
Ask HN: What is some information you're not able to find on the internet? - lainon
Did you specialize in anything and&#x2F;or know about something where there&#x27;s almost nothing on the Internet about?
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mimixco
Yes, the Goodell monorail. The first commercial monorail (and basis of all
modern monorails operating in the world today) was invented by Houston
businessman Murel Goodell. Yet on the internet, he's practically a ghost.

If you asked 100 people who invented the monorail, most would say, "Walt
Disney." Disneyland's straddle-beam monorail was invented by Goodell and was
his second-generation design. The first design which ran in Dallas four years
before Disneyland's was a suspended type.

I'm in the process of starting an online Goodell Monorail Museum precisely to
fix this problem. I've collected hundreds of documents and photos from
archival sources which have never been seen on the internet.

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bjourne
FidoNet archives:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12216932](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12216932)
At its peak in the mid 90's it must have contained millions of messages and
thousands of groups. Then internet took over and FidoNet disappeared. Archives
of messages from this time period is nowhere to be found.

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throwawaymath
Sure, designing quantitative trading strategies. That’s the easiest example I
can think of. There’s basically nothing public out there (that actually
works).

To a lesser extent, certain types of datasets can’t be found on the internet
either. They may exist digitally, but they’ll never be sent across public
networks.

~~~
akg_67
Any “working” quantitative trading strategy available publicly will be
arbitraged and stop being effective. Look for quantitative strategies that no
longer work, study them, figure out why they don’t work, how they may have
been arbitraged, and whether arbitrage created a new inefficiency that you
could leverage.

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laurieg
When I was translating, many dictionaries were not available in any electronic
format. General dictionaries usually were, but dictionaries on specialist
topics usually had been produced by small teams many years ago and were out of
print.

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Adamantcheese
I know a lot about how Blu Ray sucks.

