Matt_Cutts

For what it's worth, I pinged someone about it.

For what it's worth, I worked with Dr. Seales while getting my undergrad degree. Happy to vouch that he and his team are great humans.

This is such a fascinating problem, and could have real benefits for society. Imagine uncovering ancient works that would otherwise be lost.

This is a pretty intriguing contrarian view. I recall fielding many such inquiries during my Google days.

Of course, ideally every company (and organization) would offer fantastic customer service in every situation. In a world where that doesn't always happen, having an additional safety valve can be helpful for customers and companies alike.

If something is eye-catching enough that a newspaper would report on it, or it would get traction on HN or social media, that's worth the time to dig deeper and investigate what happened. Again, it's not the optimal way to triage issues, but it's better than ignoring outside feedback entirely.

If folks are looking for another Tracy Kidder book, I'd recommend _House_. It's the story of building one house in Massachusetts in 1985 or so. Kidder goes into the life of the buyers and the builders, and the result is surprisingly compelling.

I know what you're thinking: why not _A Truck Full of Money_, Kidder's book about Paul English, the founder of Kayak? It's a fine read, but I found _House_ to be more contemplative and open up wider vistas (for me, at least).

Kidder is a great writer. I think people might enjoy _House_.

I wrote the first version of SafeSearch, Google's family filter. That led to the insight that Google could be spammed. That led to fights with Google's founders--Sergey thought Google couldn't be spammed, for example.

Eventually the founders realized that Google could be spammed, so I helped build the team at Google that tries to keep Google's rankings from being manipulated.

I was also proud to serve in the U.S. Digital Service, which is the groups of geeks that rescued healthcare.gov. The U.S. Digital Service has done a ton of impactful things for Veterans, immigrants, students, small business owners, and many others.

Most recently, I served as an expert on spam and bots for Twitter in their lawsuit against Elon Musk.

I came here to note the same connection. I forwarded both articles to a spam person at Google.

For data science, we've seen things from looking at disability claims appeals of Veterans and how those are handled, to looking for anomalies and malicious attacks on login.gov, to looking at Medicare payments and how to improve that process.

The data that the government has is often smaller scale than industry, but it usually represents people who are genuinely in need of help.

And if anyone has any questions about the US Digital Service, please ask!

It's a really remarkable window of time right now to make government work better for the public using technology and design.

If you wanted to try a short tour, now is a very good time; things are quite remote-friendly right now. Then when the COVID situation is better, you'd have better information about whether the DC trade-off is worthwhile.

The work we're doing helps everyone from Veterans to medical patients. Making government services responsive, accessible, and transparent is really important right now.

Please consider applying, or just ask here if you have any additional questions!

I mean, if you wanted to do a short tour (~6-9 months) right now, you could probably start and stay remote for most of that time.

In general, it's really useful to be around the table with stakeholders. In a COVID world, that's less important, but when we get through this, it really does make a difference if people can be in DC.

That said, these times are definitely an experiment in how to do remote work well.

We could really use some folks to help on impactful, important projects if people are willing to help. Thanks!