Hacker News: sporkl

New comment by sporkl in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (May 2026)"

sporkl — Fri, 01 May 2026 17:22:10 +0000

Location: New York City area, USA

Remote: Yes, also open to on-site

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: C/C++, Python, TypeScript/JavaScript/React Native/Expo, C#, (System)Verilog/Vivado/FPGAs/embedded, OCaml, Rocq/formal methods and formal verification, relational/logic programming/symbolic AI, SQL, JUCE/audio/music programming.

Resume/CV: https://www.dmitrivolkov.com/volkov-resume.pdf

Email: dmitri at dmitrivolkov dot com

Website: https://www.dmitrivolkov.com/

Just about done finishing up a CS master's degree, and looking for opportunities starting in the late summer or fall. My background is in programming language theory (particularly logic/relational programming), so would be very happy to work with functional languages, compilers, automated reasoning, and/or formal verification. I also have a background in music (I'm a published composer!) so particularly interested in audio/music-related stuff as well. Open both to software enginering roles and research positions (anyone looking for new PhD/doctoral students?) I've also done full-stack work across databases/cloud infrastructure/web APIs/frontends, and independently released a commercial music production plugin (Pivotuner, more info on my website).

New comment by sporkl in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (April 2026)"

sporkl — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 15:19:18 +0000

Location: New York City area, USA

Remote: Yes, also open to on-site

Willing to relocate: Yes

Resume/CV: https://www.dmitrivolkov.com/volkov-resume.pdf

Email: dmitri at dmitrivolkov.com

Website: https://www.dmitrivolkov.com/

Finishing up a CS master's this semester, and looking for opportunities starting in the late summer or fall. I have experience as a full-stack (or fullstack, or full stack, whatever people ctrl-f for) developer as part of an intern/consultant position where I worked directly with customers to deliver features across databases/cloud infrastructure/web API integrations/frontends. I've also mostly-independently bootstrapped a commercial music production plugin (Pivotuner, more info on my website).

Open to most anything! I'm a fan of functional programming/programming language theory/compilers, currently doing research in logic/relational programming. I also have a background in music (I'm a published composer!) so particularly interested in audio/music-related stuff as well.

In general I'm trying to figure out what to do next, so would be up to connect regardless of hiring-related stuff!

New comment by sporkl in "What if Python was natively distributable?"

sporkl — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 19:38:19 +0000

Sounds kind of like Arcan https://arcan-fe.com/about/

New comment by sporkl in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (March 2026)"

sporkl — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 16:11:26 +0000

Location: US, New York City area

Remote: Yes, also open to on-site

Willing to relocate: Yes

Resume/CV: https://www.dmitrivolkov.com/volkov-resume.pdf

Email: dmitri at dmitrivolkov.com

Website: https://www.dmitrivolkov.com/

Open to most anything! I'm a fan of functional programming and programming language theory, currently doing research in logic/relational programming. I also have a background in music (I'm a published composer!) so particularly interested in audio/music-related stuff as well.

New comment by sporkl in "The Little Learner: A Straight Line to Deep Learning (2023)"

sporkl — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 02:22:42 +0000

The framework used in the book, malt[0], is currently not GPU-accelerated, but it's being worked on.

Maybe interesting, I used it for a toy implementation of the GPT architecture[1] in about 500 lines.

(I studied with one of the authors, Dr. Daniel Friedman; wasn't super involved here but proofread a late draft and TA'd for a course based off the book.)

[0]: https://github.com/themetaschemer/malt

[1]: https://github.com/sporkl/malt-transformer

New comment by sporkl in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (February 2026)"

sporkl — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 21:10:42 +0000

Location: New York City area

Remote: Yes, also open to on-site

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: C/C++/JUCE, OCaml, JavaScript/TypeScript/React, Python, logic/relational programming, Rocq and formal verification, SQL, embedded programming and FPGAs, some DSP.

Resume/CV: https://www.dmitrivolkov.com/volkov-resume.pdf

Email: dmitri at dmitrivolkov.com

Website: https://www.dmitrivolkov.com/

Finishing up a CS master's this semester, looking for opportunities starting in July/August or the fall. Research focus in programming language theory, but experienced across the full stack. Most interested in R&D-related stuff, especially related to audio or music (my other degree). Potentially looking towards applying for PhD programs this fall as well, so would appreciate to know if anyone is recruiting students!

I have experience independently building/releasing apps/plugins, and contracting for small and mid-size businesses (handling both frontend and backend). Have also conducted and applied research, including technical implementation and communication (papers/presentations/documentation).

New comment by sporkl in "Show HN: MTXT – Music Text Format"

sporkl — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 21:17:16 +0000

Lilypond is the only music engraving system I'm aware of that can handle polytempo scores. The TEX-ness really comes in handy.

New comment by sporkl in "Using a graphics tablet as a programming tool (2018)"

sporkl — Sat, 15 Mar 2025 15:08:41 +0000

I'm personally a fan of Stylus Labs Write: https://www.styluslabs.com/

Not exactly infinite canvas, but pages can grow outward. Cross-platform and open source! And has some cool features which make working with handwritten text nice.

New comment by sporkl in "High-Speed Face-Tracking for Dynamic Facial Projection Mapping"

sporkl — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 17:29:17 +0000

Not this project, I've seen this something like this done with Google's MediaPipe models to get face tracking data into Max/MSP.

https://cycling74.com/forums/n4m-facemesh-handpose-google-me...

New comment by sporkl in "The Little Typer (2018)"

sporkl — Sun, 29 Sep 2024 01:01:55 +0000

Racket! This is the language that the common author (Dr. Daniel Friedman) uses, and many of the Little books use custom DSLs implemented in Racket.

Racket now runs on Chez under the hood (inheriting the performance), and has a pretty decent ecosystem as far as schemes go.

(I TA for Dr. Friedman’s programming languages course)

New comment by sporkl in "Chromatone – Visual Music Language"

sporkl — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 01:39:45 +0000

Reminds me of the method used for sonifying periodic table elements here[0], but in reverse.

[0]: https://youtu.be/Z9dpHWrgzMw

New comment by sporkl in "How the OCaml type checker works (2022)"

sporkl — Sun, 18 Aug 2024 15:15:19 +0000

Anecdotally, I feel like OCaml is growing in popularity, probably due to ecosystem improvements. Stuff like dune and other OCaml Platform tools becoming mature, multicore support, recently first-class Windows support, etc.

New comment by sporkl in "What I Learned Writing an Album in Just Intonation"

sporkl — Fri, 16 Aug 2024 15:44:17 +0000

yeah, in general I do want to open source it, but for the time being I’m a student and every little bit counts

New comment by sporkl in "What I Learned Writing an Album in Just Intonation"

sporkl — Fri, 16 Aug 2024 14:08:53 +0000

Overall a good intro on the subject. I feel like at the start it might benefit from being a bit more explicit about pitches being frequencies and ratios being intervals; probably just worth a reminder for people who aren’t as familiar

Might be interesting to talk about how the usual ratios come from the harmonic series. For sounds that don’t produce a harmonic series, other potentially non-integer ratios can actually sound more consonant. The youtube channel New Tonality[0] has a bunch of great videos about this

Also wanted to mention that I’ve been working on a piece of commercial software[1] for working with freestyle/adaptive just intonation, if anyone’s interested

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/@new_tonality [1]: https://www.dmitrivolkov.com/projects/pivotuner/

New comment by sporkl in "Jerk"

sporkl — Sat, 10 Aug 2024 01:22:42 +0000

Cool stuff, nicely fleshed-out. Sort of like a Risset rhythm, which I’ve explored a bit myself [1]. One of my favorite pieces that uses this technique is Black Rain, by Daniele Ghisi [2].

[1]: https://www.dmitrivolkov.com/misc/risset-polyrhythm/ [2]: https://soundcloud.com/danieleghisi/black-rain

New comment by sporkl in "Discovering algorithms by enumerating terms in Haskell"

sporkl — Sat, 03 Aug 2024 20:12:02 +0000

This kind of reminds me of what happens when you implement an interpreter in a relational programming language, which lets you do cool stuff like generating quines by specifying that the program and it’s output should be the same.

Quick search lead to this paper which is exactly what I’m talking about: http://webyrd.net/quines/quines.pdf

New comment by sporkl in "15 Note Poly Tempo Pendulum [video]"

sporkl — Sat, 13 Apr 2024 16:09:40 +0000

If anyone’s curious to see complete pieces built out of this sort of technique, check out Conlon Nancarrow’s Studies for Player Piano (he does some other pretty crazy polytempo stuff too, like changing the speeds of different parts at different rates).

Personal favorites that use the same polytempo technique are No. 36 [1] and No. 37 [2].

I’ve been studying his music lately and am working on a piece with similar rhythmic experimentation, so happy to try to answer questions!

[1]: https://youtu.be/IOlId8O6D5w [2]: https://youtu.be/g0gNoELvpPo (I prefer the Werco recordings, but this is a cool vizualization)

New comment by sporkl in "Quantum Computer Music"

sporkl — Mon, 25 Dec 2023 17:54:39 +0000

Thanks! We were originally thinking of approaching things more from the educational side, but it’s kind of a hard point to make without experimental evidence, which we don’t have.

As far as playing a quantum circuit through the end, that’s what our python and max implementations do! Should work with any gate; but because it’s simulation-based, there’s a limit to the number of qubits. We’re also working on a follow-up about sonifying arbitrary hamiltonians.

New comment by sporkl in "Quantum Computer Music"

sporkl — Mon, 25 Dec 2023 15:55:09 +0000

I couldn’t make in in-person, but from what I heard the audience was pretty cool

New comment by sporkl in "Quantum Computer Music"

sporkl — Mon, 25 Dec 2023 15:45:54 +0000

a lot of it does end up being that kind of thing, but not all. some of it’s kind of like how quantum math has been used to model (if I remember correctly) seismology or weather, and some of it’s about sonifying the entire quantum state, including superpositions (assuming no error/noise, the random part of quantum doesn’t happen until measurement, where superpositions are destroyed)