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

What do you read that changes the way you think?

Posted: August 21, 2011 | Author: Hilary Mason | Filed under: blog | Tags: books, philosophy, reading | 22 Comments »

A friend asked me which of three startup business books she should read. Obama’s reading list since entering office has nothing surprising on it.

The most valuable books I read this year have been stories of things very different from what I spend most of my time thinking about.

One of my favorites was China Meiville’s The City & The City, which I loved for the ambition and artistry, and another was Simon Winchester’s The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary, which I loved for the descriptions of creating an analog, scalable information system.

What have you read recently that was really great?

Edit: Thanks for the recommendations! There are also a bunch over on Google Plus.