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Closed City

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_city
1•sans_souse•1m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Critter TUI for reviewing GitHub PRs and agent changes

https://github.com/andyhmltn/critter
1•andy55a•3m ago•0 comments

Why Doctors Hate the Internet (2000)

https://www.wired.com/2000/04/why-doctors-hate-the-internet/
1•olalonde•4m ago•0 comments

Grand jury finds DeSantis administration "misappropriated" $10M

https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/grand-jury-report-hope-florida/
2•treetalker•5m ago•0 comments

Instinct is raising a $250M Series B

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/the-latest-viral-ai-assistant-rocketing-across-silicon-valley-abb46276
1•erex78•9m ago•0 comments

First patient to undergo live AI-assisted brain surgery has tumour removed

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjwg5n7y68xo
2•gpjt•14m ago•0 comments

Roast My Startup

https://www.getstreek.com/
1•me_sleepy•15m ago•0 comments

Japanese avant-garde artist Yayoi Kusama dies aged 97

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3v4k0re3vwo
1•tartoran•18m ago•0 comments

2026 Nepal Floods

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Nepal_floods
4•dredmorbius•20m ago•2 comments

The Self-Hosted SSO Tax: A Verified Tracker

https://techfuelhq.com/self-hosted/self-hosted-sso-tax-2026/
1•LKWOODIV•21m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Do you think tariffs are about anything other than creating inflation?

1•dfps•23m ago•1 comments

Apple Maps Launches Ads on iPhone

https://9to5mac.com/2026/08/25/apple-maps-launches-ads-on-iphone-heres-whats-new/
2•Garbage•25m ago•0 comments

Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, the End

https://alyssarosenzweig.ca/blog/asahi-gpu-part-n.html
3•amemi•30m ago•2 comments

Meta's self-inflicted resignation-wave

https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/the-pulse-metas-self-inflicted-resignation-wave/
6•andsoitis•42m ago•0 comments

48 Node B300 cluster live in 3-5 weeks

1•anwar19•42m ago•0 comments

What Is a "Jeopardy "-Worthy Computer (2015)

https://today.umd.edu/what-jeopardy-worthy-computer-90e7a2a8-6faa-4ab2-95d3-c3a6d6efb20b
1•andsoitis•44m ago•0 comments

Why China is suddenly betting on e-fuels [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPpbrjyuQHI
2•thelastgallon•44m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Sift – a cross-platform Snaffler replacement

https://github.com/Stratus-Security/Sift
1•coj337•44m ago•0 comments

How researchers are teaching AI to learn like a child

https://www.science.org/content/article/how-researchers-are-teaching-ai-learn-child
1•andsoitis•46m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Check if your OTP/verification SMS or email arrived

https://github.com/flovoice53-tech/otp-watch
1•florin_builds•46m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Wattage – finds the tokens your Claude Code sessions wasted

https://github.com/faizannraza/wattage
1•faizanraza03•47m ago•0 comments

Meta Just Paid Nearly $17B to Write the Kid Safety Rules for Every Platform

https://www.techdirt.com/2026/08/26/meta-just-paid-nearly-17-billion-to-make-sure-it-gets-to-writ...
3•wrxd•48m ago•1 comments

FrankenMermaid. A deterministic, memory-safe Rust implementation of MermaidJS

https://frankenmermaid.com/
1•carnevalem•52m ago•0 comments

Show HN: CloudDM – One more small step toward safer database operations

https://github.com/ClouGence/open-cdm/releases/tag/v4.1.2
1•cloudcanalx•52m ago•1 comments

GoodSaaS – Discover useful SaaS products without the noise

https://goodsaas.xyz
1•its_ajseven•55m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Do you also notice CNN's poor English?

1•mandeepj•57m ago•0 comments

PiLFS Linux from Scratch on the Raspberry Pi

https://intestinate.com/pilfs/
3•kristianpaul•59m ago•0 comments

Tragedy of the Commons

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
2•num42•1h ago•1 comments

Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

https://economist.com/by-invitation/2026/08/20/humanity-has-the-debate-about-ai-consciousness-bac...
6•semiquaver•1h ago•3 comments

Keep an Eye Out on Chromium's Flatpak Experiment

https://itsfoss.com/news/experimental-chromium-flatpak-packaging/
1•losgehts•1h ago•0 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•1y 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.