Top all-time · #450
Spotify Engineering
Company blog · engineering.atspotify.comprogrammingaisystems
Spotify Engineering is the company blog at engineering.atspotify.com, writing about programming, ai and systems. Since 2020, 123 different Hacker News readers have linked it 161 times, most often “How to Shuffle Songs? (2014)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-16, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 8 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Spotify Engineering for its 2014 shuffle-algorithm post, plus pieces on per-user encryption, microservice testing, ADRs and engineering culture. Several commenters cite it as a source.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Our R&D teams tell the stories behind how we build at Spotify. AI, mobile, web, data science, experimentation, developer tools, design, open source, and more.
Most-linked posts?
- How to Shuffle Songs? (2014)12 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2022-05-01
- Creative usernames and Spotify account hijacking6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2022-02-23
- Building the Future of the Spotify Desktop Apps5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-04-08
- Voyager: Spotify's New Nearest-Neighbor Search Library4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-10-25
- We Automated Content Marketing to Acquire Users at Scale3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-11-07
- The What, Why, and How of Mastering App Size3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-11-14
- Basic Pitch: ML model to turn audio into MIDI3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-06-02
- Load Testing for 2022 Spotify Wrapped3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-04-01
- Coming Soon: Confidence – An Experimentation Platform from Spotify3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-08-03
- How to Shuffle Songs? (2014)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-06-26
What Hacker News says?
Spotify uses per user encryption, which is an approach that can solve this: https://engineering.atspotify.com/2018/09/18/scalable-user-p... That way account A couldn’t access account B’s decryption key to get to their private video data
Comment linking /2018/09/18/scalable-user-privacy/
on “Stealing Your Private YouTube Videos, One Frame at a Time”Submitted Portal by Spotify cut my Claude Code token usage by 90% as a story · 278 points
HN discussion> a single codebase for ALL the targets Spotify even has a pretty detailed post on this: https://engineering.atspotify.com/2021/04/07/building-the-fu...
Comment linking /2021/04/07/building-the-future-of-our-desktop-apps/
on “Psst: Fast Spotify client with native GUI, without Electron, built in Rust”Submitted Pedalboard: Spotify’s Audio Effects Library for Python as a story · 256 points
HN discussionIf you are interested in their story how the original client and architecture came to be and then how it changed to what it is today they have a podcast you can listen to: "Spotify: A Product Story" - https://pca.st/cbo7khrm Here's also a blog post related to the topic: https://engineering.atspotify.com/2021/08/04/four-lessons-we...
Comment linking /2021/08/04/four-lessons-we-learned-from-creating-spotifys-desktop-app/
on “Psst: Fast Spotify client with native GUI, without Electron, built in Rust”Submitted Spotify Optimized the Largest Dataflow Job Ever for Wrapped 2020 as a story · 196 points
HN discussionSpotify shuffle is indeed not (uniformly) random, as confirmed by this blog post[1]. The post is eight years old, so it is highly possible the algorithm has changed. [1]: https://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/02/how-to-shuffle-son...
Comment linking /2014/02/how-to-shuffle-songs/
on “Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?”Submitted Incident report: Spotify outage on March 8 as a story · 120 points
HN discussionSome more on this... How to Shuffle Songs? - https://web.archive.org/web/20220215030739/https://engineeri... ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38330877 78 points, 65 comments) Took a little bit of digging to find it - I remembered the graphic at the top and found a blog post that copied it and linked to the blog post, but the blog post isn't there anymore... so web archive. The current version of the blog post…
Comment linking /2025/11/shuffle-making-random-feel-more-human
on “Livenerf: Has Opus 5.5 been nerfed yet?”Submitted Applying the Facade Pattern on Spotify for Artists as a story · 25 points
HN discussionThey wrote an interesting blog some time back about how "random shuffle" isn't necessarily what people want, and how their algorithm works ( https://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/02/how-to-shuffle-son... ). That was a decade ago, so maybe their approach has changed or that it does not perform well under certain conditions (like the one you mention). It works well for me on most playlists on the order of 10s.
Comment linking /2014/02/how-to-shuffle-songs/
on “Spotube: Open-source Spotify-Youtube client”Submitted From development to real users: How to create a web performance story as a story · 21 points
HN discussionThe stupidest part is why it changed: https://engineering.atspotify.com/2021/04/07/building-the-fu... According to https://community.spotify.com/t5/Community-Blog/The-New-Desk... "We're working on bringing back a list-like Discography view, something many of you have mentioned missing in the new UI" They could have just left things as is, but no.
Comment linking /2021/04/07/building-the-future-of-our-desktop-apps/
on “Apps Getting Worse”Submitted Spotify’s new open source software: XCRemoteCache as a story · 16 points
HN discussionWe can only blame ourselves for Spotify's bad UI! (jk) Spotify uses an internal experimentation platform that guides which features they determine are successful, based upon how our usage moves their metrics: https://engineering.atspotify.com/2020/10/29/spotifys-new-ex... So, basically, the bad UI is improving their metrics. Or something. Maybe this is a case of experimentation gone wrong.
Comment linking /2020/10/29/spotifys-new-experimentation-platform-part-1/
on “Apps Getting Worse”Submitted Basic Pitch: ML model to turn audio into MIDI as a story · 12 points
HN discussionhttps://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/02/how-to-shuffle-son...
Comment linking /2014/02/how-to-shuffle-songs/
on “Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?”Submitted Spotify Introducing Natural Language Search as a story · 6 points
HN discussionhttps://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/02/how-to-shuffle-son...
Comment linking /2014/02/how-to-shuffle-songs/
on “Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?”Submitted AI Changed How Spotify Builds. What We Learned About Quality at Higher Velocity as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSpotify had a blogpost about it back in the day[1]. It was based on prior work that's a bit more general[2]. The basic idea was that you don't really want to randomize, you want to distribute. [1]: https://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/02/how-to-shuffle-son... [2]: http://keyj.emphy.de/balanced-shuffle/
Comment linking /2014/02/how-to-shuffle-songs/
on “We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it”Submitted We Automated Content Marketing to Acquire Users at Scale as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSpotify Desktop is kinda different from the website because of how it uses APIs locally to control things https://engineering.atspotify.com/2021/04/07/building-the-fu... VSCode is also appreciably different both in capability and implementation, https://franz-ajit.medium.com/understanding-visual-studio-co... but interesting that V8 debug protocol is becoming more common, so maybe that will come to a browser some day…
Comment linking /2021/04/07/building-the-future-of-our-desktop-apps/
on “Is the madness ever going to end?”Submitted Introducing Natural Language Search for Podcast Episodes as a story · 5 points
HN discussionMost of them have feeds. * https://engineering.fb.com/feed * https://netflixtechblog.com/feed * No feed for stripe * https://www.uber.com/en-GB/blog/london/engineering/rss/ * No feed for LinkedIn * https://engineering.atspotify.com/feed * https://tailscale.com/blog/index.xml * https://careersatdoordash.com/engineering-blog/feed * https://dropbox.tech/feed
Comment linking /feed
on “Ask HN: What are the best engineering blogs with real-world depth?”Submitted Building the Future of Our Desktop Apps as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSpotify and Tailscale do... https://engineering.atspotify.com/feed https://tailscale.com/blog/index.xml
Comment linking /feed
on “Ask HN: What are the best engineering blogs with real-world depth?”Submitted Creative usernames and Spotify account hijacking as a story · 4 points
HN discussion> especially from tech company blogs, https://engineering.fb.com/ https://netflixtechblog.com/ https://stripe.com/blog/engineering https://eng.uber.com https://engineering.linkedin.com/ https://engineering.atspotify.com/ https://tailscale.com/blog https://careersatdoordash.com/engineering-blog/ https://dropbox.tech/ -- Aggregators:( https://engineering.fyi/ ; https://diff.blog/ ) + https://hn.algolia.com/?query=engi…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What are the best engineering blogs with real-world depth?”Submitted Basic Pitch: Audio to MIDI from Spotify Research as a story · 4 points
HN discussion
