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Comment by dzonga | Hacker News Reader

I really feel like the data side of things is under-rated. mostly, it seems like when people talk of IP, they talk about th e software and forget the data. Uber, Snapchat etc are companies mostly in the business of shuffling data around. Good or bad, that's subjective. And this data-search product is a nice welcome to those people who are trying to get something off the ground, research or just trying to understand the world and human behaviour better.

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I don't think it's underrated, but I do think that there is a gap between massive data and an idea of what to do with it.

And data is simple, it's parameters plus timestamps plus a lot of storage.

Realtime access is harder but it's a well-specified problem.

The issue is inference. No one does inference extremely well except in limited circumstances. It's one of our greatest bottlenecks as humans and our software is going to be limited by it as well insofar as our understanding of what to build is controlled by what kind of inference we want.

I think data is underrated because it is actually not "simple". Especially the collection and curation of it.

I agree that data is underrated. The commercial real estate industry is a really interesting example.

There are a very limited number of companies that have complete datasets of buildings in all cities throughout the country. The leader is CoStar, they have the most complete and accurate data. What I have noticed with other CRE data companies is they are focusing on leasing activity or 1 other part of the CRE process. CoStar became the leader by valuing their data over all things, if other companies want to compete they need to do the same.

How is data underrated? Everything is data. Data is the primary asset of most technology companies.

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