Hacker News: swerner

New comment by swerner in "The map that keeps Burning Man honest"

swerner — Thu, 07 May 2026 16:09:36 +0000

https://burningman.org/global-events-groups/

New comment by swerner in "The Burning Man MOOP Map"

swerner — Thu, 07 May 2026 15:21:53 +0000

If you think that’s dedication: I met Dominic (DA) who they interviewed in this article almost 20 years ago in the Spanish desert, where taught us Euroburners the art of MOOP cleanup. He’s been at it for a long time now.

New comment by swerner in "Tell HN: Recruiters are lying about remote positions"

swerner — Thu, 07 Apr 2022 16:54:41 +0000

I’ve had a similar FAANG experience. They approached me, I made “no relocation” a non-negotiable condition from the start. We started talking, I did the marathon interview until late in the night (CET vs PT), put my formal application in their system, and after two months they said they were ready to make me an offer. On the same day, it turned out that they had not even bothered to look up the pay range for my country. Instead, I was asked for the fifth time if I were willing to move to California.

New comment by swerner in "20 Years of Haiku"

swerner — Fri, 20 Aug 2021 08:15:20 +0000

I would love to see a BeOS/Haiku userland on top, of the Linux Kernel. That would bring wide hardware support, including HW accelerated 3D (something BeOS was always lacking). It is not going to happen though, the attempts that were didn’t go far and porting the entirety of Haiku would be a gigantic effort that no one is volunteering for.

New comment by swerner in "20 Years of Haiku"

swerner — Fri, 20 Aug 2021 08:11:23 +0000

Linux 20 years ago wasn’t what it is today. Low latency audio for example, that was something that BeOS in the late 90s could do out of the box, a similar experience on Linux required special kernel patches and some compromises or it simply wasn’t there at all.

Audio latencies of less than 10ms on consumer hardware were otherwise unheard of. Windows, out of the box, was still operating in the 100+ms range.

New comment by swerner in "Renderman"

swerner — Sun, 25 Apr 2021 17:43:14 +0000

Not just side projects. We did two feature animations using Blender, more projects in the pipeline: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iZn3kCsw5D8

New comment by swerner in "How Retroactive makes Aperture, iPhoto, and iTunes work again on macOS Catalina (2019)"

swerner — Tue, 03 Mar 2020 10:38:40 +0000

In my experience, OepnCL in Catalina is about as good or bad as it was in Mojave.

New comment by swerner in "Reducing risk of automotive death"

swerner — Mon, 10 Feb 2020 09:35:34 +0000

Part of it is pure luck - being at the right place at the right time. An on site internship gave me a foot in the door for my first remote job. After that, I had experience in a certain niche and a couple of open source contributions under my belt.

Another part is just having the guts to ask for a remote job straight away and accept getting turned down dozens of times.

New comment by swerner in "Reducing risk of automotive death"

swerner — Mon, 10 Feb 2020 08:12:10 +0000

German here as well - the lack of employer flexibility is why in the last 15 years, I have been working exclusively for companies overseas, remotely. I found it much easier to negotiate remote work with an employer based in San Francisco than one in Berlin or Munich.

New comment by swerner in "Thoughts on Cocoa"

swerner — Sat, 05 Oct 2019 19:21:12 +0000

HIView was up to date and documented, and there were WWDC sessions teaching developers why they should move to HIView and how to do it. Likewise, Apple provided documentation about how to port your Carbon application to 64 bit Carbon. Maxon reportedly even had a 64bit Carbon version of Cinema 4D ready to ship when Apple suddenly announced that they would abandon 64bit Carbon - telling developers to disregard the 64bit Carbon they were still shipping in betas.

New comment by swerner in "Thoughts on Cocoa"

swerner — Sat, 05 Oct 2019 15:21:44 +0000

You have to add all kinds of reference qualifiers (__strong, __weak, ...).

New comment by swerner in "Thoughts on Cocoa"

swerner — Sat, 05 Oct 2019 13:21:16 +0000

Apple may initially have intended Carbon as temporary, but has changed their stance when they started adding new APIs that never existed in MacOS 9 - HIView/HIWindow was intended to unify Carbon and Cocoa, there was even a 64 buy version of Carbon that shipped in Mac OS betas, and when Retina-Display Hardware shipped, Carbon received new APIs to deal with that.

Likewise, Cocoa in 10.0 was buggy and incomplete. It took until about 10.4, 10.5 for Cocoa to reach feature parity with Carbon and many Cocoa applications were using Carbon for certain features (in facts, last time I checked, Cocoa menus were implemented in Carbon).

New comment by swerner in "Thoughts on Cocoa"

swerner — Sat, 05 Oct 2019 13:16:07 +0000

QTKit was deprecated, and support for objective-C garbage collection, once praised as the future, was removed altogether.

New comment by swerner in "Nobody talks about the real reason to use Tabs over Spaces"

swerner — Mon, 08 Jul 2019 11:16:49 +0000

Absolutely.

Not just tabs vs spaces, but also camel case vs underscore, line length, etc.

New comment by swerner in "Apple Is Listening"

swerner — Mon, 10 Jun 2019 08:12:18 +0000

Besides, we’re already using render farms where each machine has 20+ cores and 256GB RAM. A future render farm might as well be built from machines with specs similar to the new Mac PRo.

New comment by swerner in "Apple Is Listening"

swerner — Mon, 10 Jun 2019 07:51:24 +0000

Remember the joke of “never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 full of hard drives”? That’s the render farm. Throw a ton of work at it, and it’ll get done faster than a big single machine could. What would have taken a week now takes a day.

The Mac Pro in our analogy is 5G wireless: not nearly as much bandwidth as the 747, but at much lower latency. Lots of interactive/real time applications are possible that in a farm would be bottlenecked by network bandwidth alone.

New comment by swerner in "Blender Is Free Software"

swerner — Sun, 09 Jun 2019 21:07:45 +0000

I worked as one of several in-house Blender developers on "Next Gen". In some cases, were able to get fixed builds into our artists' hands in within 24h of a bug report. I have not had such a quick turnaround with any commercial software vendor yet.

https://www.netflix.com/title/80988892

New comment by swerner in "Blender Is Free Software"

swerner — Sun, 09 Jun 2019 20:54:36 +0000

Our repository is public. You can look at every single commit we did: https://github.com/tangent-animation/blender278/commits/mast...

"Normal days" changed during the course of the project. In the beginning, it was work on new features for months if necessary, towards the end it were overnight patches for "frame x in shot y looks wrong/crashes/takes forever".

New comment by swerner in "Why It’s Easy for a Bounty Hunter to Find People"

swerner — Tue, 02 Apr 2019 17:11:47 +0000

And those are still the harmless examples. Look at it from the female perspective: Got a violent ex-husband? A stalker? Are you a teenager who’s walking home alone after school? You have done nothing wrong, but you have a lot to hide.

New comment by swerner in "“Medieval” Diseases Flare as Unsanitary Living Conditions Proliferate"

swerner — Fri, 22 Mar 2019 15:22:23 +0000

Interesting. The difference in homelessness between EU and US may just be perception and not reality?