Hacker News: McKayDavis

New comment by McKayDavis in "Great Salt Lake Tracker – Grow the Flow"

McKayDavis — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 23:53:59 +0000

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)

New comment by McKayDavis in "Grandson of John Tyler, 10th President of the US, Died Last Month at Age 96"

McKayDavis — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 18:56:30 +0000

The title is incorrect. According to Wikipedia he he died May 25th, 2025.

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

New comment by McKayDavis in "Ask HN: 9-yo son wants to build a game, I'm lost. What can I do?"

McKayDavis — Thu, 18 Jan 2024 00:50:11 +0000

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.

New comment by McKayDavis in "The Quadrantid meteor shower 2024 peaks tonight alongside a bright moon"

McKayDavis — Thu, 04 Jan 2024 03:27:56 +0000

[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...

New comment by McKayDavis in "Hawaii responds as deadly wildfires across two islands destroy communities"

McKayDavis — Thu, 10 Aug 2023 02:48:18 +0000

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...

New comment by McKayDavis in "The computer graphics industry got started at the university of Utah"

McKayDavis — Sat, 10 Jun 2023 13:08:40 +0000

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.

New comment by McKayDavis in "The computer graphics industry got started at the university of Utah"

McKayDavis — Sat, 10 Jun 2023 06:26:55 +0000

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.

New comment by McKayDavis in "The computer graphics industry got started at the university of Utah"

McKayDavis — Sat, 10 Jun 2023 06:09:12 +0000

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…

New comment by McKayDavis in "Jim Blinn and Ed Catmull – graphics class at Berkeley (1981)"

McKayDavis — Wed, 15 Mar 2023 11:49:02 +0000

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

New comment by McKayDavis in "Recovery at California's most beleaguered reservoir"

McKayDavis — Sun, 19 Feb 2023 23:09:29 +0000

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

New comment by McKayDavis in "On leading underscores and names reserved by the C and C++ languages"

McKayDavis — Wed, 11 Jan 2023 21:55:53 +0000

New comment by McKayDavis in "BYU profs create new nuclear reactor to produce nuclear energy more safely"

McKayDavis — Fri, 07 Oct 2022 05:46:02 +0000

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/...

New comment by McKayDavis in "SVG passthrough precision"

McKayDavis — Mon, 18 Apr 2022 21:26:11 +0000

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

New comment by McKayDavis in "The voice of Utah's arches – Ambient seismic vibration sped up 25x"

McKayDavis — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 23:59:36 +0000

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)

New comment by McKayDavis in "C++ Cheat Sheets"

McKayDavis — Sun, 06 Mar 2022 23:33:31 +0000

> * Remove all unnecessary headers. Template expansion is slow, and preprocessing is even slower. Some of the standard includes (like `` and ``) 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

New comment by McKayDavis in "What happened to my career after 2010? (2021)"

McKayDavis — Sat, 05 Mar 2022 03:57:37 +0000

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.

New comment by McKayDavis in "What happened to my career after 2010? (2021)"

McKayDavis — Fri, 04 Mar 2022 02:37:00 +0000

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!)

New comment by McKayDavis in "Worldometer – real time world statistics"

McKayDavis — Fri, 19 Nov 2021 14:04:14 +0000

> And they don't run ads, which is great

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

New comment by McKayDavis in "DJI Mavic 3 Drone"

McKayDavis — Fri, 05 Nov 2021 04:37:13 +0000

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.

New comment by McKayDavis in "Child tweets gibberish from US nuclear-agency account"

McKayDavis — Wed, 31 Mar 2021 04:47:12 +0000

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.