forbes's comments

forbes | 5 years ago | on: Ask HN: What are some works of outsider programming?

I once briefly worked on a commercial system where the UI looked like it had been designed with a shotgun.

Dozens of UI elements. Nothing on the screen aligned. Nothing was in a logical place. Related items were not grouped together. Buttons had labels like 'Button1', 'Button1_'. The tab-order was completely random, so you had to use a mouse exclusively. It was a horror show.

The code underneath was just as crazy. The system was used day-to-day by several people who just understood its quirks. I made the fix I needed to make and got the hell out of there.

forbes | 5 years ago | on: One Year of Nushell

The command that I was trying to use was 'ls', which doesn't seem to play with textview when I try it out 'ls | textview' (just no output at all). textview does work for me with files, as in your example.

forbes | 5 years ago | on: One Year of Nushell

If you use less with a filename, it will work. I normally pipe things to less which doesn't seem to work for me in nu. less shows an empty input.

This is possibly me just doing something wrong.

forbes | 5 years ago | on: One Year of Nushell

This seems very interesting. After a quick play I cannot find anything similar to 'less' which I use very frequently. Is there a nushell equivalent?

forbes | 6 years ago | on: Show HN: Block Brain – a rather tricky puzzle game

This has been a minor obsession of mine for the past few months. My first project in Unity .

I had a huge amount of fun building it. ANY advice on how to find a market of people who like to play puzzle games would be greatly appreciated. I have no experience in selling a product.

forbes | 7 years ago | on: FWD:Everyone

What, did you call a client a Giraffe or something?

forbes | 9 years ago | on: A Report on the Flawed 2016 Democratic Primaries

Does any other country have a 'primary' system like the US? In Australia there is no pretending to elect candidates for each party. In our recent election we had two choices for PM from the major parties, chosen by the parties themselves.

In the US you spent a year choosing your candidates, but behind closed doors one of those parties spent all their time trying to push one candidate whilst the other party spent all their time trying to stop another.

The Australian system seems a little more honest, even though the roles of PM and President are quite different. We can elect a PM and the party can then choose to throw them out the week after. This happens frequently.

forbes | 13 years ago | on: Building my first web app - 5 months later

I'm one of the guys who built ThemeForest. (I don't work at Envato any more.)

I built the rollover previews on that site (which has been rebuilt and improved many times since). I can tell you that you are going to have trouble keeping the preview in view when they are as large as the ones that you are using, whilst still making it possibly to see the other icons in the grid. You'll need to flip it left and right, up and down depending on the position of the mouse.

I also think you need to think about what value you are providing. I think a curated site with less themes with proper reviews would be much more useful than just a scrape of the thousands of themes out there. Your own reviews would be original content which might have a slim hope of outranking the actual themes themselves in Google results. Without that, I don't think you will get a lot of traffic.

Good luck.

forbes | 13 years ago | on: Mini Drones: Army Deploys Tiny Helicopters

$20,000,000 for 160 units. $125,000 each. Slightly more expensive than the remote control helicopters you buy as toys. If this number is correct, I would love to know what justifies that amazing cost per unit.

EDIT: Jeebus, it is actually 20 million pounds.

forbes | 13 years ago | on: World's tallest skyscraper to be built in just 90 days

The more impressive headline will be "World's tallest skyscraper constructed in just 90 days." The Burj Khalifa took five and a half years to complete. Even completing this new building in twice the predicted time will be remarkable.

forbes | 13 years ago | on: Chrome for iOS

I love that it opens tabs behind, unlike Safari. Only thing I don't like is the address bar using up too much room (not disappearing).

forbes | 13 years ago | on: Final thoughts on Windows 8: A design disaster

I've been using Windows since 3.11 and when I first booted up Windows 8 I clicked the Windows Explorer button in 'Metro' and was taken to the 'Classic' desktop. No Start menu. It took me a good fifteen minutes of clicking around to discover how to get back to Metro so I could launch any program.

In short it made a programmer feel like an idiot. I can't imagine how many grandads are going to be furious with it if they upgrade. I have no idea why removing the Start menu is a good idea.

I use OS X, Ubuntu (headless servers) and Windows 7 daily and I will definitely wait until Windows 9 before I upgrade my Windows VM. They are definitely sticking to the 'every second release sucks' cycle, like Star Trek.

forbes | 14 years ago | on: Handy text manipulation tricks in Sublime Text 2

Remembering shortcuts for Sublime would be no different to remembering shortcuts for Emacs/vim/whatever. I agree with the 'no modes' sentiment which is why I find Emacs more natural than vim for the bulk of my work.

If you forget the short-cut for a command in Emacs, you can hit M-x, type in the name of the command (with completion to help you) and once you execute the command Emacs will TELL you the shortcut for next time (if there is one assigned). Best feature ever.

forbes | 14 years ago | on: Handy text manipulation tricks in Sublime Text 2

Yes I have. My comment about split windows was about TextMate, which 4 years later still doesn't have them. (Coming in TextMate 2, which will be released sometime after Half Life 3.)

Sublime has the eye candy, that I was talking about. It looks great. The 'birds eye' view is nice, but not particularly useful. There is nothing that it can do that it can do that Emacs/vim can't do or couldn't do with a few minutes of macro-recording/scripting. This is why I am saying it isn't worth the money. The open-source alternatives are superb.

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