NYC Data #378: Building Spotify Wrapped, AI in NYC Schools, NY Times Data Roles, Ad Search Algos at Etsy, Jürgen Habermas & Alex Karp, 25 Years of Eggs
Plus, a workshop on coding agents for data analysis
Hi friends, Cherry Blossom Season is about to start! You can follow the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s tracker here. Central Park appears a bit late to put up its map, but the list of locations is up to date!
Programming Note: I’ll be out next week traveling. Happy Easter and Chag Pesach Sameach!
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: u/KidTwist1]
Good Local Posts
NYC Public Schools put together its Guidance on Artificial Intelligence (open for comment until May 8th). With the exception of using the word ‘Never’ in a few places, I think this is a really well thought-out document. Despite a few nits and disagreements it’s both comprehensive and should be understandable to most parents.
Amanda Steigman of Etsy wrote about adding Multigate Mixture of Experts component to their Ads Search ranking model, as well as adding a ‘tower’ to their model to account for Add-to-Cart behavior. I found it especially interesting that ‘favorites’ had a negative impact on predictive power.
Spotify wrote about The Tech Behind Your 2025 Wrapped Highlights: they generated 1.4 billion reports, using LLMs to spot-check 165,000 of them. A ‘subtle timezone bug in the upstream data pipeline’ was caught: truly it happens to the best of us!
Upcoming In-Person Events (new listings in bold)
3/22 - 3/29: Open Data Week
3/28: MeasureCamp
3/30: Scaling AI Infrastructure
4/1: OpenMetadata is coming to New York
4/2: MCP in the Wild: The Future of Data Agents in Production
9/28 - 10/2: MLCon
Open Roles
The New York Times is hiring a whole bunch of roles: as I mentioned last week, I’m new here but so excited by the mission and the problems we’re tackling (some of which you can read about)! Open roles in data include:
Analysts and Senior Analysts (many roles)
… and many more. Please apply through the website: feel free to let me know and to send your resume to me as well!
Miscellany
John Rush used Sonnet and Codex to track all the eggs he purchased over the last 25 years across 11,345 receipts! The visualizations are nice, as is the Paul Simon reference :).
Fascinating memoir from Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, about studying with (and being rejected by) Jürgen Habermas, who passed away earlier this month.
At NICAR 2026, Simon Willison led a workshop on coding agents for data analysis. If you are struggling to get started in this area, I highly recommend it.
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