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Volscio

1,039 karma · joined February 15, 2009

Head of Engineering, Cloudburst. Brooklyn, NYC. NYU-ITP, Georgetown-MSFS, DLI-West, Modern Standard Arabic. UT Austin-Classics. Formerly: Candy Digital, Flashpoint, Vimeo, The Barbarian Group, ChatID, The Colbert Report, social media ops analyst, DHS contractor, US Army Arabic linguist/crypto-analyst/paratrooper. https://benturner.com/

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/xeus; my proof: https://keybase.io/xeus/sigs/ReAoTnkvS5P3NJITBkoICpA794i3hi1CHXZV0ppB5MY ]

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Volscio··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2023)
Cloudburst Technologies | NY, NY | Remote | Full-Time | https://burst.cloud/

Cloudburst is a seed-funded New York-based remote-first company helping customers with detection, prevention, and investigation into cryptocurrency market manipulation and fraud.

Senior+ Backend Software Engineer: https://www.indeed.com/job/senior-backend-software-engineer-...

Data Collection Engineer: https://www.indeed.com/job/data-collection-engineer-b930cd79...

Volscio··on Eviction startup gets gig workers to help landlords kick people out
If you view the source of the agent onboarding page, you can read what appears to be an arbitration clause that is written for Uber. I am guessing they just copypasted the whole thing? Or...?

https://civvl.com/agent-onboarding/

Volscio··on Interviews with developers who became managers
Charity Majors talks about the Manager-IC pendulum. You should rotate between the two every couple of years.
Volscio··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2019)
Sorry about that! We're just about to start our summer intern process in the next week or two. If it's helpful, you can reach out to me at ben(at)flashpoint-intel(dot)com.
Volscio··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2019)
Flashpoint | Software Engineer | New York, REMOTE | Full-Time, Interns | Python

Flashpoint provides meaningful intelligence that enables large enterprises and the public sector to bolster cybersecurity, confront fraud, combat insider threats, enhance physical security, and address vendor risk and supply chain integrity. Flashpoint accomplishes this through integration of collections systems and a streaming data pipeline with an intelligence analysis team.

Flashpoint Engineering hires for empathetic and force multiplying individuals, and assesses candidates through a take-home test, code review, and structured interviews.

Software Engineer #1 job description: https://boards.greenhouse.io/flashpoint/jobs/4077118002?gh_j...

Software Engineer #2 job description: https://boards.greenhouse.io/flashpoint/jobs/4212896002?gh_j...

Volscio··on Key Values – Find Engineering Teams That Share Your Values
Given so much discussion on this topic, the first thing I looked for was whether there was a reference to whether a company does timed code pair interviews and white boarding, or uses some other method (paid trial period, take home test, etc). Would that be worth adding?
Volscio··on Why Subways in the Northeast Are So Troubled
DC's metro system is in another league of dysfunction from the other systems which suffer from the typical, chronic burden of heavy use.

The article lumps it all together; "hey, we should do a transit article today".

Volscio··on A Brain Dump of What I Worked on for Uncharted 4
To complement this, I found this video interesting in demonstrating some of the technical achievements and flourishes in Uncharted 4:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ts2am8WRBXQ

Volscio··on 2015 State of Devops Report [pdf]
I (along with many others, I would assume) would be interested in seeing data on what the usage trends are for different devops tools.
Volscio··on Graph of Foursquare's Popularity After Removing Check-Ins
I felt this article was interesting regarding why and how they did it:

https://medium.com/@mrdavenport/swarm-branding-and-visual-de...

Volscio··on How We Did It: SNL Title Sequence
Uh oh, Wordpress problems.

Cached: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:2Z0Puiw...

Volscio··on NYU Eats World: An alumna laments the rise of an imperial university
You're kidding right? Kids coming out of Courant are in decent demand, especially in NYC tech departments.
Volscio··on Music 'hackers' unleash new generation of instruments
Also see NYU's Interactive Telecommunication Programs course, NIME (New Interfaces for Musical Expression):

http://itp.nyu.edu/nime/

Volscio··on Homeless Fonts
DERELICTE! It is a fashion, a way of life inspired by the very homeless, the vagrants, the crack whores that make this wonderful city so unique.
Volscio··on Updated MacBook Pros
The overall system performance improvement of an SSD is worth it alone for an upgrade (or replacing it in your current laptop if you can). It turned my old plastic MacBook into a new laptop for me. I'm surprised no one has mentioned it yet. You will love using your laptop even more, and you can get a small form factor external to complement it.
Volscio··on A New Digital Currency Whose Value Is Based on Your Reputation
Exactly; I'd also like to see how my notion of what being a "hard worker" is by comparing my definition with someone else's.

Have been tinkering with something similar: https://galapag.us/ I don't have all that much time to work on it but I think by next year I'm going to go back to spending time working on it instead of general compsci/coding nightly training.

Volscio··on NFL players: height and weight over time
The visualization looks like Conway's game of life.
Volscio··on Commander.js – Node.js command-line interfaces made easy
Ah hah, I'd known about ranviermud but hadn't noticed it had a telnet lib! Will give it a look-see, thank you!!
Volscio··on Commander.js – Node.js command-line interfaces made easy
Somewhat related, but I've been looking for a node.js-based module for providing a telnet/MUD CLI but either it's implemented through a web page with an input box, or has only the basic telnet protocol fleshed out with no user interaction. Any ideas?
Volscio··on Common Server Setups For Your Web App
Yeah, I've been googling for tutorials/configs/info on various deployment setups and digitalocean's come up more and more with solid guides. Thanks for sharing the secrets of the somewhat arcane!
Volscio··on Snowden: Why hasn’t DNI Clapper been punished for lying to Congress?
Consider WaPo's chief readership: people interested in domestic/foreign policy probably living in the DMV area and associated with the federal government.

Among those types, what Snowden did was considered, at BEST, a warranted discussion but highly unprofessional and a breach of trust. (whether you agree with that or not, but that represents their core interests in serving the federal government)

Volscio··on Vkontakte Founder Flees Russia
I was hoping to see these comments more prevalent in the hackernews thread. The story struck me at first as being interesting but then it seems like there's more murkiness involved and it's not an open-and-shut case. Not that the veracity of this passage is great, but seriously I was hoping for more of a critical eye on the story:

"United Capital Partners, a private company registered in Moscow that owns 48 percent of Vkontakte, disputed Durov's statements on Tuesday, saying he had been seeking to “politicize the situation” because there were “serious legal claims” against him and he was suspected of embezzlement."

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/vkontakte-founder...

Volscio··on Daniel's review of Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt
"Mr. Joe Trader" might need some definition. For instance, I felt that HFT didn't change the game for "Mr. Joe Trader" as much as the rules limiting daytrading ($25k minimum for margin, restriction on round-trip trades per quarter) did. Now you need to be fairly well off or trade pretty much full-time to be able just to enter the game. Fees may be down but fewer players can play.
Volscio··on The Disruption of Cable Television Has Arrived
People have been writing stuff like this for like 20 years now, ever since the internet became viable for a future of streaming video.

But cable TV has continued on strong. If anything I feel like, despite cable-cutters, the vast majority of people out there still regularly consume cable TV in one form or another. Perhaps what's changed is that the "golden age of TV content" right now feels more like the movie industry, in that big cable networks release big TV series and market them heavily almost as if you were going to the theater to watch a blockbuster movie.

The online streaming services actually seem diluted now, while cable networks have very strong brands; I don't really have netflix but my wife and I have ondemand and a dvr through time warner and 3 different devices to watch amazon through. The fobs you can get from google and amazon and whomever else will continue to dilute that access to streaming (which is good for competition and for DIYers at some point, I suppose)

But really the battle is about whether cable TV will continue to be an always-on service, and in that regard I think it will. Just flip on your TV, which you may have in several rooms in your house, or at your favorite sports bars, or in the office lobby, or wherever. It can be background, it can be a social experience for live sporting events (probably the most compelling reason for keeping cable), etc.

The other component is that video games are now more compelling to play/watch, and in fact a lot of youtube and twitch channels are now regularly consumed by viewers.

I would argue that the "disruption" already happened a long time ago but the cable networks and service providers have adjusted and assimilated to various degrees, such that we now have tons of avenues for stuff to watch.

Maybe this just takes some perspective to see because I feel like people keep predicting cable TV will just die or something, and that seems like such a naive way of looking at the world.

Volscio··on Genetic mugshot recreates faces from nothing but DNA
Similar: Heather Dewey-Hagborg's project http://deweyhagborg.com/strangervisions/

In Stranger Visions artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg creates portrait sculptures from analyses of genetic material collected in public places. Working with the traces strangers unwittingly leave behind, Dewey-Hagborg calls attention to the impulse toward genetic determinism and the potential for a culture of genetic surveillance.

Volscio··on Looking back on “Look Back” videos
Engineers figure out ways to make this sort of thing cheaper, easy to do, and scalable. Most of all, the end result is something tangible, interesting to individuals, and a product of a lot of data that the engineers already had laying around.

Then that code and how it was created circulates to other orgs (hopefully through open source), then it's picked up by researchers and grad students who start to apply it to more important research. Maybe also privately funded or state-sponsored aid types read about how it was done and they apply those principles to the high-minded projects that you want to see.

Blaming society for having "fucked up" priorities is a very college freshman view of the world. There is no way that even the most talented engineers would also have the wherewithal, experience, connections, and local knowledge to produce sustainable projects that would, I don't know what you were imagining, lower poverty or increase literacy rates.

Volscio··on Anonymity vs. Real Identity
In theory this is true if everyone is being a well-intentioned actor but anonymity can be used to distort a broader agenda into an appealing message; see obscured-funded lobbying campaigns.

Also context is important for whatever one says, and a statement hanging on its own is rarely very convincing. It can be a red flag (whistleblowing) and it can be inspiring (famous quotations) but usually an argument is stronger as a result of the context from which it came (a culture, a person's stature, reputation, etc.).

That all said, I think we need to have anonymity, pseudonymity, and also verified identity. If we choose to share across those boundaries (sharing Facebook details with another service, as an example) then we have to deal with and accept the drawbacks. We can't expect to have isolated identities exactly the way we want them given that that kind of system would be a quagmire for developers to build...

Volscio··on Dear Recruiters
Applies to just about every industry.
Volscio··on Facebook's big deal shows we're back in the dot-com funny money era
Money is a lot tighter in most other deals. It's nothing like the wild west of the dotcom era where companies were formed with little more than a mission statement and they'd get pumped up.

These types of financial articles are the worst because they are unable to accurately predict the future of new markets. They're the types of articles that you read a decade later and kind of pat on their head.

Skepticism of an industry is one thing, but most of the time that skepticism is not coming from any type of informed or even historically accurate perspective. It's just not understanding what the current market price of things is. Which is pretty dangerous for a newspaper article writer.

Volscio··on Writing an MMO with Web Actors
I was thinking about the Primer from "The Diamond Age". :(

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age

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