Quotes from Hilary Mason

It's easy to find people who can make pretty pictures, and it's easy to find people who can do math. But it's difficult to find people who can do both.

After graduate school, I joined Johnson & Wales University in Rhode Island as an assistant professor, but I continued to program in addition to teaching and working on research. I built a program that crawled job boards to determine which skills employers value, which helped Johnson & Wales explore ways to improve its curriculum.

Nobody really cares about short links, but people do care about saving and sharing content.

It's really fun and challenging to build things that have never been built before.

Teaching someone to program is like giving them a superpower.

As your competitors learn more, you'll need to learn, too.

My job is to analyze our data set to understand it and build products on it. I look at raw data, do the math to clean it up, and build systems to make it easy to understand.

Often, people think that individual data is the most valuable thing they can collect. But it's not useful to know what I am doing or where I am, unless you're particularly interested in me, which is weird. But it is very useful to know what a population of people are doing.

A lot of people seem to think that data science is just a process of adding up a bunch of data and looking at the results, but that's actually not at all what the process is.

Data science is the combination of analytics and the development of new algorithms.

I think we need more ambition about using our data to make our lives better.

Data science requires having that cultural space to experiment and work on things that might fail.

I'm very lucky to work at bitly, with a data set that allows us to explore human social behavior at the scale of human social behavior.

In tech entrepreneurship, even a lot of hack events tend to be overly commercial in that they're designed to produce companies.

I believe there are a lot of inefficiencies in the way technical innovation happens.

Companies that rely on licensing a proprietary dataset should expect to be outpaced by competitors using modern data collection techniques and more frequent updates and greater accuracy.

The core advantage of data is that it tells you something about the world that you didn't know before.

Don't be afraid to push your company in the direction you think is right - you'll either be fired or promoted, and either outcome will end up just fine.

I grew up as a computer scientist, and I've always been fascinated by algorithms.

I hope that, in the future, data is used to empower people and not just for marketing purposes.

I'm really curious about people - what their desires and interests are - and bit.ly's data tell me that. It gives me an unprecedented window into human communication and behavior.

The sender and subject line are actually the most important parts of an e-mail because people tend to put more important information in the subject.

The job of the data scientist is to ask the right questions.

I don't actually, as a general policy, block any sort of cookies. I keep them all turned on, and that's because I'm willing to make the tradeoff that I let companies gather this information about me in return for a better experience.