NYC Data #348: NBA, Fighting Crypto Fraud, Rokt, Reddit's Push Notification Logic, Plotting Residuals, Ranking NYC Blocks by Robot-Friendliness

Plus, who should get your vote for Mayor?

Hi friends, looks like we’re in for another rainy week. Here's hoping the weather clears up in time for Manhattanhenge Thursday!

As always, help me keep this space up-to-date: please send me posts, events, and job openings. If you know someone who might enjoy or benefit from this newsletter, please share it with them. [image credit: BorisGorelik]

Good Local Posts

• Who has your vote for mayor of NYC? The primary is on June 24 (early voting starts on June 14). The general election is on November 4, 2025. The City & Gothamist gave 12 candidates a questionnaire: you can take it too to see which candidate’s views line up most closely with your own.

• Andrew Gelman recently posted about a subtle but important model evaluation technique: plotting with the prediction (not the observed value) as the independent variable.

• Reddit’s engineering team shared details on their Push Notifications Recommender System. I was most interested in the Budgeting step, where they decide on the max number of notifications to send, and whether to override the budget or not for a particularly relevant post. Their model is much more computationally intensive than other recommender systems I’ve worked on, but I suppose that’s the benefit of a ‘push’ system where you don’t have to respond on a sub-second timescale to user requests!

Upcoming In-Person Events (new listings in bold)

5/28 - 5/30: Lifetime Data Science Conference
5/29 Manhattanhenge!
6/2 - 6/8: NY Tech Week
6/3: Pulse NYC
6/5: Generative AI Summit
9/18: Data Management Summit

Open Roles

• Squarespace is hiring a Marketing Analyst, a Data Scientist, and especially Data Platform Engineers.

• A colleague (ex-Chipotle, Sweetgreen, HelloFresh) is seeking a founding data scientist for her AI-powered restaurant supply chain startup. Tackle complex forecasting challenges in a legacy industry ripe for change. If this excites you, let me know and I'll make the connection.

• The New York State Attorney General’s office is hiring a data scientist focused on finding and fighting crypto fraud and deception.

• The NBA is looking for a Marketing Analyst.

• SeatGeek is hiring a Data Scientist.

• Rokt is seeking a VP, Data Acquisition.

Miscellany

• Google announced their new Veo3 video generation model. Super impressive. The model can even create decent jokes! This one is my favorite so far.

• Researchers at Cornell Tech developed a “robotability score” and rated every street in New York City on how hospitable it would be to robots. Here’s the map. What a time to be alive!

Thanks so much for being a subscriber. To see previous job listings (many of which are still open!) and blogs, check out the archive (which has emails from the tinyletter days!). Feel free to forward this to anyone: they can subscribe here: