I travel quite a lot, and I ve developed the habit of always texting myself my hotel room number so I don t forget it (unfortunately, I really do stay in that many hotels). I recently looked at my texts to myself and realized it seems like a reasonable set of random numbers. Hello, hotel-based entropy*! What Continue reading Bad Idea Fridays: Bring Your Own Entropy
DeepMind s WaveNet: A Generative Model for Raw Audio paper was one of the most interesting papers last year. It describes a new approach that dramatically increases the accuracy of generating audio, including individual voices. Read more here. So what are people going to do with this? It s easy to imagine high-quality voice output from Amazon Echo or Siri, or Continue reading Bad Idea Fridays: An…
I m a fan of having lots of ideas, and that means you have to be open to the ones that, on the surface, are ridiculous. The best ideas often start as a bad idea. When you re willing to push the boundaries, you re more likely to stumble onto something really interesting. Every Friday, I m going to share a ridiculously bad Continue reading Bad Idea Fridays: Cold Storage
I recently acquired a new 13 Macbook Pro. My last machine was from 2012, so I ve been having fun catching up on how you actually set up a functional developer environment today (it s basically the same as in 2012). I had to look up how to get OS X Sierra (10.12) to remember my SSH Continue reading Note to self: Managing SSH Keys in OS X
This is a content-free welcome post.
Posted: January 6, 2015 Author: Hilary Mason Filed under: blog, projects Tags: book, culture, data, data science Comments Off I’m excited that my short book, Data Driven: Creating a Data Culture, co-authored with DJ Patil, is out in the world! We talk about processes and qualities of strong data teams and Continue reading Data Driven: Creating a Data Culture
Posted: January 1, 2015 Author: Hilary Mason Filed under: blog Tags: google, streetview Leave a comment » Something fun to start off the new year — I found myself in Google Street View! (A quick search of tumblr posts with streetview in the URL leads to a lot of fun, related Continue reading I found myself in Google Street View!
Play with your food! Posted: February 14, 2014 Author: Hilary Mason Filed under: blog Tags: data, food Leave a comment » I spent a few minutes this week putting together a quick script to pull data from the Locu API. Locu has done the hard work of gathering and parsing menus Continue reading Play with your food!
Using Twitter’s Lead-Gen Card to Recruit Beta Testers Posted: December 18, 2013 Author: Hilary Mason Filed under: blog Tags: email, hack, twitter 3 Comments » It turns out that it’s pretty easy to co-opt Twitter’s Lead Generation card for anything where you want to gather a bunch of e-mail addresses from Continue reading Using Twitter s Lead-Gen Card to Recruit Beta Testers
Posted: November 1, 2013 Author: Hilary Mason Filed under: blog 11 Comments » Yesterday I asked people on twitter for recommendations for things to read to improve as a programmer. I’m looking mainly for things on the philosophy side of software engineering. I do realize that practice is the most important thing, Continue reading Books Recommendations for Programming Excellence