Hacker News: santaclaus

New comment by santaclaus in "Unity is buying Peter Jackson’s Weta Digital for $1.6B"

santaclaus — Tue, 09 Nov 2021 22:03:29 +0000

> its a cool Visual FX studio not a technology company..

Weta develops metric tones of tech internally, including employing some of the top graphics researchers at various points in their careers. There is tons of tech talent in VFX and animation shops. Hell, I work with libraries open sourced by Pixar as part of my day job at a FAANG.

New comment by santaclaus in "Hiring for tech jobs has increased more than 100% in these Midwestern cities"

santaclaus — Tue, 06 Oct 2020 17:49:32 +0000

I used to follow your Rust work and had no idea you are yinzer! Mineo’s or Aiello’s? :)

New comment by santaclaus in "Hiring for tech jobs has increased more than 100% in these Midwestern cities"

santaclaus — Tue, 06 Oct 2020 16:45:59 +0000

It’s currently tied for 1 with their other usual suspects in US News [1]. Of course these rankings are all a bit arbitrary, game-able, and should be taken skeptically :)

[1] https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-science-sch...

New comment by santaclaus in "Hiring for tech jobs has increased more than 100% in these Midwestern cities"

santaclaus — Tue, 06 Oct 2020 16:41:01 +0000

It’s certainly not East Coast, but it’s very North East - the rust belt spans well beyond the Midwest. Even culturally Pittsburgh feels like it has more in common with, say, Buffalo or other North Eastern rust belt cities than Wisconsin or Minnesota.

New comment by santaclaus in "Hiring for tech jobs has increased more than 100% in these Midwestern cities"

santaclaus — Tue, 06 Oct 2020 16:23:26 +0000

> There are plenty FAANG engineers minted from the top Midwestern schools - think CMU and other state schools - even if they rank behind the top schools on the coasts.

CMU is a private school, ranked number 1 in CS, and is not in a Midwestern state! That said, there are lots of top CS programs in the Midwest.

New comment by santaclaus in "Hiring for tech jobs has increased more than 100% in these Midwestern cities"

santaclaus — Tue, 06 Oct 2020 16:20:48 +0000

University of Illinois Urbana Champagne, University of Michigan, university of Wisconsin Madison, and Purdue are all top 20 in CS.

New comment by santaclaus in "Show HN: I made a computer vision addon for Blender"

santaclaus — Sat, 03 Oct 2020 16:34:15 +0000

Very cool! Just the other day I was trying to set Blender’s camera based on a standard 3x4 computer vision KRT matrix, and it is surprisingly a pain in the ass —- I wish more of these graphics CAD packages (Blender, Houdini, Maya) made it easier to deal with vision data.

Programmers say Uber Eats is systematically underpaying their workers

santaclaus — Fri, 21 Aug 2020 00:01:11 +0000

Article URL: https://www.salon.com/2020/08/20/programmers-say-uber-eats-is-systematically-underpaying-their-workers/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24230433

Points: 41

# Comments: 15

New comment by santaclaus in "Japanese anime studio Khara moving to Blender"

santaclaus — Fri, 16 Aug 2019 20:54:18 +0000

Very cool! Glad to see Nucleus still getting some love, Jos would be happy — I was talking to a Pixar effects fellow at SIGGRAPH and was under the impression that Houdini’s constraint solver thing had spread like wildfire in that department.

New comment by santaclaus in "Japanese anime studio Khara moving to Blender"

santaclaus — Fri, 16 Aug 2019 19:30:15 +0000

Maya is still used in Pixar’s characters department for modeling, I believe, and maybe a few shading-related (UV layout?) tasks here or there.

New comment by santaclaus in "Japanese anime studio Khara moving to Blender"

santaclaus — Fri, 16 Aug 2019 18:39:32 +0000

Autodesk is doubling down on CAD and engineering (their leadership has even said so publicly) — VFX and animation is just a much smaller market. I personally think this is very short sighted.

New comment by santaclaus in "Japanese anime studio Khara moving to Blender"

santaclaus — Fri, 16 Aug 2019 18:36:59 +0000

Autodesk laid off the entire R&D staff of Maya (outside of Bifrost, which was an acquisition a few years ago and is now a one person show, mainly) and transferred ownership to their maintenance engineering division, if that isn’t life support I don’t know what is.

New comment by santaclaus in "Japanese anime studio Khara moving to Blender"

santaclaus — Fri, 16 Aug 2019 13:36:06 +0000

> Autodesk tools (especially Maya) are way too expensive in what they deliver. I'm glad many big studios realized this in that they either build their own tools (Pixar/Dreamworks) or they adapt Open Source (Blender) and help improving it.

Cost isn’t the issue, it’s mainly the fact that Autodesk effectively put Maya on life support. Pixar is paying hundreds of software engineers in the Bay to develop their proprietary animation tools, which is most definitely not cheaper than a few hundred Maya seats per show.

New comment by santaclaus in "BGP super-blunder: How Verizon sparked a ‘cascading catastrophic failure’"

santaclaus — Tue, 13 Aug 2019 16:10:15 +0000

> I was interested to find out which steel mill, since they are almost non-existent in Pittsburgh these days

As evidenced by the smell of sulphur yesterday morning the coke plants down in Clairton are still alive and well!

Russian Land of Permafrost and Mammoths Is Thawing

santaclaus — Sun, 04 Aug 2019 19:36:16 +0000

Article URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/04/world/europe/russia-siberia-yakutia-permafrost-global-warming.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20608741

Points: 15

# Comments: 0

New comment by santaclaus in "Blender 2.80"

santaclaus — Tue, 30 Jul 2019 19:49:15 +0000

I don’t think Pixar’s Maya-like software ‘man v’ runs on macOS, at least it didn’t a couple of years ago (my ex was a TD at Pixar and used to complain about the old version of Linux they were on). I’m pretty sure the demos they showed were of their file format viewer which is a separate thing.

New comment by santaclaus in "Blender 2.80"

santaclaus — Tue, 30 Jul 2019 17:41:51 +0000

Film 3D is mostly Linux at this point. All the major VFX shops (like Weta) and animation studios (Disney, Pixar, etc) are on Linux for artist workstations. Apple stuff gets lots of use, but mainly iPads for story boarding and such.

New comment by santaclaus in "American Suburbs Swell Again as a New Generation Escapes the City"

santaclaus — Tue, 02 Jul 2019 02:34:38 +0000

> Curious if this is my bubble or consistent.

Depends where you live! I’m in Pittsburgh and there is still a culture here of bailing to the well heeled suburbs (cough cough Fox Chapel) when having kids. You couldn’t pay me to leave the city core, but the Midwest still clings to that suburban status symbol life more than the rest of the nation.

New comment by santaclaus in "Cripes, a bumbershoot"

santaclaus — Fri, 20 Apr 2018 20:46:04 +0000

> I don't want to be that kind of stuck-in-the-mud, so I'm trying to just relax and accept linguistic progress in whatever form it takes.

Does this mean you will be dropping the 'u' from colour?

New comment by santaclaus in "The Rendering of Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor"

santaclaus — Sat, 30 Dec 2017 02:12:20 +0000

I love these types of breakdowns! It would be really cool to see breakdowns in other portions of a game engine, too: physics, character animation, managing the massive assets, lots of potential goodies.