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YouTube Is Down

https://www.youtube.com/?app=desktop
2•cmckn•1m ago•0 comments

WalkmanLand

https://walkman.land/
1•bookofjoe•2m ago•0 comments

Show HN: LucidClip – a privacy-first, local-first clipboard manager for macOS

https://lucidclip.app/
1•Ethiel97•3m ago•0 comments

Thousands of CEOs just admitted AI had no impact on employment or productivity

https://fortune.com/2026/02/17/ai-productivity-paradox-ceo-study-robert-solow-information-technol...
2•virgildotcodes•5m ago•1 comments

AI agents with wallets and self-update loops

https://web4.ai
3•halcdev•7m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Fullbleed – Rust HTML/CSS-to-PDF with Deterministic Output+Python CLI

1•krflol•10m ago•0 comments

Epibatidine in Siberia

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/epibatidine-siberia
1•ricksunny•11m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Scanward – Free domain security scanner (SSL, DNS, headers, email auth)

https://scanward.com/
1•accadius•14m ago•0 comments

Diyclaw.dev

https://diyclaw.dev
2•kordlessagain•18m ago•0 comments

Heroku Seems to Be Down

https://x.com/search
4•forgingahead•23m ago•6 comments

I got tired of on-device LLMs crashing my apps, so I built a managed runtime

https://github.com/ramanujammv1988/edge-veda
3•rish2497•25m ago•1 comments

Advice, not control: the role of Remote Assistance in Waymo's operations

https://waymo.com/blog/?modal=short-advice-not-control-the-role-of-remote-assistance
18•xnx•27m ago•3 comments

Palantir moving headquarters from Denver to Miami

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/17/palantir-headquarters-miami-denver.html
4•absqueued•28m ago•0 comments

Color‑Driven Code Navigation

https://www.poppastring.com/blog/colordriven-code-navigation
1•PaulHoule•30m ago•0 comments

LyX 2.5 Released

https://wiki.lyx.org/LyX/NewInLyX25
1•lawrencejgd•31m ago•0 comments

(When) Is Mechanistic Interpretability Identifiable?

https://cocakoala.substack.com/p/when-is-mechanistic-interpretability
1•imranmk•32m ago•0 comments

YouTube Is Down

https://downdetector.com/status/youtube/
74•Vaslo•37m ago•22 comments

ZeroClaw – Rust-native agent that runs on your Rpi

https://zeroclaw.bot/
3•DLion•39m ago•0 comments

Google Public CA is down

https://status.pki.goog/incidents/5oJEbcU3ZfMfySTSXXd3
97•aloknnikhil•41m ago•36 comments

US threatens to quit International Energy Agency if won't drop green transition

https://www.politico.eu/article/us-threatens-to-quit-international-energy-agency-if-it-doesnt-dro...
4•c420•42m ago•2 comments

Show HN: Masharif

https://github.com/alielmorsy/Masharif
1•alielmorsy19•48m ago•0 comments

Design docs are waterfall wearing a hoodie

https://www.lucasfcosta.com/blog/design-docs
2•lucasfcosta•51m ago•0 comments

Show HN: GreedyPhrase – 1.21x better compression than GPT-4o tiktoken, 6x faster

https://github.com/rayonnant-ai/greedyphrase
1•bazlightyear•51m ago•0 comments

Phison CEO: Consumer electronics firms may fail by 2026 over AI memory crisis

https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/memory/many-consumer-electronics-manufacturers-will-go-bankrupt-...
7•jamesy0ung•51m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Spawn – PostgreSQL migrate/test build system with minijinja (not vibed)

https://github.com/saward/spawn
1•Winsaucerer•59m ago•0 comments

Practical Guide to Building Reliable AI Agents

https://docs.inkeep.com/guides/agent-engineering
1•gaurav12342345•1h ago•1 comments

The anxiety driving AI's brutal work culture is a warning for all of us

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2026/feb/17/ai-startups-work-culture-san-fr...
4•i7l•1h ago•3 comments

Did Gemini just give me someone's personal information?

https://old.reddit.com/r/GeminiAI/comments/1r7dn80/did_gemini_just_give_me_someones_personal/
2•virgildotcodes•1h ago•0 comments

Show HN: Instagram Saved Collection Exporter

https://chromewebstore.google.com/
2•qwikhost•1h ago•0 comments

Join the Python Security Response Team

https://pyfound.blogspot.com/2026/02/join-the-python-security-response-team.html
1•lumpa•1h ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

I Miss Visual Basic

https://micro.webology.dev/2025/05/11/i-miss-visual-basic/
19•speckx•9mo ago

Comments

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