HN Explorer

Ask HN: What would you do with the data sets of Google, FB, et al?

7 points by wu-ikkyu ↗ HN
Hypothetically, say you had full unfeterred access to the major world data sets as possesed by the likes of Google, FB, Amazon, Twitter, etc., what would you do with them?

Curious what interesting and creative use cases HNers could think up besides using the data to sell advertising.

11 comments

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jklein11
cd / && rm -rf .
jklein11
surprisingly the asterisk is escaped so rm -rf "*" without the quotes is displayed as rm =rf
shortoncash
Predict the stock market. There has to be alpha in abnormal increases in product-related queries.
AznHisoka
You can already get that through Google Trends.
shortoncash
I doubt that's as timely. I was assuming exclusive, quick access not available to others, especially since the Ask HN prompt said the data was worthy of being sold.
huj7
I'd hand them over to the Chinese. To do something impactful with that amount of data requires resources that nobody else has.
ainiriand
Select a set of people at random every week and ask them to do something nice for someone. The other person has to post the good deed publicly for everyone to see. If the selected person refuses to do it then publicly shame him/her in carefully targeted ads. This is how a revolution begins.
veddox
I'm not quite happy about the ethical implications of forcing people to "do nice things" on threat of public shaming... It seems somewhat - hypocritical.
ainiriand
Read the the rest of the fantasizing comments and try to find something ethical in having control over the personal data of millions of people.
veddox
True that. Good point ;-)
veddox
Ignoring all privacy-related concerns: Build a service to give users a personality analysis. What are their defining character traits, strengths, weaknesses, etc. I'm sure much of that could be read from a dataset of such proportions. I at least find it invaluable to have a good understanding of myself - so a service like that would hopefully benefit lots of other people too.