DataGotham: The Empire State of Data

Posted: August 22, 2012 | Author: Hilary Mason | Filed under: blog, projects | 2 Comments »

I’m extremely excited about DataGotham, a conference that I’m co-hosting with friends and fellow New York data nerds Drew, John, and Mike.

DataGotham is a celebration of the NYC data community, and will bring together professionals from all industries in New York that are built around data, from finance to fashion and from startups to the Fortune 500 and government. The event is September 13th – 14th at NYU, with tutorials and The Great Data Extravaganza Show (with cocktails!) at the Tribeca Rooftop Thursday evening, and a single track conference Friday. Our speakers and sponsors are all amazing. You can register now.

While DataGotham is definitely a labor of love, there are numerous reasons to do it. I believe that New York has a distinct data philosophy — the study of human behavior — that is unique and should be celebrated. We have an large population of local badass data hackers, and our community will only grow stronger if we can build relationships across the industry divides. Finally, there’s an opportunity for all of us to influence the future of data science, and this event will highlight some voices that might not otherwise be heard.

I hope to see you there!

(Also, anyone who made it this far through can register with code “dataGothamist” for 25% off )

Why I love New York City

Posted: August 19, 2012 | Author: Hilary Mason | Filed under: blog | 11 Comments »

New York is infinite.

A human can only explore a place at a particular speed. The rate of change in New York exceeds the rate at which a person can possibly experience the city, and so it is impossible to run out of city to experience.

New York is a neighborhood.

At the same time, New York is a mosaic of wonderful little neighborhoods. What many visitors miss and all residents know is that you rarely have to walk more than a few blocks from home for any of life’s essentials, and enough people do the same that you find yourself saying hello.

New York is chaotic.

You are never the weirdest thing you see. The city will give you things to think about, and more. It is never boring, and you cannot take it for granted.

New York is opportunity.

Everyone comes through New York, eventually. Whatever food, material goods, or unexpcted experiences you look for can be found or made here, including Japanese Hotdogs, Cuban Chinese restaurants, salons only for curly-haired girls, and spontaneous art and even opera.

But what, no tech scene?

New York does have a thriving tech community full of wonderful people that I’m excited to work alongside for many years, but I fell in love with the city long before it belonged to us.

BTW, if you’ve seen Avengers or Batman, you know that no city is destroyed so beautifully as ours.

Identity Slippage, and what’s the weirdest thing you’ve been e-mailed by accident?

Posted: January 26, 2012 | Author: Hilary Mason | Filed under: blog | 23 Comments »

I have an old, short, and concise gmail address (my first initial and last name at gmail.com). There are many other hmasons in the world who have since signed up for gmail, with variations on the “hmason” theme. Every so often, they mistype the address, or someone mishears it. I now receive between four and ten pieces of e-mail per week meant for other hmasons. This was pretty amusing until someone opened an amazon account on that address (which I had to shut down). Poor Holly has never seen a single Citibank credit card statement (and Citibank won’t remove the e-mail address from the account when I call, since I’m not the account holder). Heidi hasn’t linked her Paypal account to her bank account, but I’m waiting for someone to send her money.

This sort of unwitting misattribution results in an identity slippage that could actually have some fairly interesting consequences. We’ve settled on e-mail as a unique identifier across platforms, but we increasingly cannot rely on that assumption.

I saw Chris Adam‘s comment on Twitter this morning and can’t agree more — it should become standard practice to confirm an e-mail address before sending personally identifiable or sensitive data. Now, please.

Hacking the Food System: The Ultimate Chocolate Chip Cookie

Posted: September 26, 2011 | Author: Hilary Mason | Filed under: blog, projects | Tags: cookies, food, tech, writing | Leave a comment »

Food+Tech Connect is putting together a fun series of essays where technologists and foodies share their opinions on how to hack to the food system.

They also had a great party, with liquid nitrogen ice cream and other very cool foods.

I’m honored to have been asked to participate, especially since food and tech are two of my favorite things! I decided to write about a hack that I did about three years ago, where I wrote a parser and built a statistical model of chocolate chip cookie recipes that I crawled off of the web.

I’d like to tell you the story of the Ultimate Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe.

This isn’t the Neiman Marcus $65,000 cookie recipe. Nor is it the classic Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe that we all grew up with (and, though the instructions are all the same, my Mom made the best). This is a recipe learned from thousands of bakers around the world, via love and math.

Read the rest of the essay on their site. I’d love to know what you think!

Special thanks to Matt LeMay for language-clarifying edits to the piece.

bash: get http response codes for a list of URLs

Posted: August 24, 2011 | Author: Hilary Mason | Filed under: blog | Tags: bash, code, script, shell | 14 Comments »

I had a file with a list of URLs, and I wanted to grab the HTTP response codes for each of them. I’m sure this quick bash script isn’t the best way to do it, but it works, and I’ll probably want to do this again someday, so here it is!

#!/bin/bash

while read line
do
    echo $(curl --write-out %{http_code} --silent --output /dev/null $line)
done <$1