NickPollard

11 ms·

91.
by NickPollard 12y ago
Yes, sorry I was referring to his numbers in the simulator rather than in the actual game. In the game it depends on the deck - for some decks, it's more useful than others, either due to particular mana curves, or to triggered effects
92.
by NickPollard 12y ago
In that article, he shows that giving the coin to p1 (the 2nd player, it's 0-based) gives a /disadvantage/ to p0 (the 1st player), so it is actually beneficial for the player who gets the coin.
93.
by NickPollard 12y ago
My understanding (as someone who worked in the Games Industry but not on the financial side) is that the developer normally gets an advance against royalties to finance production, so you're right that they need to earn out the advance
94.
by NickPollard 12y ago
Regarding your latter thoughts: You're right in many ways that whilst bikeshedding about a 'better' language, we end up stuck with the old language that no-one really wants. The issue is, people are never going to agree. Your
95.
by NickPollard 12y ago
Thanks! I've been missing this functionality on Windows for so long, didn't realise there were addins to fix it.
96.
US 'in denial' over poor maths standards(bbc.co.uk)
60 points by NickPollard 12y ago|97 comments
97.
by NickPollard 12y ago
At the ScalaX conference last year, someone demoed the Scala plugin for Eclipse debugging actor messages asynchronously, so you can breakpoint on receiving a message, then see the callstack that generated that message on a different actor,
98.
by NickPollard 12y ago
DevOps isn't amount making Developers be Ops guys. It's about the fact that automation eats everything, and a significant part of 'ops' is now coding. A DevOps person isn't someone who develops, and who does Ops. It
99.
by NickPollard 12y ago
His point though is that JITs (like LuaJIT) are often not allowed on consoles for security reasons - they don't allow running of unsigned code. So LuaJIT might not be an option.
100.
by NickPollard 13y ago
In the UK most universities don't really have the concept of 'major' and 'minor' - you simple have your degree, which might involve you doing other learning around the subject. In this context, 'degree' an
101.
by NickPollard 13y ago
Great work, thanks for building useful, friendly government services. More of this please!
102.
by NickPollard 13y ago
(Former AAA game dev, including a stint at Sony) No, but console OSes and Drivers are (well, compared to PC drivers). There's an enormous amount going on between your code and the metal on a PC, even when writing C++ w/ OpenGL or
103.
by NickPollard 13y ago
The problem is that currying is useful for so many things that this is a bit like asking 'what is addition useful for?' Currying can always be implemented just by lambdas, so it does not actually enable any new behaviour, but it m
104.
by NickPollard 13y ago
Scala derail: You might have an unintentional happens-before relationship in that example: The deletePersons call will end up being in the flatMap of the putAll[Person] call, which means it wont be started until the putAll finishes, when by
105.
by NickPollard 13y ago
That's a tautology. By that reasoning, don't bother writing any tests, because all your bugs in production will get past them anyway! My bugs got past my type-checker, but only 100 of them. You have 1000 because the 900 my type ch
106.
by NickPollard 13y ago
> The biggest thing that contributes to refactorability has nothing to do with type safety. Instead unit test coverage, by a mile, is the thing that makes code easy to refactor Type Safety is Unit Test Coverage. Typing is a statically
107.
by NickPollard 13y ago
At a guess, base rate fallacy and typing. The java community is huge, so even a small percentage of happy scala converts translates into a large absolute number. People from dynamic languages (Ruby, Python) are probably averse to Static Typ
108.
by NickPollard 13y ago
Teaching someone a programming language (e.g. Scala) is not equivalent to teaching someone to program. If you take someone who has 5 years Ruby/Python/Java experience, and then spend a month teaching them Scala, they don't mi
109.
by NickPollard 13y ago
For one, it's a good way to attract hires. As they mentioned, Scala developers are not as common as say, Java developers, so a post like this is a way to announce to Scala developers looking for work that Coursera is a potential employ
110.
by NickPollard 13y ago
I thought it was a great article, but I think it would be better if the image of the 'random character's at the start showed racial variation - saying that your character is totally random and then having a picture of 6 white peop
111.
by NickPollard 13y ago
They didn't when I worked there, Vaio's all round. That was 3 years ago though, at SCE (Playstation).
112.
by NickPollard 13y ago
> If you now want to buy a current nexus phone or tablet, you have to be in a country where they allow purchase. They would deliver a much better customer experience (and sell many more phones) if they just let Amazon handle selling the
113.
by NickPollard 13y ago
> an idle brain is useful for creative thinking and problem solving. This is a more reasonable argument, and I agree. It is often useful to have quiet space to think. That said, I prefer to put the dishwasher on, and go for a walk outsid
114.
by NickPollard 13y ago
That's very poetic, but entirely meaningless. It merely posits that because we used to do dishes by hand, we are now missing something by not doing them. Which is true, in the same way that we're missing something by not having po
115.
by NickPollard 13y ago
Why is it sickening? There is no virtue in being bored; no goal to be achieved by doing nothing. If I have time, I wish to do something useful with it, and entertainment is useful (if not, then life would be rather dull). There is a certain
116.
by NickPollard 13y ago
I find the NDK fine to work with - but I'm writing a game which is entirely C plus some embedded Lua/Moonscript. I develop on Linux (Ubuntu), with a make file set up to build for desktop or for Android with one command, and it jus
117.
by NickPollard 13y ago
For game shops, the reason they might have more is for GPU compatibility - where actual OpenGLES features can very between devices and you do have to worry about different code paths.
118.
by NickPollard 13y ago
It is entirely possible to earn that much (and more) in London, outside of London - assuming you're not in a complete backwater that much should be possible. I'd say rather than worrying about what technology you know, spend a bit
119.
by NickPollard 13y ago
I started learning Scala almost a year ago at my latest job - we use it for production systems at a large multinational investment bank. Coming to Scala from experience including C, Java and Haskell, I intially found Scala quite difficult.
120.
by NickPollard 13y ago
In fact it's the opposite - the reason that 'Enumeratees' and their ilk look slightly unusual is that they are abstractions over general input and output, and are not specific at all to Play or WebSockets. If you are used to

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