HILARY MASON

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.

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

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.

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.

Deep learning allows you to create predictive models at a level of quality and sophistication that was previously out of reach. And so deep learning also enhances the product function of data science because it can generate new product opportunities.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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 decided that since I was trying to teach 'style' of thinking in science and engineering, and 'style' is an art, I should therefore copy the methods of teaching used for the other arts - once the fundamentals have been learned.

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.

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

Everyone likes taking their own photos and seeing themselves reflected back.

Data is a tool for enhancing intuition.

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

Science is the practice of failing repeatedly but learning as you go.

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 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.

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.

It turns out it's important to build a product and not just a bunch of data models.

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.

I think of 'data science' as a flag that was planted at the intersection of several different disciplines that have not always existed in the same place. Statistics, computer science, domain expertise, and what I usually call 'hacking,' though I don't mean the 'evil' kind of hacking.