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HyprTile – a new app launcher for the Hyprland ecosystem

https://hyprtile.org
1•BimJeam•1m ago•1 comments

The most exciting Bluetooth feature in years

https://www.theverge.com/report/839245/auracast-marketing-jbl-lg-samsung-google
1•ravenical•1m ago•1 comments

The One Number That Matters

https://domofutu.substack.com/p/the-one-number-that-matters
1•wjb3•2m ago•0 comments

Show HN: XeraSentry – Real-time Ethereum security monitoring in Python

https://lavender-clarette-17.tiiny.site
1•Chu_Wong•2m ago•0 comments

DankLinux Repository

https://danklinux.com/docs/danklinux/
1•chrchr•8m ago•1 comments

The Man Who Was Supposed to Kill Martin Luther King Jr

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/12/martin-luther-king-mlk-fbi-files-murder-assassination...
1•martey•8m ago•0 comments

New Study Raises Heart Health Concerns About Long-Term Melatonin Use

https://chillnoise.com/blog/new-study-raises-heart-health-concerns-about-long-term-melatonin-use
1•TailErrorSwift•8m ago•1 comments

I launched a free podcast mastering tool and it hit #1 on Google

https://freepodcastmastering.com
1•pruufsocial•12m ago•3 comments

Show HN: AI that scores news for emotional coercion and rhetorical manipulation

https://www.goanie.com/
2•goshtasb•13m ago•1 comments

Magnitude-7.0 earthquake hits in remote wilderness along Alaska-Canada border

https://apnews.com/article/earthquake-alaska-canada-yukon-7c0f68370e387b1b23fa7fe7fc9c2c71
6•appreciatorBus•16m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Is Mythical Man-Month still relevant in todays AI Vibe Coding world?

2•Codegres•24m ago•4 comments

Project Bhavanga: Fixing LLM Context Dilution with Buddhist Psychology

2•DosankoTousan•30m ago•1 comments

The Medusa compiler: create interactive ebooks

https://www.erix.it/medusa.html
1•znpy•31m ago•0 comments

The Heist of Nearly 1/2 Ton of Its Culinary Crown Jewels Rocks French Village

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/04/world/europe/france-escargot-heist.html
1•bookofjoe•33m ago•1 comments

Moving Off of Netlify to Self Hosted

https://broderic.blog/post/moving-away-from-netlify/
1•Group_B•34m ago•0 comments

SedaiBasic2: A modern reimplementation of Commodore BASIC v7

https://github.com/camauri/SedaiBasic2
1•amichail•36m ago•0 comments

Introducing Proton Sheets: Protect the data that drives your business

https://proton.me/blog/sheets-proton-drive
2•akyuu•36m ago•0 comments

Aristotle from HarmonicMath has solved Erdős Problem 124 in LEAN

https://xenaproject.wordpress.com/2025/12/05/formalization-of-erdos-problems/
1•unprovable•36m ago•0 comments

Show HN: FuseCells – a handcrafted logic puzzle game with 2,500 levels

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fusecells-logic-grid-puzzle/id6754704139
6•keini•37m ago•1 comments

Empirical data on human chain-of-thought: 100 thought intrusions, one stopwatch

https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.14609.08800
3•Fanaxuki•37m ago•1 comments

Petit Louis – Baby tracker that predicts when your baby will nap

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/petit-louis-baby-tracker/id6754668538
1•sfl83•37m ago•1 comments

A fork of Calibre called Clbre, because the AI is stripped out

https://github.com/grimthorpe/clbre
9•pabs3•38m ago•6 comments

Former deep-cover Russian spy leads Moscow campaign to co-opt Indian tech

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/former-deep-cover-russian-spy-leads-moscow-campaign-to-co-op...
1•MilnerRoute•40m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Watsn.ai – Scarily accurate lie detector

https://watsn.ai/
2•flx1012•40m ago•0 comments

Deep Dive in Java vs. C++ Performance

https://johnnysswlab.com/deep-dive-in-java-vs-c-performance/
2•ingve•41m ago•0 comments

OpenTelemetry Distribution Builder

https://github.com/observIQ/otel-distro-builder
2•pveierland•47m ago•1 comments

Kilauea erupts, destroying webcam [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TK2N99BDw7A
30•zdw•49m ago•3 comments

Updating Rust's Linux musl targets to 1.2.5

https://blog.rust-lang.org/2025/12/05/Updating-musl-1.2.5/
2•ingve•51m ago•0 comments

The Resonant Computing Manifesto

https://resonantcomputing.org/
1•tlarkworthy•52m ago•0 comments

Kenyans lured by lucrative job offers and sent to fight for Russia

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c20gn2d51l1o
4•breve•52m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

I Miss Visual Basic

https://micro.webology.dev/2025/05/11/i-miss-visual-basic/
19•speckx•6mo ago

Comments

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

  On Error Resume Next
dyl000•6mo ago
I was a real big fan of vb.net! Built so much with it.
sph•6mo 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.