4 ms·

This isn't hard to believe if you've worked w/ the Edgar system!

• jefe_ 8y ago
  Not a security complaint but an annoying experience with the system: Sat down one Saturday to create a database for their Financial Statement and Notes data set https://www.sec.gov/dera/data/financial-statement-and-notes-data-set.html https://www.sec.gov/dera/data/financial-statement-and-notes-... Located documentation, thought okay this shouldn't be too bad. Ended up taking one day to understand the structure and another to implement the system. Finally got everything loaded in my tables and spot checked against the rendered versions on their website only to discover they truncate the most important text field. It's technically in the documentation that the value field is limited to 2048, but it's also in the documentation that the value field is for 'text analysis applications' and their website literally says: 'The information is presented without change from the "as filed" financial reports submitted by each registrant...' so I managed to gloss over this detail until I had already spent and entire weekend working on it. I just can't wrap my mind around how they got 99% of the way there and then decided, 'hey lets just truncate this field, it's only the entire purpose of this dataset.'
  • elliekelly 8y ago
    > I just can't wrap my mind around how they got 99% of the way there and then decided, 'hey lets just truncate this field, it's only the entire purpose of this dataset.' I'm willing to bet this is because they haven't made any significant changes to the system since it was implemented in 1996.
• eclipticplane 8y ago
  Calling it a "system" is an offense to all other systems.