Hi. I'm Hilary Mason.
Data scientist and hacker. I <3 data and cheeseburgers.
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.
Going to Strata in Feb?
Posted: January 12, 2012 | Author: Hilary Mason | Filed under: blog | Tags: conferences, quick | 1 Comment »Are you planning to attend Strata in Santa Clara at the end of February? Reach out for a discount registration code.
Why do I miss google calendar invites?
Posted: January 2, 2012 | Author: Hilary Mason | Filed under: blog | Tags: calendar, configuration, google | 1 Comment »I keep missing Google calendar invites on both my personal and work accounts. I’ve had my google account for years (since 2004?) and assumed it was some quirk of how I had configured something along the way.
Today I was following Google’s instructions for syncing calendars with an iOS device and discovered that if you click calendar settings (which means click the gear icon then ‘calendar settings’), then ‘calendar’, then ‘notifications’ next to the calendar that you care about, you can turn on e-mail and SMS notifications for any given calendar.
(I’ll save my ranting about the number of clicks to find and configuration anything on google’s properties right now for another time.)
I’m sharing this on the theory that I’m not the only one with this particular frustration. I hope it saves someone from missed opportunities and useless rage!
80 Million Links a Day Don’t Lie: Fast Company interview!
Posted: November 6, 2011 | Author: Hilary Mason | Filed under: Media | Tags: fast company, interview, video | 1 Comment »Fast Company came to our office to film a short interview with me. If you’ve been following bitly closely there won’t be any surprises for you here, but I did get to talk about some of the exciting projects that we’re working on.
The best part about filming the interview was getting back to my computer after, where my clever co-workers had been silently answering the questions along with me in our chat room — with a lot more snark. 
Happy Halloween
Posted: October 31, 2011 | Author: Hilary Mason | Filed under: blog | Tags: fun, misc | Leave a comment »The meatpacking district in NYC has been particularly colorful today!
This post is a reminder to myself to have this shirt printed and wear it next Halloween so that I fit in:
I’m on Fortune’s 40 Under 40: Ones to Watch list!
Posted: October 21, 2011 | Author: Hilary Mason | Filed under: Media | Leave a comment »I’m excited to be on Fortune’s 40 Under 40: Ones to Watch list!
My world domination clock is ticking.
Web 2.0 Summit: The Secrets of our Data Subconscious
Posted: October 21, 2011 | Author: Hilary Mason | Filed under: Presentations | Tags: conference, data, web2summit | 1 Comment »I just got home from the Web 2.0 Summit, a three-day conference that was packed with announcements, interesting ideas, and good conversations.
My short talk, The Secrets of our Data Subconscious, touches on how the data we generate online interactions with the physical world spatially and through time, and on the relationships between the things we consume (in private) and the things we broadcast (in public).
I’m in Glamour Magazine!
Posted: October 10, 2011 | Author: Hilary Mason | Filed under: Media | Tags: glamour, magazines, media, press, womenintech | 13 Comments »
This is probably the least likely thing you would expect to appear on this site, but it’s true! I appear in the November 2011 issue of Glamour alongside Jess Lee, Caterina Fake, and Stacy Brown-Philpot, in a story by Kara Swisher. There will also be a panel event tomorrow morning to talk about the article.
I don’t usually speak publicly about the women in tech issue, for a variety of reasons, primarily: if I’m speaking about women in technology I am not speaking about technology, it’s not a topic that I have much insight on, it ignores the other dimensions of the problem, and I would really rather work hard and be known as a great technologist than a great woman technologist.
The opportunity to reach out to Glamour’s audience of millions of teenage girls to make math and technology look cool was just too good to pass up!
That’s why I’m proud to appear among such pieces as “Guys talk sex!”, “The Real Kristen Stewart: A Twilight Exclusive”, and “12 Ways to Get Your Sh*t Together”. It’s exciting to think that people who never would have picked up an article about a bunch of nerds will be reading and thinking and being inspired.
If you found your way to my site via this article, please let me know what you think, either by commenting here or sending me an e-mail.
PS. I don’t know why I’m blonde in the photo, but it’s not entirely unnatural.
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.
Conference: Strata NY 2011
Posted: September 25, 2011 | Author: Hilary Mason | Filed under: Presentations | Tags: conference, keynote, presentations, strataconf, stratany | 1 Comment »The first Strata Conference in New York just wound up. It was a five day expo of business, data, and tech, and brought a ton of great people in the data community to New York.
Thanks so much to Edd and Alistair and everyone whose hard work made this possible!
My talk, Short URLs, Big Data: Learning in Realtime is already online:
And the slides are up on Slideshare: