Hire a former SoundClouder | Hacker News Reader

Hire a former SoundClouder

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325 pointsFHMS113 comments

OK, completely out of topic, but it's interesting to notice how broadly they use the term "data science". This goes to confirm my thinking that data science is becoming more and more an "all around data". The various facets of data science I am seeing in this spreadsheet:

- BI - Data visualization - Data engineers - Statistician - Warehouse - SQL - Python-fu - Marketing

I look at it and I think it's a great prove that data science is not only phd territory, there are so many ways to bring value to the field.

This is a notoriously difficult topic to pin down.

For people that genuinely want to tease it apart, there are useful ways to do it, such as:

http://www.datasciencecentral.com/profiles/blogs/six-categor...

A bit of transparency goes a long way. Where I work (Casetext), our data team does a mix of traditional data engineering, machine learning, graph algorithms, NLP (a mix of off-the-shelf and custom work), information retrieval, customer/market analytics, and experimental design. For us, and probably many other companies in this situation, it helps us to know what a candidate is interested in and good at. It also helps explain what we do to another level of granularity.

Yes, the "data science" label is pretty muddled. It happens (but it is understandable) probably because of the fuzziness of the topics and differing communication styles and goals of engineers, marketers, salespeople, and investors.

I welcome the breadth. Data science is science with data, right? What could be more broad? If anything, it will be nice to break the association somewhat between data science and AI hype.

I also think thats justified. A newer, and more specific term I particularly like is "Machine Learning Engineer", which will probably soon be recoined to "AI Engineer". We (www.datarevenue.com) basically have to use "AI" now to make it clear what we do. Something that would have made me feel awkward just 3 months ago.

Do you see a substantive difference between AI and ML? "Machine learning" to me is pretty cut and dry, in that anytime something is automated we are employing machine learning, literally teaching a machine to do something. "Artificial intelligence" I have a hard time defining, because I don't have a good definition for "intelligence".

Behind AI I would always expect at least Deep Learning. Machine Learning I use for everything that learns it's own decision boundaries. When it's humans teaching a machine, I'd call it simply automation or expert-system. Although a lot of "teaching" still goes into feature engineering ...

One of the founders of Underdog.io (https://underdog.io) here. Almost goes without saying, but we'd be happy to help any SoundClouders looking for something in NYC or SF (our two main markets). We work with ~350 of the best tech companies in those locations.

https://underdog.io/candidates/apply

It takes 60 seconds to apply and we can get you fast-tracked to an upcoming batch. Can also email us with questions -- support[at]underdog[dot]io.

Two questions ... 1. This is a somewhat odd spreadsheet to find semi-randomly posted to HN. Can anyone speak to its provenance?

2. Is something, not so public, going on at Sound Cloud or is this just normal turn over for a company of there size?

Hey there, this spreadsheet was made by SoundCloud employees of the Berlin office who are now looking for work. We are just helping to share it and hoped the HN community could help. Any companies hiring please post - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JDx5acZPvdmmSeMyEr77...

And that answers the big question running around in my head. Thanks !

But didn't most redundancies happen outside of Berlin, with offices being closed?

Or these are most technical redundancies (in Berlin)

They laid off 40% of their staff yesterday: http://www.vulture.com/2017/07/soundcloud-makes-major-layoff...

Can't find the link now but there was a post yesterday about them laying off a lot of staff. The layoffs weren't based on performance so a lot of good quality engineers will be looking new jobs quickly.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14711461

https://www.engadget.com/2017/07/06/soundcloud-lay-off-40-pe...

I find it even more strange that this "phenomena" happened with one of the few startups outside the Valley that did mass layoffs.

The top of the spreadsheet says, "For companies currently hiring, please add your details to the second tab", but I'm seeing the spreadsheet in readme-only mode. Can the creator of this spreadsheet comment on how companies can edit it, please (or whether it's permanently locked now)?

The editable link is: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZP8FNlL0a-SvSpZFflxO...

As I'm living in Berlin, where most of the layoff is happening, and knowing that SoundCloud is known for good talent, I'm wondering what impact that will have on the job market here. I track the amount of weekly recruiter requests on LinkedIn&such, curious if this will have an impact on this.

Sounds like a good blog post topic if you notice anything interesting

I was of the impression that the situation was the reverse: the Berlin office was spaired while the San Francisco, London, and New York offices were entirely laid off.

As far as I've heard, the Berlin office headcount will be reduced by 140.

Ouch.

Definitely a shame - we're big fans of SoundCloud at Iris.

Please add IrisVR to the list. We're building AR / VR collaboration tools for 3D design pros, so lots of interesting challenges here for the right designers and engineers.

We're hiring a DevOps engineer (kubernetes, google, terraform, golang) and a Software Engineer for our desktop app (web/cloud technologies, electron, javascript, node) and would love to talk with anyone in NYC or Boston.

If anyone is looking to maintain an entire team (especially in the areas listed in my profile, but any good dev+cloud team actually), I will hire you as an entire team.

Unfortunately, not many names on this list in NYC which is where we'd prefer, but I can also do L.A., Phoenix/Tempe/Chandler, S.F., San Diego, Charlotte, or other options.

Of course, happy to hire individuals as well.

My username at gmail.

Please add Squarespace! We're hiring all kinds of technical and non-technical talent in NYC and we're working on building a more beautiful web. Interested parties can reach out directly to our lead tech recruiter Kelly Jeanes (kjeanes@squarespace.com) or apply here: http://grnh.se/dn27gt1

Here's all of your columns: Company: Squarespace

Role: Creative Developer / SRE Manager / Android Eng / Frontend Eng / Product Backend Eng / Analytics Eng / App Infrastructure Eng / Data Pipelines Eng / Core Services Eng / Security Eng / SRE Eng / Recruiters / PMs / Designers

Location: NYC

Remote: No

All job listings: http://grnh.se/dn27gt1

Contact Kelly (kjeanes@squarespace.com)

Copying my post from the who's hiring thread to here. Always been a fan of SC and clearly there were a ton of talented people working there. If you are anywhere along the spectrum of data scientist to data engineer and interested in python and go, shoot me an email.

Short term contract-based jobs are available if you are just looking for something to generate a little income while you explore the market.

Job posting:

Exigent Capital | Chicago | Data Scientists, Data Engineers | Full-time, Contract, Part-time | Onsite or Remote

Market Making / HFT group focused on cryptocurrency exchanges. Looking for quant / data scientists to find new edges in the market and talented Go/Python engineers to expand the trading platform.

Contact wes+hnsc ||at|| exigentcapital.com

If anyone from SoundCloud is passionate about podcasts get in touch at hello at zencast dot fm (https://zencast.fm)

I'm currently in Berlin if anyone would like to grab coffee.

You can add Sprout Social in Chicago to this list (assuming OP has write access).

Sprout Social | Chicago | ONSITE | https://sproutsocial.com/careers/open-positions

We are hiring people in all engineering and product roles. We are looking for Python engineers, React.js engineers, SREs, QA, Mobile (iOS, Android, and React Native), etc.

Also, if you would like to add our resident recruitment lead to the list on the "recruiters" tab, here is their contact info (and info for the columns in the sheet):

Amy Wolcott | amy@sproutsocial.com | Sprout Social | Talent Lead

Wow... based on this list - Companies might consider hiring in Denver/Boulder... because SF looks like a mad house.

http://www.avclub.com/article/soundcloud-has-laid-40-its-emp...

Forgive my naivete, but what happened to AV Club?

Do you mean that you wouldn't expect them to write an article about this? The "A" in "AV" does stand for audio

Newswire business stories aggregated from Bloomberg are not that.

Adobe Ad Cloud is hiring !

Want to help us build the best data engineering platform in the industry that handles billions of ad events every day including a vast distributed system that makes 250,000+ decisions per second ? Join us build the first end-to-end platform for managing advertising across traditional TV and digital formats, simplifying what has been a complex and fragmented process for the world's biggest brands. We're hiring for senior & lead dev and qe roles

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https://adobe.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/external_experienced/job...

Hi, alexis richardson here from weaveworks. We have a berlin office and would love to hire people who want to work in our main areas. See https://www.weave.works/company/hiring/

Very sorry to hear about the news SoundClouders. I was an avid user and loved the site, especially how you could comment on specific parts of the songs.

We've got a bunch of engineering positions (everything from entry level to Sr level) at The Trade Desk in a variety of different locations such as London, Sydney, San Francisco, New York, Boulder, San Jose, Aliso Viejo, Ventura and Bellevue.

Here's a list of our open jobs: https://www.thetradedesk.com/join-us/open-positions

Please feel free to email me directly as well if you'd just like to hear more. taek.yun@thetradedesk.com

Context? Were there layoffs at SC?

Discussion yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14711461

If anyone on this list is interested in working at Reddit, we're hiring a ton of people in Engineering and other departments in SF! Check out our jobs page: https://about.reddit.com/careers/#jobs-16253

If anything seems interesting, you can email me at saurabh.sharma at reddit.com

From an engineer's perspective, it's a wonderful opportunity to be part of a company that's only now building out most of their tech stack. We get quite a lot of traffic and it's very interesting to work at this scale.

We'll triage at http://www.layoff-aid.com starting with SF, where we launched last week.

We've been building a solid list of hiring companies for several months already. Our mission is to help people affected by layoffs and we're now ready with a network of local companies specifically hiring SF tech talent affected by layoffs.

May expand to NYC pretty soon given demand. NYC/SF/Boston Hiring companies can sign up now to get people from the next SoundCloud, Etsy, Twitter, etc

If anyone is interested in the future of Network Automation and Orchestration, Itential is a start up in Atlanta looking to make big waves. Check us out. http://www.itential.com/careers/

If any of you on that list are interested in hacking on docker, kubernetes/docker swarm, aws/azure/google cloud or infrastructure provisioning tools (terraform, cloudformation, cm tools like chef and puppet) and making scalable and testable infrastructure a reality at really large companies, email me at carlos@contino.io.

I've been working with some amazing folks on some really interesting projects, and we have clients all over the world. We are located in NYC, London and Melbourne but hire from anywhere (I live in Dallas.)

Interesting, was this set up by someone from soundcloud or independently?

Independently - I was passed the list as an effort by SoundCloud to increase exposure. No one til this point had thought about posting it on HN. No affiliation with SC and not in the recruiting business.

With a collaborative spreadsheet like this, my assumption is usually that it was set up by the first person in it.

Does it matter?

Yes. If it was set up from outside it has the feel of imposing a job hunting strategy on people without their involvement.

Given the skill summary of each employee I'm guessing this is an insider effort. And kudos to them! This is a great way to turn a sad situation into a springboard for new opportunities. Would love to see it repeated in the future.

Also what would be the benefit to a head hunter in sharing this data?

That's a fair guess. It was more a "maybe some of them want time off without getting above average interview offer spam". Overall I think it's a good thing too.

Hi, Markus, Founder of DataRevenue here - we can't open the original sheet for editing as that would put the employees data at risk. So here's another sheet for companies to post and edit directly - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JDx5acZPvdmmSeMyEr77...

The spreadsheet columns are not matching the right companies.

For example, the link for Modomoto points to jobs at Oberlo. The link for Modomoto jobs is under Zalando.

Yeah, had to go in and fix the entry I put up yesterday for SeatGeek. We're hiring, NYC, CPH, Portland and Remote! http://seatgeek.com/jobs

If any Back-end and Mobile engineers from SoundCloud is looking to make a transition into healthcare. do get in touch jobs[at]outcomes4me[dot]com or visit this landing page outcomes4me.com to see our open positions.

Short term contract-based jobs can also be arranged if you are just looking for something to generate a little income while you explore the market.

We're building out the future of TV at Philo in SF. There are lots of hard/fun engineering challenges to take on all across the stack. We're hiring core engineering members who will get to launch our product into the market and grow our user base by an order of magnitude.

If you're curious to learn more please reach out to me at maxg at (company name) dot com

Seeing so many presumably youngish and modern companies listed, I was struck by how many of them offered no remote work. Is remote work an idea whose time still hasn't come yet for many companies, or is it actually declining ? (Yahoo! was one of the companies listed, and they famously abolished remote work some years ago)

CTO of PolicyGenius (NYC) here. We'd love to have former SoundClouders come join. Not just for engineering, we have a bunch of openings across the business. You can also email recruiting@policygenius.com.

https://boards.greenhouse.io/policygenius

Please add Gigster to the list of companies hiring (www.gigster.com). We're hiring for Sales, Customer Success, Engineering, Product and Ops. Open roles are here - https://jobs.lever.co/gigster.

Roles are in SF and in some cases remote.

Capital One is hiring for all kinds of roles in SF, New York, McLean and Richmond, VA, and other places as well: http://rolp.co/oZ3Nb and/or you can email me with questions at josh.rotenberg at capitalone.com

CB Insights is hiring across the board in Engineering, Marketing, BD, Research and more in the NYC office: https://www.cbinsights.com/jobs or you can email me directly at: mchang at cbinsights.com

A bit late to the party, but does anyone now how to add a company to this excel sheet with their former employees seeking new jobs?

Credit Karma | San Francisco, Charlotte, LA | Full Time, ONSITE | https://creditkarma.com/careers

If you're a scala engineer in sf who knows finagle, we're hiring. Plus, pretty much everything else.

Sad for Berlin.

But what great times we live in actually, a community caring for people they don't even know.

You can ADD LADDERS in NYC to the list of willing to hire! Javascript React front end Java/Clojure backend! also looking Technical Product Manager and account managers

I am INTERNAL technical recruiter please feel free to reach out Drosa@theladders.com

Douglas Rosa 646-307-7522

We (Searchmetrics, http://www.searchmetrics.com/ ) are happy to hire Data Scientists, Frontend Developers, and Backend Developers in Berlin :-)

Please add MakerSights, Inc to the list of companies hiring. (https://www.makersights.com)

- Hiring engineering, UI/product design (in SF, will consider remote).

C++ devs - zenAud.io GmbH wants to meet you. We make the world's first AU/VST hosting and MIDI capable sequenced live looper.

https://zenAud.io

jobs@zenAud.io

Can you add Zenly please?

We work with Go, Go Mobile, C++, gRPC, Maps, UE4/Unity/Vulkan, distributed systems, low level systems development, Spark, iOS, Android.

We're located in Paris, France.

Reach out to me directly at steeve at zen dot ly.

Most of these people are listed as still working at SoundCloud - what is the "explain it like I'm five" about this document? Did all of the employees just get laid off and I missed that news?

looks like ELI5'd it to yourself haha

lol.. yeah

Jet.com are hiring in Dublin for all you Berliners

https://jet.com/careers/locations/dublin

Please add to the list of companies hiring :)

SketchDeck, Full stack engineer, Sunnyvale California, No remote, Join our little dev team to grow our design marketplace - happy to talk: david@sketchdeck.com

Is there a way to add my company to the list of recruiters or export it as a .xls/.csv.

GrowingStartup.com would love to work with some of these people. I'm glad to see how supportive everyone is.

Do the people listed know that their email addresses, possibly personal, are listed on a public spreadsheet with massive visibility?

Yes, the list was built by SoundClouders asked to share. Everyone on the list added themselves to it.

BTW what are notice periods for Berlin and London based SoundClouders?

For SF it's 2 weeks I assume?

Based on the contracts I've seen in Germany the notice period is usually around 3-6 months, though the mandatory periods are a lot shorter (~4 weeks if you have been with the company for at least 6 months, up to 7 months if you have been with the company for a long time). IANAL and I don't know the SoundCloud contracts.

For NYC people the norm seems to be 3 months.

Wow, I had no idea Phil Collins worked for SoundCloud! :D

What a shame, SoundCloud is/was a great service.

Gib job.

You can add SoundHound (the confusingly similarly named and colored startup with not unrelated lines of work) to the list of companies willing to hire!

I'll copy paste my usual Who's Hiring message here:

SoundHound | All roles available in Santa Clara/San Francisco. Engineering roles only in Toronto. NLP only in Sacramento/Baltimore | ONSITE - http://soundhound.com/careers I'm an NLU / Data Engineer at SH. We've just raised $75 Million from NVIDIA, Samsung, KP and others to take on Amazon and Google in AI with our "Collective AI" Houndify platform. Our open Houndify platform has the world’s fastest speech recognition and most sophisticated natural language understanding. We've had a lot of interest from partners and there are a LOT of really interesting projects being worked on requiring complex problem solvers who can work well independently. Things have come a long way since our leaked demo video took top spot on Reddit a year ago! https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/38fdyl/this_is_insa... https://www.houndify.com/ http://app.jobvite.com/m?3uCiQhw0 If you have any questions you'd like to ask an engineer here just email me: rob at (company name) dot com. I respond to all emails but please no agents!

Hey Robbo, thanks for the post we've created another spreadsheet so companies post directly - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JDx5acZPvdmmSeMyEr77...

Somewhat unrelated but I'm a big fan of you guys and glad to hear you've raised enough to really push the technology. Can't wait to see where you take it!

You recently wrote: > It is hard to determine which is needed more, as a home has costs, loosing a job leads usually loosing a home.

It sucks to lose a job. These folks lost their jobs suddenly, and without having done anything wrong.

Simultaneously, the industry struggles to find qualified talent. Somebody put two and two together, and realized there's a quick, easy, and inexpensive way to slightly help reduce the pain of a layoff.

I'm sure these folks would've found jobs anyway, but this might help a few find it faster.

Frankly, I find it very disturbing that you understand the pain of job loss, but mock people who are reducing the pain. It says a lot about you; but those people are good people. Better than you'll ever be.

It looks like you've created several accounts to post this kind of personal attack today. Would you please not do that here?

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14720640 and marked it off-topic.

MemSQL here! We have open positions for a number of roles! You can see the full list here: http://www.memsql.com/jobs/

Some highlights from the list:

* Javascript engineers who want to work on React.js based single page browser applications. We are pushing the boundaries with what you can do in the browser. From running the entire binary protocol on the client to rendering an amazing user experience, everyone is able to find something they love to do at MemSQL.

* SRE's with experience with both cloud and on-premise - come work with a team of experienced SRE's managing infrastructure spanning multiple international locations.

* Software engineers with a focus on systems - MemSQL delivers a advanced, enterprise ready database to customers worldwide. Come work on hard problems like code-generation, query optimization, vectorized execution, and more.

Please add MemSQL to the list, and for people who want to learn more feel free to email me directly or apply on our website. carl at (company name) dot com. I will respond to all direct (non-agent) communication.

I am pretty sure all ex-soundclouders are going to be super happy when low-ball offers start coming to them. They should consider their next job a temporary one and immediately start searching for another, better one...

EDIT: for downvoters, you probably never worked for Berlin startups, right?

To get a job in Berlin one has to answer itself an important and fundamental question "what's the lowest salary you can accept?" (it gets lower as one becomes more desperate so it's worth to play ontime, the rent will not become any cheaper, and the monthly health insurance contributions - oh boy).

I may have lost current trends, but this is very disturbing to me.

Putting up this data together is very disturbing and to be honest somewhat desperate in my eyes. Cannot these guys find jobs themselves, they must be sold in a bundle, or what is the idea behind?

I believe the startup bubble is starting to slowly drain, and we'll see more and more of this.

It's just a group of people who've all been already vetted by a respected software company and who are all in a tough situation simultaneously due to no fault of their own. As long as their involvement is voluntary I don't see anything to be concerned about here.

The reason I usually hear: Good engineers almost always have jobs and usually aren't looking to change. When large layoff events happen good and bad engineers lose their jobs. This gives other companies an opportunity to recruit better talent with less effort than usual and, if they're really lucky, recruit entire teams that have worked together before.

One concern with that would be that good engineers would usually see this on the horizon and leave for better / more prospective jobs in advance. So those who stayed until mass layoffs might not be the top talent that used to work at the company before when it was doing better.

I am not sure it applies in this case as this was quite sudden and we don't have enough visibility to see how many red flags were there few months / a year ago. In this case it seems to have been so sudden that lots of great people have been caught off guard.

There are actual a host of real life circumstances such as family, babies, health etc. that might prevent or make it difficult for someone to conduct a preemptive job search or job change.

Yes I think this is actually a big factor I had not thought about.

People with families, children, mortgages etc might be more prone to staying and hoping for the ship to be righted rather than preemptively moving.

Both hypotheses sound reasonable to me, I'd like to see some data on this type of thing.

Unfortunate that your perception is that this is a desperation play. I think the intent is the exact opposite of that.

The startup souffle might be deflating for sure, but I think the intent here is to say:

"We just had to layoff 40% of our staff yesterday. Through no fault of their own, our folks are now jobless. Can the community help?"

I love the fact that people are prepared to be so open about this. Wish it would happen more. I don't know anything in detail about these people and their work, and so won't name names, but there are certainly people there that I recognise as quite impressive and I don't read this as desperation, just a neat response to an unexpected situation.

(edit: well, I wouldn't name names even if I did know more about their work. That would be uncouth)

Well, since companies are always complaining about the chronic "shortage of tech talent" I'm sure everyone here will be employed within a few days, amiright?

EDIT: Honest, non-snarky question, then: If you believe there really is this shortage of tech talent, why is this effort needed? I don’t believe there is such a shortage and I wish these guys best of luck.

The shortage is not evenly distributed.

There absolutely is no shortage. The distribution issue is taken out of the picture by looking at large firms like Google and Apple that can hire broadly. Google prides themselves on their interview system that has a high false negative rate. If there were any kind of shortage, they would probably be desperate to improve their hiring efficiencies. They are most definitely not concerned with that. On the other hand it is always in the buyers best interest to bitch about a "shortage" especially when they have regulatory influence. Why wouldn't they want to lobby for anything that can bring supply prices down? The day you see blog posts about Google or Facebook streamlining their interview processes (for both type I and II errors), I'll concede.

That, and there isn’t a shortage. There is a shortage of engineers willing to work for the wage being offered. When there is a shortage of a particular type of engineer, it’s because the company wants to pay $75,000 for a position that the market demands be $95,000. Thus the “shortage” and the “need” to bring in low cost H1 workers to fill that shortage.

Seems like if an engineer can easily hold out for 95k, it's because there is indeed a shortage that is big enough to do so. If there was a surplus of engineers instead, then more would be willing to work for lower pay, no?

Tangentially related but I believe Soundcloud actually paid above the average Berlin start up salary. Maybe someone else can confirm this?

Seems like a win-win to me - companies get a list of somewhat-vetted potential employees, and if looking for a team can potentially hire a team already used to working with each other; the people get their details seen by a wider pool of employers and may find a new role quicker/with less effect on their part.

I don't think it in anyway implies they couldn't find a job using the more traditional routes; this is just an alternative avenue to try.

>"Putting up this data together is very disturbing and to be honest somewhat desperate in my eyes. Cannot these guys find jobs themselves, they must be sold in a bundle, or what is the idea behind?"

I think this a rather insensitive view. How is this fundamentally different than changing a your LinkedIn status or putting your resume up on a job board? If anything it might just be more efficient.

I understand the reasons given so far, still feel there is a little bit of "name company" privilege involved.

why find the jobs when you can let the jobs come to you?

Take a moment to check out Toptal opportunities! https://www.toptal.com/careers We're a 100% remote company that allows people to work from anywhere in the world. Our people make up the top 3% of freelance talent. The people at Toptal are truly some of the smartest, most interesting people you will come across in your career. We currently have a number of open Core Team roles in addition to freelance opportunities: Client Experience Roles, Back-end Developer, Content Strategist, Sales Recruiter, Client Partner, Engineering Manager, Desktop Developer, Front-end Developer

I didn't make the 3% cut, and had a pretty awful experience going through the interview process at Toptal. I was given a Euler-project type of problem that I had to live-code under a (I believe) 20 or 30 minutes. After I didn't succeed the interviewer basically hung up on the Skype call, and I wasn't really given any further feedback after soliciting it, other than 'you're allowed to try again after 30 days'. The whole thing seemed a bit ridiculous, as they approached me specifically for my (10+ years) PHP experience. I was told there was a lot of demand for it by their customers.

The Euler problem seemed to have a pretty low bearing on what most PHP programmers would do, so it all seemed super unfair. Had the challenge been anything related to API's, architecture or scalability I'm sure I would have passed. But doing math related to primes simply is not something that I practically ever need in my work so I was fairly dusty.

I would absolutely not recommend interviewing with them. Prepare to be disrespected unless you tick their specific boxes unrelated to the work you'll actually be doing.

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