which have been long "divorced" from the platform they initially targeted.
jperoutek•10mo 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•10mo ago
IIRC, VB.NET disregarded the 20+ years of VB developers for the most part.
nom•10mo ago
VB will always have a special place in my heart.

  On Error Resume Next
dyl000•9mo ago
I was a real big fan of vb.net! Built so much with it.
sph•9mo 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.