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Comment by campchase | Hacker News Reader

Hey, this is Joe from twitter thread linked. I didn’t post this to HN but it’s nice to see it on here. I was wondering why a weeks-old tweet suddenly started popping off...

One thing I’d like to note—-I have learned a tremendous amount from other people responding to the opinions enumerated in that thread. Some things I’ve even started to question. So I’d love to hear your ideas—-especially if you disagree with me. Just please do it constructively. Sometimes seeing your ideas thrust onto HN without being prepared for it can be a harrowing experience and I’d rather this time around be a productive one.

Much love to the brilliant minds of HN -Joe

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I think your tweet is taking off here because Facebook's acquisition of Mapillary is currently trending on the front page. My guess is lots of people here are trying to understand the industry.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23605362

Wait what? I didn’t know about that post either.

I don’t think anyone has ever posted something I’ve written to HN, let alone two things in the same day.

The take that I had the most curiosity about was #4.

I get where it comes from, but what I observed when I was in the military was if you asked staff in the operations center about data they would say, something like "we've got two drone feeds, GPS trackers, field reports.. we're drowning in all this data we can't look at it all..." Okay, great we got some money from the theater, we can get anything you want, what do you want? "Another drone feed." It seems that even if you can't use all your data right now, the long run answer to today's unanswered questions is usually more data, or did I not understand something about that take?

Some problems people don't try to solve because they don't realise there's a solution available - or don't conceive of the fact that, if they spent enough, one could be developed.

If you take a time machine back to the year 2000 and talk to people who collaborate on documents and ask them what would make their lives easier, very few of them will say "invent an online browser-based real time collaborative document editing system" - many will just want more time, and consistent file naming when e-mailing back and forth modified word documents.

Are you the TerrAvion? Very impressed by the company you've built, and didn't realize you had a military background.

I've heard it described by the NGA as the "success-catastrophe of big data." They are struggling to figure out wtf to do with a data source like Planet that is daily, everywhere. Change detection has turned out to be WAY harder than anticipated, so most of it goes not only unseen but also un-analyzed. It's a giant waste of valuable information that is still locked up in servers of AWS and Google Cloud.

I cannot stress enough how spot-on your point about open source is. I distinctly recall having conversations with management about whether we were going to pay for the things we used from the community, since we had licensing obligations, and the answer was a resounding "look at all the other things we're not paying for."

Hi Joe, nice to see you here! :)

So I think every community is interpreting the post with their own bias (it also showed up on Reddit). The context that is missing is that (1) you work for a company that writes amazing open source software to analyze satellite imagery and that as many other companies in the space have found out the hard way, (2) competing with ESRI marketing is absolutely difficult - you have some battle scars already from it. Cheers!

Haha, that is so kind of you to say. Means a lot coming from the founder of one of the slickest and easiest to use products in the geo world! https://www.amigocloud.com/en/

Any good resourse to start with geospastial stuff? personally I am from data science background.

I found this to be an easy & fun project; https://blog.patricktriest.com/game-of-thrones-map-node-post...

If not a game of thrones fan, it's adaptable to something real world.

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