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Show HN: Epstein's emails reconstructed in a message-style UI (OCR and LLMs)
This project reconstructs the Epstein email records from the recent U.S. House Oversight Committee releases using only public-domain documents (23,124 image files + 2,800 OCR text files).
Most email pages contain only one real message, buried under layers of repeated headers/footers. I wanted to rebuild the conversations without all the surrounding noise.
I used an OCR + vision-LLM pipeline to extract individual messages from the email screenshots, normalize senders/recipients, rebuild timestamps, detect duplicates, and map threads. The output is a structured SQLite database that runs client-side via SQL.js (WebAssembly).
The repository includes the full extraction pipeline, data cleaning scripts, schema, limitations, and implementation notes. The interface is a lightweight PWA that displays the reconstructed messages in a phone-style UI, with links back to every original source image for verification.
Live demo: https://epsteinsphone.org https://epsteinsphone.org
All source data is from the official public releases; no leaks or private material.
Happy to answer questions about the pipeline, LLM extraction, threading logic, or the PWA implementation.
- pfd1986 10mo agoThe convo with Noam Chomsky is interesting. Deepak Chopra one talking about Trump being 'loco' is quiet funny. Neat data visualization solution!
- toon-noot 10mo agoThanks!
- dizhn 10mo agoAndroid/Firefox. Nothing's happening when I tap the icons on the demo site.
- toon-noot 10mo agoThanks for the feedback. i'll try to reproduce. I spent more time with the data pipeline then with testing the UI across platforms...
- marstall 10mo agobrilliant. feel bad asking for something more - but an inline annotation of who these people are would take it over the top.
- palmotea 10mo agoOne nit: the message view seems to auto-hyphenate long words on line-breaks to pack in more text, but one of the things that's struck me about Epstein is how utterly incompetent he was with punctuation. Those correctly-inserted hyphens distract from that impression.
- pea 10mo agoThis is really cool, I enjoyed going through them in this form. Thanks
- lights0123 10mo agoSee also: https://jmail.world/ https://jmail.world/