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" When you start at Bitly, you go through this emotional cycle, where first you go, 'Oh my God, this data is amazing.' But then you start looking at it, and you conclude that humanity is completely doomed. Because what people read is cats and Bieber and celebrity gossip and that stuff. "

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" 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. "

Hilary Mason

Science

Think

Process

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

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

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

Hilary Mason

Your

You

" 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. "

Hilary Mason

Work

Behavior

" I'm a huge fan of the liberal arts approach of teaching you to think, analyze, and communicate, then sending you out into the world to cause trouble. "

" Even smaller companies are putting resources behind their analytics teams in the same way they put resources behind engineering and product teams. There are some great tools out there that allow even tiny businesses to use data effectively. "

" 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. "

Hilary Mason

Experience

Better

" In some ways, chocolate chip cookie recipes are my favorite algorithms. You put a bunch of bad-for-you stuff in a bowl and get a delicious result. "

Hilary Mason

Bowl

Result

" Value experiences by how much you're learning, and if you're aren't learning, move on. "

" If you find something obscure fascinating, learn as much about it as you can, because there's a good chance it won't be obscure for long. "

" Teaching someone to program is like giving them a superpower. "

Hilary Mason

Someone

Giving

" People share things that make them look good. "

Hilary Mason

Good

People

" Creating things that people want to tie into their identity is the best way to make them spread. "

" It's rare that you can solve a technology problem with more technology. "

Hilary Mason

Technology

Problem

" Cool innovation might happen in startups, but they often lack the resources or the deep expertise in the problems they want to address. "

" 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. "

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

" My Grinnell education didn't prepare me directly for the work that I'm doing, but it did give me the tools that I needed to focus my curiosity. "

Hilary Mason

Focus

Curiosity

" I think e-mail should be sorted by importance, not by time. "

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

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

" 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. "

" Data is a tool for enhancing intuition. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

Hilary Mason

Communication

Data

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

" 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. "