NYC Data #331: New MTA Data, Buy vs Rent, Understanding Entropy, Harmony Labs, Rippling, CDC & Schema Changes, Evaluating LLMs

Hi friends: whether you have a long weekend or not, I hope you have a great Veterans Day.

As always, help me keep this space up-to-date: please send me posts, events, and job openings. [image credit: Annie Elis]

Good Local Posts

• Cool post from Eli Schultz at the MTA about working with a legacy mainframe with old-school encoding to track Metrocard swipes, and some new data they’re releasing coming out of the work. I love these kinds of stories!

• A nice reminder from Randy Au: Sometimes, stuff's not worth measuring, keep saying no to silly work.

• I missed this earlier: The New York Times updated their Buy vs Rent Calculator earlier this year to reflect current tax law.

Upcoming In-Person Events (new listings in bold)
11/13: PyData Talk Night
11/14: ODSC & Google Cloud AI Meetup
11/16: R-Ladies NYC November Book Club
11/19 - 11/20: Urban Tech Summit
11/19: Data Exploration of Pixar Films: Which One is the Best?
11/20: GIS Day
11/20: New York dbt Meetup
11/20: November Kafka Meetup
11/21: Data for AI at Scale
11/27: NewYork Machine Learning Meetup - Understanding Entropy
12/10: Unstructured Data in LLMs

Open Roles

• Squarespace is hiring for several data roles, including a Manager, Marketing Channel Analytics and Operations and a Marketing Analyst.

• A friend at Harmony Labs is hiring a Research Scientist.

• S&P is looking for a Director of Data Science – NLP, LLM and GenAI.

• The NY State Insurance Fund is seeking a Data Analyst.

• Lazard is hiring a Vice President, Data Visualization Engineer.

• New York Life is looking for a Corporate Vice President, Analytics Data Engineer.

• Rippling is seeking a Staff ML Engineer.

Miscellany

• Really good post on strategies for handling schema changes in CDC pipelines: bookmarking this one!

• I’ve been really interested in the question of evaluating LLMs for a long time: I read this piece from influx about frameworks for assessment with a lot of interest.

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