frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Open Source @Github

fp.

I run a pizzeria out of my Smart car in NYC [video]

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/22/bradley-alvelo-runs-pizza-pod-mobile-pizzeria-smart-car-new-york-...
1•jdnier•1m ago•0 comments

Programming from the Ground Up(2003) [pdf]

https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spr08/cos217/reading/ProgrammingGroundUp-1-0-letters...
1•o4c•3m ago•0 comments

Vim's UserGettingBored Autocmd

https://evanhahn.com/usergettingbored-vim/
1•zdw•4m ago•0 comments

So Long Relayd, and Thanks for All the Fish

https://btxx.org/posts/so-long-relayd/
1•zdw•5m ago•0 comments

You Cannot Grow a Pumpkin

https://taylor.town/pumpkin
3•Curiositry•5m ago•1 comments

Polymarket wallets may have traded on military secrets

https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/more-than-150-polymarket-wallets-may-have-traded-militar...
2•Gaishan•8m ago•1 comments

Fixing an EMachines EL1200 Bios Bug with Claude

https://www.downtowndougbrown.com/2026/08/fixing-an-emachines-el1200-bios-bug-with-claude/
1•zdw•10m ago•0 comments

Shark MX Gameboy Modem

https://forums.nesdev.org/viewtopic.php?t=9520
1•rickcarlino•10m ago•0 comments

A new Task Manager by the old Task Manager guy

http://tmog.org
2•davepl•14m ago•2 comments

'Knees over toes' exercises can help strengthen your knees. Experts explain

https://theconversation.com/influencers-claim-knees-over-toes-exercises-can-help-bullet-proof-you...
2•defrost•18m ago•0 comments

Building trades unions come out in strong support of data-center build-out

https://apnews.com/article/artificial-intelligence-technology-labor-unions-data-centers-64b10b2f9...
3•andsoitis•26m ago•1 comments

Press Conference After Day 1, People of the State of California et al. v. Meta

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWppdXmS9Us
4•1vuio0pswjnm7•30m ago•0 comments

AI one-shots tiny games 'cause it's memorized them. Try one it hasn't seen

4•Marvin_RunAI•38m ago•0 comments

Adding 4 More 2.5GbE Interfaces to the GMKtec Intel N150 NucBox G9

https://catskull.net/adding-4-more-25gbe-interfaces-to-the-gmktec-nucbox-g9.html
1•walterbell•42m ago•0 comments

PFTE Ingestion as Way to Increase Food Volume, Satiety w/o Increasing Calories

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4928218/
4•CGMthrowaway•43m ago•3 comments

Why Comfortable People Don't Revolt: Propaganda, Debt, and Control

https://internationalman.com/articles/why-comfortable-people-dont-revolt-propaganda-debt-and-cont...
4•CGMthrowaway•45m ago•0 comments

2012 National Reconnaissance Office space telescope donation to NASA

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_Office_space_telescope_donation_to_NASA
3•toomuchtodo•46m ago•1 comments

Tech leads should have the largest AI exhaust

https://schipper.ai/posts/technical-leaders-should-have-the-largest-ai-exhaust/
2•oliculipolicula•48m ago•2 comments

Neanderthal gene variant may increase muscle mass in people living today today

https://news.ki.se/neanderthal-gene-variant-may-increase-muscle-mass-in-people-living-today-today
3•gmays•50m ago•1 comments

Smart probiotics can sense high blood sugar and release GLP-1 on demand

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-08-smart-probiotics-high-blood-sugar.html
2•Gaishan•50m ago•0 comments

I'm saving more now–just 10 credits can generate a cinematic-quality video

https://textideo.com/text-to-video
1•cloaud•51m ago•0 comments

This Fact About KPIs May Surprise You

https://www.satisfice.com/blog/archives/488189
4•satisfice•51m ago•0 comments

America's Desert Metropolis Is on the Short List to Lose Water

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/23/us/arizona-canals-colorado-river.html
2•mooreds•1h ago•1 comments

A zero is not a measurement

https://readingpub.net/read/home/a-zero-is-not-a-measurement
3•ruusvuu•1h ago•0 comments

Vorssaint – The modular Swiss Army knife for macOS

https://vorssaint.com/
1•tambourine_man•1h ago•0 comments

Mac OS X on Xbox 360

https://github.com/osx360/osx360-drivers
3•PortableCode•1h ago•1 comments

Bringing more agent harnesses and frameworks to Cloudflare, starting with Flue

https://blog.cloudflare.com/agents-platform-flue-sdk/
2•gurjeet•1h ago•0 comments

Former OC actor Ben McKenzie on crusade to take down 'stupid' cryptocurrency

https://www.rnz.co.nz/life/people/celebrity/former-oc-actor-ben-mckenzie-on-crusade-to-take-down-...
9•billybuckwheat•1h ago•4 comments

Load Cells for Silos

https://www.swttech.com/products/load-cells-for-silos/
2•swttech•1h ago•1 comments

What the EU AI Act means for you and your business

https://proton.me/blog/eu-ai-act
4•devonnull•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.