ephermata

Facebook | Privacy Engineer | Menlo Park, Seattle| Full-Time | Onsite

Facebook is seeking passionate engineers to identify, advise, investigate and mitigate privacy violations and/or exposures in our products. Your skills will be the foundation for understanding privacy risks in Facebook initiatives by being the technical advocate for privacy decisions and discussions across the company. You will be relied upon to provide engineering and product teams with the privacy expertise necessary to make confident product decisions.

We are seeking both individual contributor and managers.

The job description for individual contributors https://www.facebook.com/careers/v2/jobs/442604633040190/

For managers https://www.facebook.com/careers/jobs/2317996711826538/

I am an engineering manager in the same organization. I support a related team that helps people find security flaws faster with static analysis. I am happy to answer questions about what it's like to work in security and privacy at Facebook. My email is dmolnar -at- fb.com . Twitter is @dmolnar and DMs are open.

There were at least two programs when I was there. I heard a lot more about them under Ballmer than under Satya.

HiPo -- for junior to mid level -- special training, networking, and seminars. MiniMSFT comments section mentions this from time to time.

Bench -- for mid to later career, usually on the way to "partner" or above level -- same as HiPo, but may be asked to work on a project with others in Bench, may see attention from VPs mentoring the group.

Neither one had any official impact on ratings, rewards, or career velocity. What they did do, however, was establish an elite and help that elite network across the company.

Microsoft (Security Risk Detection in AI & Research) | Senior Developer | Redmond, WA | ONSITE | Full-Time

Microsoft Security Risk Detection brings pioneering Microsoft technology for analyzing the risk from "million dollar" bugs to everyone, wrapped up in a scalable cloud service for security testing. Customers come to Microsoft Security Risk Detection to scale security assurance processes without sacrificing speed of execution. We help customers be the best they can be at analyzing the risk from insecure software so they can do more of what they love. Learn more about the service at https://www.microsoft.com/msrd.

We are looking for a talented software engineer with strong technical skills and smooth team collaboration skills to join a small team of developers working in a fast-paced environment. This position is for a highly motivated and passionate engineer who can work autonomously and provide consistent engineering execution. You will be responsible for the technical execution and overall quality for our fuzzing workflow on Linux. This entails improving the existing offering to adapt to customers’ needs as well as implementing new scenarios.

As part of the Microsoft AI + Research organization, Microsoft Security Risk Detection is creating value for customers from cutting edge Microsoft research. Our organization is working tirelessly as one to democratize access to artificial intelligence technologies that are changing the world.

Want to learn more? feel free to email me: dmolnar (at) microsoft.com . I lead the group. I am also happy to answer questions about what it's like at Microsoft generally or AI & Research specifically.

Link to full JD and official application:

https://careers.microsoft.com/jobdetails.aspx?ss=&pg=0&so=&r...

[Disclaimer - I work for Microsoft]

Azure just released nested virtualization VMs. I've tested Hyper-V running in such a VM and it worked well. Have not yet tested HAXM.

This is valuable advice. The supervisor is absolutely the most important consideration. It is worth pointing out two things that are different in many U.S. universities.

1) PhDs in the U.S. in CS take between 3-10 years to finish. Less if you are in theory and have a strong set of results off the bat that align around a single area. More if you need to build something with a long cycle time, such as create a new architecture and build a chip.

The first 2-3 years will have classes and feel a little like undergrad. After that it transitions into the free-form research as the post describes. Unlike in the U.K., typically you do not have a hard stop at 4 years, and you can find teaching assistantships or other sources of funding to keep going a year or two at a time.

The good news is that you have more time with relative freedom. The bad news is depending on your advisor, it is easy to drift for years without making much progress.

2) In all the U.S. universities I know, the standard state is for you to be employed by the university as a teaching assistant or a "graduate student researcher." This has impact on intellectual property. For example, the University of California used to ask and may still ask all employees to sign a "Loyalty Oath and Patent Assignment Agreement."

What optimization tasks do Exec and Uber solve to provide the quality of service their customers expect?

Congratulations! Now to go put this together with exec or taskrabbit. :)

(Disclosure: Microsoft employee writing this on a Surface with Touch Cover)

Check out the Samsung Series 7 slate. 128GB SSD, 4GB RAM, core i5. 11.6 inches and a little less than 2 lbs. Unfortunately I don't know where you could find one in person to play with. I've been using it with Win8 for a bit and quite liked it -- with the dock and a keyboard you can run Visual Studio just fine.

This link suggests Samsung just rev'd it to add a higher res screen, keeping the 4 GB RAM and 128 SSD. http://www.bestsalenewreviews.com/Samsung-Series-7-XE700T1C-...

It is too bad that they haven't figured out distribution for your area. It does sound like what you want.

Congratulations!

Start a mailing list, start recruiting people to post...who knows, maybe you'll set up the new place?

I read that as "the employer pays you 2K or 3K RMB less than what it otherwise would" , not "the employer pays only 2K or 3K RMB per month."

While none of these are exactly the same as Exec, they do let you hire people remotely to do things.

http://www.taskrabbit.com (see also API at http://taskrabbit.github.com)

http://www.zaarly.com http://www.gigwalk.com http://www.gigboard.com

Exec differentiates on up front pricing ($25/hr), fast fulfillment (within 10 minutes), and on positioning toward executive assistant services. There's an interesting comparison table to be made with columns like "number of active workers," "geographic regions covered," "pricing model," "top 5 tasks" etc.

There's also craigslist, of course, which is highly liquid and has high reach. Craigslist doesn't have a great experience, though, for hiring people.

Yes. One of the clever touches of the TaskRabbit web site is that every task has a unique URL that facilitates sharing stories like this. You can even push a button on the page to "use this task as a template."

Some of the things I've found useful --

Write notes about a webinar, following instructions on key things to notice and questions to ask. http://www.taskrabbit.com/virtual/t/take-notes-from-a-1-hour...

Attend a lecture, write a trip report, take pictures. http://www.taskrabbit.com/seattle-wa/t/attend-a-talk-at-uw-a...

Count number of businesses on FB matching certain criteria. http://www.taskrabbit.com/virtual/t/estimate-number-of-faceb...

Handle the legwork for contacting ~30 vendors on aliexprss.com to open initial discussions about custom clothing. http://www.taskrabbit.com/virtual/t/virtual-assistance-resea...

Helping me attend a meeting via Skype in a different city. http://www.taskrabbit.com/san-francisco-ca/t/help-me-attend-...

I'd love to see livestreaming from Exec workers. That would help "human telepresence" tasks like these:

http://www.taskrabbit.com/tasks/attend-a-talk-at-uw-and-writ...

http://www.taskrabbit.com/tasks/please-help-me-shop-for-furn...

http://www.taskrabbit.com/tasks/help-me-attend-a-conference-...

Could you hire people on www.taskrabbit.com to go pick things up for you? You'd have to probably pay them on retainer to get the responsiveness you need, but it's a way to recruit in different cities.

I've seen people post "Stand in line for me at the DMV" on TaskRabbit. I haven't tracked how many tasks, but it would be interesting to see growth over time. I wonder how that compares to the specialized services.

Another bit that leapt out for me is his discussion of displays. He's talking about flatscreen color displays, about 15-20 years before they really become commonplace.

My favorite is the end, where he talks about how belief and momentum influence the investment into different technologies. Makes you wonder what technologies have been "coming soon" for the last decade, but are just waiting for someone to come in and spend the required amount to pull them off.

Checking David Heckerman's web page shows this paper from October 2011 in the Journal of Virology. I don't know how it relates to the news article specifically but it's interesting if you'd like to follow this stream of work.

http://jvi.asm.org/content/early/2011/10/20/JVI.05577-11.abs...

(Disclosure: I work at Microsoft Research, but not on this project.)

I can't seem to reply directly to adambrault. Just to expand on why I asked about MS Paint adventures. The aesthetic is similar -- although of course &! is about productivity instead of kids playing a most dangerous game, the emphasis on awesomeness, the suspense, etc. are shared.

It's wonderful that you have "give us feedback" as one of the initial tasks in the first team created. It's less wonderful that there is no obvious way to give you that feedback. Five minutes in and already I'm falling behind on shipping!

On a different note: I actually need to recruit people I don't previously know to my team. Would it be possible to add a landing page for a team that signs up the person and then auto-ads them to that team. This would have a hard-to-guess URL, so I would have confidence that only people I recruited (or their friends) would show up.

Finally, I just need to ask, are you fans of http://www.mspaintadventures.com ?

This is why I tend to leave the laptop & cell behind when attending DEF CON. Besides, it's about meeting the people there, isn't it?

Thank you for posting this. Puts into words what I and I expect others are feeling. Sad to think he is gone.

I'm sorry to hear that you're leaving. Thanks for posting about your reasons for leaving.

In any case best of luck with your move. You may want to drop by Noisebridge in SF sometime, you might enjoy meeting some of the people there. Since you're in Palo Alto, there's also Hacker Dojo near you as well.

Try Metrix Create Space, in Capitol Hill. http://metrixcreatespace.com/

I just noticed that a Kinect game featuring Michael Phelps has been announced. Time will tell if this is brilliant, or if it's the latest way to flail badly in front of your TV. Does look like it'll make you exercise, though. http://www.joystiq.com/2011/02/02/michael-phelps-push-the-li...

The name unfortunately is a homonym for "Mi-Go," who are an extra-terrestrial race that appear in several stories of H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. The Mi-Go are not particularly friendly. For example, in one story they extract a person's brain from his head, then keep the brain alive in a jar while they fly with it through space to their base on Yuggoth (Pluto). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mi-go

So if you ever see jokes along the lines of "MeeGo: the phone that extracts your brain from your head!" or "MeeGo: the phone from Yuggoth" or similar, that is why. I have not yet seen Charlie Stross reference this in one of the Laundry stories, but I'm waiting for it. ; )

I would hope this is unintentional on Nokia and Intel's part. I mean, who would intentionally name their OS after something in Lovecraft?

For WP7, the officially supported languages are C# and VB.NET. That being said, because it is just running Silverlight, you can try running any .NET language.

For example, there are a few people running F# on Windows Phone 7. I haven't tried it myself, but here is a link to templates for game development with F# on WP7: http://sharp-gamedev.blogspot.com/2010/12/project-templates-...

Here's an article on building a WP7 app with IronRuby: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ff960707.aspx While this isn't as fast as it could be, because you can't access Reflection.Emit to JIT method bodies to native code, it does show you can run Ruby in a WP7 app.

Grant writing is stressful and has an impact beyond just the meetings directly discussing the grant. I haven't had the pleasure of writing them myself, but I know several people who do. There is intense pressure because the grants pay the stipends and tuition for your students and postdocs. If the grant does not succeed, you can't support them. In some cases you need grants to pay your summer salary, as well (rules here are complicated). Add this to low acceptance rates from most major funding agencies and long lead times between submission and the decision, and you have a pretty stressful situation.

Most of this work is spent in polishing the grant and figuring out how to best present your research agenda. This is not writing code, so if you'd rather be writing code, this isn't really a good fit for you.

Nitpick: Matt was at Harvard, not Stanford.

With respect to what has changed, one of the things that comes through is that his day at Google is more self-directed and less interrupt driven. Fewer meetings, no petitioning others for grants or industrial money, no need to get up in front of a class, and no meetings with students. Instead there are three or four projects that need to make progress, but how exactly that happens is up to him.