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Ask HN: Where do you get data?

6 points by roundsquare ↗ HN
I am interested in playing around with popularity algorithms, graph theory algorithms, trying out some map coloring algorithms, etc...

All of these require data though, and I'm not sure where to get it. So I was wondering if people on HN have good places to get data.

7 comments

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byoung2
Usually the governing body that oversees that industry will have tons of data. In the US, there is a governing body for everything, either a gov't department, or a similar organization. I'm not sure what type of data you need, but here's where I have gotten data to work with:

Population data - US Census (http://www.census.gov/main/www/access.html) Food data - USDA (http://www.ars.usda.gov/Services/docs.htm?docid=8964) SAT stats - College Board (http://professionals.collegeboard.com/data-reports-research/...)

I could go on and on...try a search for {subject} statistics and you should get some ideas

jacquesm
I treat the www as one giant database...

The nice thing about that is that it is all real world data, so quite messy. That gives you a good grip on what it takes to massage data before it becomes usable, and it also gives you some control over the level of abstraction.

Travis
Amazon offers public datasets at http://aws.amazon.com/publicdatasets/

They include census data, as well as a dump of freebase's data (which mirrors things like wikipedia). They also have some genome data.