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McKayDavis

867 karma · joined June 23, 2014

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McKayDavis··on Great Salt Lake Tracker – Grow the Flow
I think the idea is a huge waste, but the Utah State Legislature already considered exactly this in 2022 (building a massive pipeline to the Pacific Ocean).

https://www.sltrib.com/news/environment/2022/05/19/utah-legi... (archived non-paywall version: http://archive.today/GzuUD)

McKayDavis··on Grandson of John Tyler, 10th President of the US, Died Last Month at Age 96
The title is incorrect. According to Wikipedia he he died May 25th, 2025.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Ruffin_Tyler

McKayDavis··on Ask HN: 9-yo son wants to build a game, I'm lost. What can I do?
My kids were able to make complex 3D games at 9yo with very little help using Roblox Studio. It’s free.

https://roblox.com/create

Disclaimer: I work for Roblox Corp.

McKayDavis··on The Quadrantid meteor shower 2024 peaks tonight alongside a bright moon
[1] timeanddate.com is a great site that provides a visualization with times and directions for a given city.

I don't think its possible to link directly to a specific lat/lon, so you'll have to choose the city yourself.

For Honolulu the "very good" times are between 2am-6am HST, with the direction about 40 degrees (NE)

[1] https://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/meteor-shower/quadrant...

McKayDavis··on Hawaii responds as deadly wildfires across two islands destroy communities
It certainly burned but is still intact. Who knows if it will survive.

Video of the banyan tree after the fire:

https://twitter.com/PandaToybox/status/1689394756844138496?s...

McKayDavis··on The computer graphics industry got started at the university of Utah
I don’t know the exact year the CDRS group was acquired by PTC, but it be around the same time I attended the same High School Computing Institute in 1996.
McKayDavis··on The computer graphics industry got started at the university of Utah
East High School is the closest public high school to the University of Utah. Because of this proximity the school was fortunate to get a direct T1 (1.5 Mbps) connection in 1992 (93?).

The original domain was east.east-slc.edu before it was standardized to east.k12.ut.us circa 1995.

After school every day for a few hours the East High CS room would be full of students exploring the new online world: surfing gopher, playing MUDs, Usenet, and using NCSA Mozilla on the DEC station. This is when Yahoo! was all hand curated.

Students could even dial in to one of 2 modems and connect to the Internet from home. It was glorious.

McKayDavis··on The computer graphics industry got started at the university of Utah
Right out of high school I started as an intern at PTC in Research Park shortly after they acquired CDRS from E&S.

CDRS was originally started by some of the researchers from the University of Utah that created the Alpha_1 NURBS modeler.

After PTCs org wide rebranding, it was called Pro/Concept.

I worked on the other product in the group called Pro/3D Paint. It was the first product to use projective texture mapping to allow industrial designers to draw directly on 3D models instead of in texture space.

So many more memories I wouldn’t know where to begin…

McKayDavis··on Jim Blinn and Ed Catmull – graphics class at Berkeley (1981)
Jim Blinn and Ed Catmull will both be speaking next week (March 24th) at the 50 year celebration of the University of Utah Computer Science Department.

https://www.price.utah.edu/ieee-milestone-events#graphics

McKayDavis··on Recovery at California's most beleaguered reservoir
This Imgur collection of animated gifs capturing the 2017 Oroville Spillway crisis is an amazing work of journalism:

https://imgur.io/gallery/mpUge

https://imgur.io/gallery/6IyCi

https://imgur.com/gallery/YgatJ

McKayDavis··on On leading underscores and names reserved by the C and C++ languages
Like
McKayDavis··on BYU profs create new nuclear reactor to produce nuclear energy more safely
I doubt the veracity of your claims because according to multiple sources [1][2] the only nuclear reactor in the state of Utah is located on the bottom floor of the Merrill Engineering Building on the University of Utah campus.

If a reactor were located on the BYU campus, I would expect it to be public knowledge and tracked by the IAEA.

I used to work on the top floor of MEB for many years and had the opportunity to see the glow of the core in the pool of water on multiple occasions.

Tangentially, the UofU reactor made national headlines last week when a student made a threat to blow it up if the football team lost [3].

1. https://www.deseret.com/2011/3/16/20370414/university-of-uta...

2. https://dailyutahchronicle.com/2016/11/04/sole-nuclear-react...

3. https://www.sbnation.com/platform/amp/college-football/2022/...

McKayDavis··on SVG passthrough precision
Often, you can considerably reduce the file size of an SVG text file without a noticeable reduction in perceptual quality just by reducing the precision of the coordinates.

The awesome SVG Optimizer [1] has a filter (cleanupNumericValues) to process SVG files to a fixed precision.

The equally awesome SVG Optimizer Missing Gui (SVGOMG) [2] provides a web-based GUI [3] to interactively adjust precision and see the resulting render (and file-size).

[1] https://github.com/svg/svgo

[2] https://github.com/jakearchibald/svgomg

[3] https://jakearchibald.github.io/svgomg

McKayDavis··on The voice of Utah's arches – Ambient seismic vibration sped up 25x
For more Utah arch vibration content, check out Prof. Jeff Moore's twitter feed @UtahGeohaz (Jeff is in the same department as the link).

Here's some very cool visualizations showing exaggerated vibrations of natural wonders:

https://twitter.com/UtahGeohaz/status/1451218202621399043 (Colonnade Arch) https://twitter.com/UtahGeohaz/status/1473692964216057865 (The Matterhorn) https://twitter.com/UtahGeohaz/status/1473692964216057865 (not sure which arch)

McKayDavis··on C++ Cheat Sheets
> * Remove all unnecessary headers. Template expansion is slow, and preprocessing is even slower. Some of the standard includes (like `<regex>` and `<iostream>`) are notorious for slowing individual translation units to a crawl. `#pragma once` for your own headers also helps with cpp-time performance.

> * Forward-declare as much as you can. Forward type declarations mean that the compiler doesn't need to process all of `Foo` when it sees `Foo&` or `Foo`.

I've found the include-what-you-use (IWYU) tool [1][2] can help immensely with automating this process, especially on large code-bases.

It uses LLVM/Clang to analyze a .cpp file / translation unit and produces the minimal subset of exactly which includes are necessary and what types can be forward declared.

[1] https://include-what-you-use.org/

[2] https://github.com/include-what-you-use/include-what-you-use

McKayDavis··on What happened to my career after 2010? (2021)
Not really. Roblox the company doesn’t actually publish games (or experiences as we prefer to call them).

Valve and Epic both develop big titles in-house. Whereas Roblox’s experiences are developed by entirely separate entities.

McKayDavis··on What happened to my career after 2010? (2021)
That’s partially due to that fact that Roblox is a platform and is not a gaming company. It’s a different business model and culture that isn’t subject to the vagaries of the games industry.

(And yes, it’s a great place to work!)

McKayDavis··on Worldometer – real time world statistics
> And they don't run ads, which is great

You must be running an ad blocker because Worldometers most definitely runs ads.

McKayDavis··on DJI Mavic 3 Drone
Her Twitter account was one of the most interesting ones I followed. Unfortunately, even though I had never interacted with her, she blocked me out of the blue some months ago. I was entirely confused at first. From what little I could find out, she did a mass block of her followers who were also following another person she was having some major Twitter drama with. I never quite figured out exactly who or why though.
McKayDavis··on Child tweets gibberish from US nuclear-agency account
On the morning of January 13th, 2018 I was looking at my phone. When at 8:08am, every cell phone in the entire state simultaneously emitted an emergency alert tone and displayed this exact message:

BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.

I turned on the radio and FM stations were playing the Emergency Broadcast System's well known emergency tone followed by a computerized voice playing the same message as above on repeat.

When faced with this information, time is of absolute essence. The price of taking your time to doubt things and evaluating the veracity of the information means you're not acting to potentially prevent the immient death of yourself and your family.

In this scenario, you cannot expect people to do anything but take things at face value and seek immediate shelter.

McKayDavis··on Child tweets gibberish from US nuclear-agency account
Please don't discount the people in Hawaii that experienced this event.

We lived on O'ahu when it happened and the topic still comes up occasionally. At the time, it was quite traumatic for myself, my wife, and our kids. I spoke to a large number of people who were still in a state of shock in the following week. At least one person died of a heart attack.

Errant tweets or text messages like this from positions of authority have the potential to have very real and major effects on people's lives. Don't downplay the power they hold.

McKayDavis··on [dead]
Also, the original domain was pineapplefund.org, whereas this is pineapplefund.me
McKayDavis··on When You Win a Nobel and They Can't Reach You at Home
> Basically, the announcement is a secret until it happens.

I too had thought that this was the case, but it appears the press does get at least some advance notice. Last Wednesday Jennifer Doudna found that she had won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry in a phone call from a reporter. Ref: paragraph 7 of [1]:

> At a press briefing today, Doudna noted she was asleep and missed the initial calls from Sweden, only waking up to answer the phone finally when a Nature reporter called. "She wanted to know if I could comment on the Nobel and I said, Well, who won it? And she was shocked that she was the person to tell me."

[1] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/10/crispr-revolutionary...

McKayDavis··on Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?
@dang recently (17 days ago) posted a list of the most favorited HN comments in this comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24360449

McKayDavis··on We can now edit the human genome – how far should we go? [video]
> Unless I am unaware of something, CRISPR is not yet ready for medical usage.

CRISPR has been used successfully to treat Sickle Cell Anemia in at least one patient. [1]

You're spot on though that there are many obstacles to overcome (such as off target effects). CRISPR-Cas is not the answer, but rather just one more tool in the gene editing toolbox, albeit a very powerful one.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/06/23/8775436...

McKayDavis··on Luau: Augmenting Lua’s Syntax with Types
Related HN discussion on Aug 5 of the Luau github page [1]: "Luau A fast small, safe gradually typed scripting language derived from Lua" [2]

[1] https://roblox.github.io/luau/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24059432

McKayDavis··on No handshakes. A bad economy. These car salesmen shifted tactics– and succeeded
If you have a Costco membership, I highly recommend you contact the Costco Auto program [1]. They pre-negotiate a discounted price with nearby dealer on your behalf.

[1] https://www.costcoauto.com

McKayDavis··on Air India repatriation flight crash-lands, at least 17 killed
This appears to be the story OP was linking: https://www.newindianexpress.com/states/kerala/2020/aug/07/1...
McKayDavis··on Luau – A fast, small, safe, gradually typed scripting language derived from Lua
Please check out Roblox Studio [1], the free Win/Mac IDE for creating and publishing games on the platform.

Also look at the developer site [2], where you can find documentation, tutorials, and an awesome, active community in the developer forum [3].

[1] https://roblox.com/create

[2] https://developer.roblox.com

[3] https://devforum.roblox.com

(disclaimer: I'm an engineer on the Roblox Studio team)

McKayDavis··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2020)
Roblox | San Mateo, CA | Full Time | ONSITE (Remote during Shelter In Place)

We are actively hiring and all interviews are currently done via phone & zoom.

Roblox is ushering in the next generation of entertainment, allowing people to imagine, create, and play together in immersive, user-generated worlds. We are recruiting across multiple teams and positions. Our top priority roles are:

Technical Artist: 5+ years’ experience; Proficient in C++, Lua, Python and/or JavaScript

Backend Web Engineer: 5+ years’ experience, Fluent in C#, C++, Java, or another OOP language

C++ / Lua Engineer: 3-5 years’ experience; Proficient in C++; Experience with Lua preferred

C++ / UI Engineer: 3-5+ years’ experience; Proficient in C++; Experience with building very complex end user applications

C++ 3D Modeling Engineer: 3-5+ years'; Proficient in C++ (and/or Python); focus on 3D API's

Data Engineer: 3+ years’ experience; Expert with Java and Go; Custom ETL design, implementation and maintenance

Engineering Manager, Developer Tools (3D); 3-5+ years'; Proficient in C++ (and/or Python); focus on growing and mentoring teams

UI Engineer: 2-4+ years experience; Strong Python; Build tools to accelerate the development process for millions of engineers

Please visit https://corp.roblox.com/careers/ to apply, find more information and/or to see our full list of open positions.

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