Top all-time · #343
Spotify Labs
Company blog · labs.spotify.comprogrammingdata
Spotify Labs is the company blog at labs.spotify.com, writing about programming and data. Since 2013, 156 different Hacker News readers have linked it 230 times, most often “Spotify engineering culture (part 1)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Spotify Labs is our home for research previews, experimental features, and early-stage products at the frontier of AI, audio, and creativity. Get a first listen and help shape what comes next.
Most-linked posts?
- Spotify engineering culture (part 1)14 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2014-11-27
- How Spotify shuffles songs11 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2015-01-28
- Creative usernames and Spotify account hijacking8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2015-10-23
- Spotify's Event Delivery on GCP6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2019-11-13
- Spotify Engineering Culture (Part 2)5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2014-09-20
- Improving Critical Infrastructure Rollouts5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2017-06-23
- Managing Machines at Spotify5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2016-04-01
- Show HN: Coördinator, a visual interface for turning an SVG into XY coördinates4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2018-03-02
- Creative usernames and Spotify account hijacking4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2013-06-18
- Introducing Chartify: Easier chart creation in Python for data scientists4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-11-15
What Hacker News says?
Creative usernames and Spotify account hijacking Posted on June 18, 2013 https://labs.spotify.com/2013/06/18/creative-usernames/
Comment linking /2013/06/18/creative-usernames/
on “Let’s talk about usernames”Submitted Creative usernames and Spotify account hijacking as a story · 281 points
HN discussionWorth mentioning Spotify's account hijacking problem when using unicode https://labs.spotify.com/2013/06/18/creative-usernames/
Comment linking /2013/06/18/creative-usernames/
on “Let’s talk about usernames”Submitted How Spotify ran a large Google Dataflow job for Wrapped 2019 as a story · 269 points
HN discussionhttps://labs.spotify.com/2017/06/07/meet-our-engineers-charl...
Comment linking /2017/06/07/meet-our-engineers-charlie-pastuszenski/
on “Spotify’s Discover Weekly: How machine learning finds new music”Submitted Spotify’s Love/Hate Relationship with DNS as a story · 135 points
HN discussionSpotify wrote a brilliant blog post on this. Highly recommend reading. https://labs.spotify.com/2014/02/28/how-to-shuffle-songs/
Comment linking /2014/02/28/how-to-shuffle-songs/
on “Show HN: A Set of Dice That Follows the Gambler's Fallacy”Submitted What it feels like being an iPad on a stick on wheels as a story · 123 points
HN discussion> Our archetypal team is one product manager, one designer, two engineers from us and two engineers from the client. This organizational system is also referred to as "squads"[1]. We also use it at DSC and it works remarkably well. 1. https://labs.spotify.com/2014/03/27/spotify-engineering-cult...
Comment linking /2014/03/27/spotify-engineering-culture-part-1/
on “How we ended up with microservices”Submitted Spotify's Kafka-Based Event Delivery System as a story · 122 points
HN discussionFrom time to time, I'v enjoyed Spotify's blog: https://labs.spotify.com/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Which companies have the best blogs written by their engineering team?”Submitted Building Spotify’s New Web Player as a story · 101 points
HN discussionYou can listen and read Spotify engineers talking about their experiences with Google, including running 2,000,000 qps load tests without ever telling anyone at Google. If you read some of their blogs, you can see how brutally honest they are about the pros and cons of our services: https://labs.spotify.com/2016/03/10/spotifys-event-delivery-... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTVFg6YOjWo&index=7&list=PLI... https:/…
Comment linking /2016/03/10/spotifys-event-delivery-the-road-to-the-cloud-part-iii/
on “Google launches Public Datasets program”Submitted What the heck is Backstage anyway? as a story · 75 points
HN discussionSpotify used to have a security problem with this kind of characters: https://labs.spotify.com/2013/06/18/creative-usernames/
Comment linking /2013/06/18/creative-usernames/
on “Mimic – abusing Unicode to create tragedy”Submitted Managing Machines at Spotify as a story · 73 points
HN discussionReminds me of a issue Spotify had too with unicodes and usernames. https://labs.spotify.com/2013/06/18/creative-usernames/ I had someone tell me that programming isn't real work before, and this is yet another example of all the small little details going into building things that most people don't really think about day to day. I haven't had to work with login code in a while, but might at some point. I know some s…
Comment linking /2013/06/18/creative-usernames/
on “Hacking GitHub's Auth with Unicode's Turkish Dotless 'I'”Submitted Introducing Chartify: Easier chart creation in Python for data scientists as a story · 57 points
HN discussionI work at Spotify on ML. I spent quite sometime working on our production vector model pipelines. We have three components: 1. Training data: Scalding pipelines (could be any large scale production framework) to preprocess training data and reduce it to a few hundred gigs. 2. Run latent vector models (Matrix factorization, Embedding models etc) to generate item vectors. This stage is designed to be non specific to f…
Comment linking /2016/08/07/commodity-music-ml-services/
on “Ask HN: What does your production machine learning pipeline look like?”Submitted Monitoring at Spotify: Introducing Heroic as a story · 57 points
HN discussionThis is why normalization methods exist, but is also the source of various security flaws, like Spotify's issue in June 2013 [1] with user names that were different at the Unicode level, but normalized into forms that were not unique. (Their example, the account 'ᴮᴵᴳᴮᴵᴿᴰ' could seize control of the account 'bigbird'.) [1] http://labs.spotify.com/2013/06/18/creative-usernames/
Comment linking /2013/06/18/creative-usernames/
on “UTF-8 – "The most elegant hack"”Submitted ELS: latency based load balancer as a story · 55 points
HN discussionMissed one! Spotify just released their own dataviz library yesterday https://labs.spotify.com/2018/11/15/introducing-chartify-eas...
Comment linking /2018/11/15/introducing-chartify-easier-chart-creation-in-python-for-data-scientists/
on “Python Data Visualization 2018: Why So Many Libraries?”Submitted Oh IPv6, Where Art Thou as a story · 44 points
HN discussionThere's a gamut of reasons, and it benefits all of managers, ICs, and the company. I like to point to Spotify's prose on building their engineering career ladder as a good example of why ladders can be important. 0. https://labs.spotify.com/2016/02/08/technical-career-path/ 1. https://labs.spotify.com/2016/02/22/things-we-learned-creati...
Comment linking /2016/02/22/things-we-learned-creating-technology-career-steps/
on “Defining a Distinguished Engineer”Submitted What it feels like being an iPad on a stick on wheels (2013) as a story · 42 points
HN discussionThere are a bunch of great references for career ladders, broadly speaking, that discuss the rollout process and what each level means for that company. The best not only say something about the levels, but about how the levels are interpreted in line with that company's culture, whatever it means. It's very hard to get to levels beyond senior as a pure generalist: you're typically going to have to have worked on pr…
Comment linking /2016/02/08/technical-career-path/
on “Levels of Seniority”Submitted How Spotify shuffles songs as a story · 41 points
HN discussionhttps://labs.spotify.com/2014/02/28/how-to-shuffle-songs/
Comment linking /2014/02/28/how-to-shuffle-songs/
on “How Spotify ran a large Google Dataflow job for Wrapped 2019”Submitted Creative usernames and Spotify account hijacking as a story · 33 points
HN discussion
