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Comment by new299 | Hacker News Reader

Wow... I had no idea this kind of manifest information was publicly available. I'm kind of unreasonably excited by this.

Using the Enigma datadata I was able to figure find at least one major vendor another player in my industry uses. That information isn't publicly disclosed elsewhere. Really interesting stuff.

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I seem to recall an article online somewhere about 10-15 years ago that described the process that Apple used when shipping desktop computers. They used some sort of freight forwarding company and were able to mask the owner and contents of the shipping containers to protect against theft as well as speculation by competitors as to the type and number of computers in each container.

yes, I imagine if you are interested in masking this information it's absolutely possible but requires some effort. Still interesting to have this as a tool when investigating companies.

Link to actual data: https://public.enigma.com/browse/ams-cargo-descriptions/e36c...

Provides cargo specifications pertaining to each incoming shipment, for 2017, updated weekly. Details include shipment ID's, container numbers and descriptions, and piece counts.

Where exactly can you retrieve the actual bill of lading document in pdf or image format? Enigma's dataset seems to have it all broken down into rows and columns.

What I'm looking for is the actual source documents like this example:

https://camo.githubusercontent.com/f2784648ff26fccf187f9371f...

Any idea where Enigma sources from? I want to attain the least latency possible, something like Flexport sources.

What kind of patterns would be interesting to find out in this dataset? A thought came in to my mind to do some data acrobatics and possibly publish a dashboard based on this data if I can arrange some extra time.. (didnt check any possible terms of use for the data yet)

It would be interesting to be able to pick a company and then track the flow of goods to/from that company.

For example, I was interested in a particular company so I looked them up, found shipments, searched another table for the shipper, and then googled to find out what they make.

But being able to more easily navigate that would be interesting, who else does that supplier ship to? The shipments I saw looked kind of regular, but plotting them on a timeline, with weights, would give me a better understanding of what's happening.

Can I correlate shipment sizes with earnings etc? I think there are lots of interesting things to look for.

You can make a microsite that publishes only ridiculous shipping facts such as (these use actual Enigma data):

"Over 1K+ imports were refused by the FDA in 2013 for containing a 'filthy, putrid, or decomposed substance'"

"Only 23 shipments of McDonalds chicken nuggets came into the US in 2013"

"The #1 piece of cargo imported into the U.S. in 2013: empty containers (over 275k of them)"

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