Top all-time · #2449
Hilary Mason
Personal blog · hilarymason.com/blogdataprogrammingcareer
Hilary Mason's personal blog at hilarymason.com covers data, programming and career. Since 2009, 31 different Hacker News readers have linked it 44 times, most often “A Twitter bot that returns the result of bc -l of any DM”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-17, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (14) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Hilary Mason's blog for her talks and data science work, especially her Ignite talk on replacing yourself with a very small shell script and her SMS-to-email gateway code.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 14 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
This is the home page's excerpt
Most-linked posts?
- A Twitter bot that returns the result of bc -l of any DM3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2010-07-26
- /2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-02-22
- How to get a random line from a file in bash2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-05-02
- /about/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-09-18
- /blog/ignitenyc-the-video/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-05-26
- Everything you need to know about Machine Learning in 30 minutes or less2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-07-04
What Hacker News says?
Hilary Mason has a presentation about this, "How to Replace Yourself with a Very Small Shell Script"[1]. Recommended. [1]: http://www.hilarymason.com/blog/ignitenyc-how-to-replace-you...
Comment linking /blog/ignitenyc-how-to-replace-yourself-with-a-very-small-shell-script/
on “How to Level Up as a Developer”Submitted Everything you need to know about Machine Learning in 30 minutes or less as a story · 204 points
HN discussionWell identity is still a problem. Hilary Mason had a similar problem on Bing a couples of months ago. http://www.hilarymason.com/blog/im-a-dead-celebrity/
Comment linking /blog/im-a-dead-celebrity/
on “Google killed me”Submitted Machine Learning: A Love Story as a story · 124 points
HN discussionA similar 'thing' done using SMS (by Hilary Mason in 2010), code included http://www.hilarymason.com/blog/sms-to-e-mail-gateway-the-sm...
Comment linking /blog/sms-to-e-mail-gateway-the-sms-doorbell/
on “Show HN: I built a thing”Submitted Hey Yahoo, You’re Optimizing the Wrong Thing as a story · 113 points
HN discussionIt's a little amusing to observe Twitter being used as a sort of "transport layer" for services because of how easy it is for people to use it; a few decades ago, to interact with a service you would probably open a TCP connection to it and communicate in a service-specific protocol. Later, that was largely replaced by the ubiquitous HTTP "web API", and now we see services built on services like Twitter which are al…
Comment linking /blog/a-quick-twitter-bot-bc_l/
on “Introducing Tweet-a-Program”Submitted Women in tech - Stop talking, start coding as a story · 100 points
HN discussionIt's also blogspam, thanks for the actual link. http://www.hilarymason.com/blog/ignitenyc-the-video/
Comment linking /blog/ignitenyc-the-video/
on “Hilary Mason: How to Replace Yourself with a Very Small Shell Script”Submitted What Mugshots Mean For Public Data as a story · 57 points
HN discussionI think there's a very non-trivial chance the person who wrote this article knows much more about advertising than you think: http://www.hilarymason.com/about/
Comment linking /about/
on “Hey Yahoo, You’re Optimizing the Wrong Thing”Submitted Getting Started with Data Science as a story · 8 points
HN discussionSubscribe to Data Science Weekly: http://www.datascienceweekly.org/ http://blog.zipfianacademy.com/ http://blog.cloudera.com/blog/category/data-science/ http://www.hilarymason.com/ http://mathbabe.org/ http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/ http://blog.kaggle.com/ http://grepalex.com/ http://pulseblog.emc.com/category/big-data/ http://radar.oreilly.com/ http://flowingdata.com/ http://oreilly.com/data/newsletter.h…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What journals and blogs should I be reading to become a data scientist?”Submitted Help, I’m the first data scientist at my company as a story · 8 points
HN discussionSeems a shame that wikibon.org interview couldn't spell her name correctly. See: http://www.hilarymason.com
Comment linking /
on “Interview with Hillary Mason, Chief Scientist of Bit.ly”Submitted Search is Not a Solved Problem as a story · 6 points
HN discussionHillary was also the key note speaker at pycon this year. Her talk and slides - http://www.hilarymason.com/blog/conference-pycon-2011-keynot...
Comment linking /blog/conference-pycon-2011-keynote/
on “Interview with Hillary Mason, Chief Scientist of Bit.ly”Submitted Why YOU (an introverted nerd) should try public speaking as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI certainly don't believe that bootcamps are a scam, I think that the _right_ bootcamp can provide a beginner with the foundation needed to succeed as an engineer-in-training. The way I see it, "being an engineer" is a life-long journey. When you're starting to code the first few 100 hours tend to be the most difficult ones (since so much is new). This is where the support you get from a bootcamp is really helpful.…
Comment linking /blog/learn-to-code-learn-to-think/
on “Are Dev Bootcamps a scam? A Hacker's perspective”Submitted Food API as a story · 4 points
HN discussionIf you like the idea of this then you will also like this one. It goes a bit further, still on my todo list for interesting fun projects. http://smarterware.org/6172/hilary-mason-how-to-replace-your... Hillary Mason Substitute yourself by some small scripts Document classification Just stumbled upon a YouTube clip of one of the best Ignite presentations I've seen, by Hilary Mason, a computer scientist at Bit.ly. Mas…
Comment linking /blog/ignitenyc-the-video/
on “Automate Your Life: Sending Emails”Submitted Interview Questions for Data Scientists as a story · 4 points
HN discussionIt's new. It's similar to what they already do. It isn't trivial like cat pictures or boring like databases. It's obviously going to be very important. It is believed to involve math. It can be about almost anything, including things people talk about at cocktail parties. Because it is new, it is not necessarily about anything in particular. And it has been talked up for years by attractive, articulate, impressively…
Comment linking /about/
on “Ask HN: Why is data science so popular with developers?”Submitted What do you read that changes the way you think? as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI use twitter for news, follow scientists & technologists, I see many links there before HN. I think platforms like FB are for showing off and looking for chicks and stalking people. SN interest me because they are yet to be explored medium. There are many algorithms that enable you to find out nifty things. See https://github.com/clyfe/cywiky/wiki/Social-Media-Analytics and http://www.hilarymason.com/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What is the purpose of social media?”Submitted Books Recommendations for Programming Excellence as a story · 3 points
HN discussionMaking sense of large corpus of text via machine learning, say .. SVM which stands on top of linear algebra (computing inner products in an isomorphic space of bigger dimension via kernel functions) (Hillary Mason working at bit.ly gives talks about this stuff http://www.hilarymason.com/ ) Data mining, a lot of which boils down to multidimensional exploratory statistics needs linear algebra.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Linear algebra and web software?”Submitted One Random Tweet, please. as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted How to get a random line from a file in bash as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Gitmarks: a peer-to-peer bookmarking system as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
