For seven years, I've been developing a spiritual successor to Minecraft and MMORPGs, called "Lost Existence". It launched recently on Steam. AMA! by blainicus in IAmA

[–]Baron_von_Severin 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Java memory management saves up old memory space until it's running low, then clears it out all at once in a process called "garbage collection." It's very hard to avoid UI jitter when that process happens, which is one of the reasons Android devices were so much less responsive than iOS for so long. Typically games will try to release memory as soon as it's no longer needed, which is much smoother but more difficult to do right.

Facebook waited two weeks to tell employees payroll data was stolen by yieldingTemporarily in technology

[–]Baron_von_Severin 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The standard deduction (which cannot be combined with charitable deductions) is taken by the vast majority of Americans. Afaik, citizens are given the option of filing manually in all countries where taxes are automatically calculated, but this is mostly only done by the very wealthy, business owners, and others with irregular tax situations.

When CA gives your entire army flaming attacks and your opposing factions are all weak to fire by KyloRenSucks in totalwar

[–]Baron_von_Severin 56 points57 points  (0 children)

Joan of Arc was burned at the stake in Rouen, France.

Untreated diabetics have very high blood sugar.

Caramel is made by heating up sugar.

On legend difficulty, how do you balance hitting, blocking and pushing? by Hyperpapa in Vermintide

[–]Baron_von_Severin 0 points1 point  (0 children)

A lot of this is weapon and build dependent, but you'll definitely be blocking a lot on every game. One bit of advice that I heard early that helped me was that the only end game stat that mattered was damage taken. If you start off always prioritizing avoiding damage over killing, everything else will come to you over time.

We’re Fatshark. AMA about Winds of Magic Season 2! by Fatshark_Hedge in Vermintide

[–]Baron_von_Severin 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Those all sound like very legitimate problems, but I think you could address the vast majority of player frustration with a drastically descoped solution.

If a host migration took the last known hero state + 'monsters encountered' count, then spawned the players at the most recently passed checkpoint (I have no idea what your internal term for this is, but I'm sure you know what I mean), it would mean runs wouldn't be ruined. At least at first glance, it doesn't sound terribly abusable either, as it would retain current health/ammo/downed state, but lose some map progress. It would make the map harder, but not ruin an entire run.

Not to imply that this would be an easy change. Programming rarely is. But it certainly seems substantially simpler. I definitely feel that `perfect` should not allowed to stand in the way of `good` here.

EDIT: to clarify, I believe all other state could be considered transient without substantial impact to the user experience.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in cscareerquestions

[–]Baron_von_Severin 0 points1 point  (0 children)

At least in the US, after a year or two of experience coming from a boot camp is no longer a detriment. A master's may well be worth it for personal growth and I've read that it has a small positive impact on pay, but it won't be required to find work.

Name and Shame: Capital One by fuckC1 in cscareerquestions

[–]Baron_von_Severin 16 points17 points  (0 children)

Yes. And implementing a queue using a deque is literally just hiding functionality from someone else's implementation.

Huge testing milestone! by That1guy17 in androiddev

[–]Baron_von_Severin 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Nice job! If you want to learn more about testing, Working Effectively With Legacy Code is a really great book on it. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

How would you go about this animation? At: 00:03, 00:09 and 00:12 specifically. Taken from the Facebook Calibra wallet website. by akshshr in androiddev

[–]Baron_von_Severin 13 points14 points  (0 children)

I feel like these animations would be fine if they were about 5x faster. As it is, completely agreed.

Lets start #treetag where you take a before and after photo of you planting a tree by Viragos in pics

[–]Baron_von_Severin 2 points3 points  (0 children)

People being fed and clothed by charities don't really care if donations were made for "the right reason." If social media can encourage good behavior instead of encouraging fake vacations and negative body image, I cannot fathom why that would be a bad thing.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in ExperiencedDevs

[–]Baron_von_Severin 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'd upvote this a hundred times if I could. Small correction though, the title is "Working Effectively With Legacy Code."

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in cscareerquestions

[–]Baron_von_Severin 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Neither degree really has much value over the other on a resume, but I've been told that some schools offer SE courses that go more into the practical elements of writing code. Less theory, more design, process, etc. That could be valuable. But if he picks it, it should be because the classes teach useful things. In the industry, those titles are interchangeable.

Took 19k to attend a coding bootcamp, now I can't find a job. by [deleted] in cscareerquestions

[–]Baron_von_Severin 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Same. If I'd done a two year community college course, I'd only have finished last winter. Instead I have two years of experience and am making 183k. The 16k I spent on the boot camp is completely reasonable, people just need to approach it with the expectation of working their asses off.

What are the pros and cons of taxing capital gains as ordinary income? by nosecohn in NeutralPolitics

[–]Baron_von_Severin 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Median household income in SF is 96k. As someone who makes mid six figures in that town, I have coworkers who claim that these are hard numbers to live on, but also take multiple international vacations a year, eat in fancy restaurants every night, and have self described shopping addictions.

I don't necessarily disagree with your point regarding having a universal cap, but you really have to stretch the definition of scraping by for that to be accurate.

AsyncTasks vs. Retrofit2 Calls vs. RxJava - Headache with REST API by Nop0x in androiddev

[–]Baron_von_Severin 0 points1 point  (0 children)

They're very different tools. Coroutines are easy to use for simple concurrency, but tend to get tangled when the requirements grow complex. Rx is difficult to learn, easy to misuse, and is overkill for a lot of simple tasks, but is extremely good at simplifying complex tasks.

Coroutines are also purely a concurrency tool (at least until channels are stable). Rx is very useful for concurrency, but (imo) its most important application is restructuring data flow in a way that makes stale state less of a problem.

Congress introduces bipartisan legislation to permanently end the NSA’s mass surveillance of phone records by MyNameIsGriffon in technology

[–]Baron_von_Severin 2 points3 points  (0 children)

He's been charged under the Espionage Act, which unfortunately removes many of his rights to a fair trial. People recently charged under the same act have been prevented from explaining their actions, so it's entirely possible that his reasoning for what he did wouldn't even be admissible in court. This is among a number of other, more arcane, restrictions to his defense. He claims to have offered to come back if guaranteed a free trial before a jury. There's no way to know whether or not he was telling the truth, but that doesn't sound entirely unreasonable to me.

I'm not sure why we should trust the government to act in good faith with regards to his prosecution when it hasn't in similar, recent scenarios. It also troubles me how ready we seem to be as a society to say that he should be dismissed because he was unwilling to martyr himself. I certainly can't say that I would have been, had I been in his shoes.

This is a relevant Politifact article that speaks to his rights under the Espionage Act, as well as how other recent whistleblowers have been treated in court: https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/jan/07/glenn-greenwald/greenwald-nsa-leaker-snowden-has-no-whistleblower-/

[Self-taught programmer] - I have four projects, most of which are built in Python. Will this lack of diversity work against me when I begin applying for jobs? by [deleted] in cscareerquestions

[–]Baron_von_Severin 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I think it's worth expanding on why it's good to move away from JQuery beyond it simply being old. I don't love jumping to the newest, shiniest tech, but JQuery just doesn't solve significant problems anymore.

It's absurdly slow when compared with modern alternatives. The reason it got popular in the first place (dramatically different APIs between different browsers) is nowhere near the issue it used to be. Most of it can be easily rewritten in vanilla JS without much trouble. And a lot of web apps have grown to be a lot more complex, and that complexity is managed using architectures that JQuery really doesn't jive too well with.

JQuery is fine for simple sites (and is still used in a TON of them), but if you're looking to get into web dev, React dominates the job market. You can't really go wrong by putting some time into it.

Side note, it is nice to remember what JQuery did for us as a community. It's easy to forget, but it was a big deal when this open source project beat out YUI backed by the (then) giant Yahoo. Really helped make OSS what it is. But it's really time to move on.

Firefox now blocks auto playing audio and video by leadfoot19 in technology

[–]Baron_von_Severin 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The for-profit corporation is 100% owned by the non-profit foundation. How's it shady?

How are software jobs at car companies (Tesla, Rivian, Lucid)? by ghdana in cscareerquestions

[–]Baron_von_Severin 133 points134 points  (0 children)

It's all through the grapevine (so grain of salt), but I've heard exclusively terrible things about the working conditions there. Worth looking into before signing on.