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Comment by metamet | Hacker News Reader

But what type of range are we talking? Tens, hundreds, thousands?

It could also mean that if you have to ask... or the first rule of data brokering...

Seems like the first thing to do would be to get an account with one of these data brokers. I'd imagine most of these places are "contact us for pricing" so they can play used car salesman games

Or, you could ask John Oliver to do it for you and then tell all of us on one of his episodes exactly how in depth it could get. They have the money to do this, and it seems like something right in his team's wheel house

If you need John Oliver to do it maybe it's not such a big problem? If no one here is able to provide a single concrete example, maybe it's not real?

John Oliver likes to spend HBO's money to do things others can't do while entertaining the rest of us. I'm not spending my money on something to prove what is known as possible for you. At this point, even with receipts, you're coming across as someone that would argue that grass is not green, or water isn't wet, and fire isn't hot.

Just because someone doesn't answer your belligerent questions does not mean it's not possible. It probably means that the people that are doing this with first hand knowledge have too much to do than trying to convert doubting Thomas over here.

All of this started because in response to an extremely concrete question, what's the cost of transaction data for a tightly constrained population, you replied with a smug non-answer about the greed of salespeople. These questions only got "belligerent" because every single answer has been nonsense insisting that it's super easy and cheap but also I couldn't possibly name a single site where this data is sold or provide even an order of magnitude of cost. Or maybe now it requires HBO levels of funding, who knows.

I offered sage advice on how to negotiate when you don’t know a firm price on anything whether that be data or a car or a home remodeling. If you want to say that advice was a smug answer then that’s on you. Every answer after has just gone further and further off the rails

Nah there's no way you actually watch John Oliver because that was really funny. Anyways, you mentioned earlier that we wouldn't believe you even if you posted receipts but that's actually exactly what we want to see. Like, just the name of a business, the thing that was sold, and the price.

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