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I'm impressed. You guys cloned a whole suite of products in a short period of time that cost millions of dollars. Even the little bits of humor look costly. On
by muzani 10mo ago
I'm impressed. You guys cloned a whole suite of products in a short period of time that cost millions of dollars. Even the little bits of humor look costly.
On the other hand, it's way more information than I expected. I can see why someone would hesitate to release them - there's a lot to sift through and it's likely even the government couldn't sift through all of them to make sure their friends weren't mentioned somewhere.
- lukeigel 10mo agoThanks! And it's a lot of info, yeah. ~90% of new data in yesterday's drop was photographs, which they redacted for us. The House Oversight Committee's giant drop in November had tons of data we still didn't take advantage of even after doing the original Jmail, like flight logs. For the Yahoo release, which is still ongoing, the folks at Drop Site News (see https://www.jmail.world/about https://www.jmail.world/about) are handling the manual redaction which has been very time consuming, even with tons of AI to help in the background.
- dvrp 10mo agoWould be nice to explain at some point how we did the structuring of the destructured data. For now we’re focusing on fixing the bugs because we’re already seeing an insane wave of traffic so most of us are focused on keeping the site alive.
- nsomaru 10mo agoHey, I’d be interested in your thoughts on this, or the key ideas/research results you relied on:
- lukeigel 10mo agoYes! We used our friends at Reducto (https://reducto.ai/ https://reducto.ai/) for all document extraction and parsing (one of the best companies I've ever referred to YC ;) ) We did an initial parsing pass of all four DOJ document batches on Friday. This takes a raw PDF and returns chunks containing typed blocks—each with a type (Title, Text, Figure, etc.), bounding boxes, content, and confidence scores. For PDFs that were just scans of photographs (which was like 90% of new content in Friday's release), it gave in depth descriptions of those! You can type search terms like "door" at https://www.jmail.world/photos https://www.jmail.world/photos to see what I mean. For apps like Jmail and JFlights we use their structured extraction endpoint instead—you define a schema (e.g. {from, to, subject, date, body} for emails or {departure_airport, arrival_airport, passengers[], date} for flights) and it pulls those fields directly into JSON. The JFlights example served as the best ad for Reducto and how doc parsing technology can speed up hours of journalistic investigations like this. See for yourself. Given this document https://www.jmail.world/drive/HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_002031 https://www.jmail.world/drive/HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_002031 It inferred and enriched multiple flight cards on JFlights (https://www.jmail.world/flights https://www.jmail.world/flights). I was really shook when I first saw this.
- adit_a 10mo agoThis might be our coolest case study yet. Thanks for the mention!
- defrost 10mo agoOne interesting thread to pull is "Stuff released and then Yanked back" ... Images removed from Epstein files less than a day after being posted - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-12-21/images-removed-from-epstein-files-less-than-a-day-after-posted/106167464 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-12-21/images-removed-from-e... promises all the sleuthing excitement of chasing the significance of Donald in a Drawer.
- wahnfrieden 10mo agoImages were also planted to falsely suggest incriminating evidence.
- wahnfrieden 10mo agoI see people are not clued into this and incredulously downvote because the file release appears to be in good faith to them such that illegal evidence tampering is out of the question See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46341688 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46341688
- zahlman 10mo agoThe post you link to is deleted.
- bryanrasmussen 10mo agowhile true, it would probably be useful to provide examples. The one that I am aware of seems to be a picture showing Clinton, Michael Jackson, and Diana Ross with "redacted" victims https://www.imdb.com/news/ni65628031/ https://www.imdb.com/news/ni65628031/ https://bsky.app/profile/meidastouch.com/post/3mag7myutmc2d https://bsky.app/profile/meidastouch.com/post/3mag7myutmc2d however it seems that this photo is actually taken from a 2003 Democratic fundraiser, and the redacted images of victims were of Diana Ross' son Evan, and Michael Jackson's kids, Paris and Prince Jackson. This may or may not be accurate either, since I have not been able to dig down into the photo and determine if it has any connections to a supposed 2003 fundraiser. But it seems more likely to be true than not that this was sloppily planted evidence that was especially insultingly fake. on edit: looking closer does not seem to be exact same photos, but instead two different photos taken at the same time and place, so in the 2003 Dem fundraising, but a different photo of that. So it could be that Epstein had it and DOJ thought hey, look at these pervs! Let's release!!
- alex1138 10mo agoI'm being snarky and this isn't such a serious comment and I don't really mean this for Gemini but can you imagine using something like Gemini ("Hi, please comb through this") and it just refuses on ethical grounds
- lukeigel 10mo agoWe found that Codex indeed refuses but Claude + Gemini are willing to RAG it
- muzani 10mo agoUsually Claude is the prude. Personally I haven't even tried for fear what I'd find. I can stomach homicide and war pictures, but Epstein is too much.
- alex1138 10mo agoI just have real institutional problems with Google, they have all the best tech minds but some things are just off limits to them being politically correct And no, not Epstein. It's a general statement; but it's disappointing that they're like this (and of course Gemini was famously the one that gave black Nazis and things like that)
- underlipton 10mo agoGoogle has never fixed their black people/gorilla issue. The foundational tech that all of their products run on going back a decade is fundamentally flawed (and outputs outputs that many would say align with racist ideologies, among others).
- lukeigel 10mo agoalso, shoutout the Jason Liu (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jxnlco https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jxnlco) for discovering that one. His turbopuffer-based version of Jemini is coming soon!
- genghisjahn 10mo agoBut, whoever’s doing the redacting sees the original right? What prevents the redactor from saying, “here’s what the document really said.” Or “here’s who’s in the image, I saw it before I redacted it?”
- freedomben 10mo agoThe idea of spending the rest of their life in prison is what stops them
- helterskelter 10mo agoYeah but a few words from somebody like Ghislaine could completely fuck shit up for a lot of people. Of course, she'll have hanged herself shortly afterward while the security cameras were malfunctioning.
- mcintyre1994 10mo agoI’d guess a first pass is done automatically? Eg if a page mentions eg Trump, just redact that whole page/paragraph/etc. So the people who have done the closer reading to redact further probably don’t actually know the scale of what was already redacted. Just a guess though.
- chiefalchemist 10mo agoThat’s a good point. I would imagine they break it up into pieces - in a reCAPTCHA sorta way - and any given person sees a sentence or a piece of a sentence. An alternative would be to strip out all obvious known words and only leave unknowns (i.e., names) and then have those fragments reviewed (in a reCAPTCHA sorta way). Finally, for images, cover all faces and the one by one decide which should remain covered and which should not. LOTS of work but there are workflows to mitigate the ability for reviewers to connect more than they should.
- sigwinch 10mo agoPart of the law mandates that all redactions will be listed for Congress within 15 days.
- johnys 10mo agoYeah, there’s a ton of information. https://epsteinsecrets.com/network https://epsteinsecrets.com/network is another tool to pursue the data dumps.
- Alex3917 10mo ago> You guys cloned a whole suite of products in a short period of time that cost millions of dollars. At the risk of stating the obvious, the functionality isn't actually cloned, only the UI. The actual code powering Gmail probably dates back to the late 80s or early 90s and has had several hundred thousands of hours of work put into it. This is just a webpage that looks kind of similar. I point this out only because I've seen people saying that software businesses don't have moats anymore because of this, which is taking away a completely false lesson.
- jonathanstrange 10mo agoOut of curiosity, would you explain what you mean by that? Google was founded in 1998 and writing a mail client isn't terribly complicated. Did they buy some code for Gmail from an older company? Is Gmail older than Google?
- randall 10mo agoit is not. gmail is 100% from paul bucheit.
- Alex3917 10mo agoHe wasn't sitting there writing binary code and implementing all 7 layers of the OSI stack by hand, he was was gluing together pre-existing components. And the pre-existing components he had access to include two major email startups acquired by Google in 2001 and 2003, which were founded in 1995 and 1997 respectively. (Although he does have at least two patents for features and algorithms he co-invented while making Gmail.)
- estebank 10mo agoIf I invite you to a barbeque and tell you I made lunch, will you tell me off because I didn't raise and butcher the cow?
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- TechDebtDevin 10mo ago[flagged]
- JKCalhoun 10mo ago"…there's a lot to sift through…" A job for an LLM…
- wayeq 10mo ago> - there's a lot to sift through and it's likely even the government couldn't sift through all of them to make sure their friends weren't mentioned somewhere. if only there were some kind of universal summary engine that never gets tired and is essentially free.
- tonyhart7 10mo ago"whole suite of products in a short period of time that cost millions of dollars." but they just copy the "UI" not the whole product
- huntertwo 10mo ago> I can see why someone would hesitate to release them - there's a lot to sift through and it's likely even the government couldn't sift through all of them to make sure their friends weren't mentioned somewhere. Jared kushner, is that you?
- elif 10mo agoThinking Gmail costs "millions to develop" sounds exactly like the kind of price unawareness that comes from that family. I would bet the Gmail team has single employee salaries in that range.
- stanfordkid 10mo agoTo be fair, millions could be hundreds of millions.
- elif 10mo agoSure. And you are inches tall.
- an0malous 10mo agoWhat do these million dollar salary employees at Gmail do?
- Den_VR 10mo agoThree things, not all of which any specific employee does: 1. Fix security issues 2. Create “features” in order to seem useful that the world was better without 3. Rest upon laurels of gmail from 15 years ago
- d4mi3n 10mo agoMake Google multiple millions by improving ad delivery and conversion within Gmail. Probably by also helping Google land big corporate or public contracts, but last I checked most of the money was made via ads in the free tier of GMail.
- qoez 10mo agoWell there's only 2500 emails here. They definitely had time to sift through these to make sure friends weren't mentioned.
- Bender 10mo agothere's a lot to sift through The total archive size is 300GB. AFAIK they have only released around 2GB. Curious what is in the rest of it assuming it does not get [redacted] out or deleted. I am also curious how they intend to release the rest of it in time to meet the requirements of the act. Discussion [1] Epstein Files bill sponsor Ro Khanna and Hassan, no dogs being zapped. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KT2u0Fp3hQg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KT2u0Fp3hQg [video][1hr12m]
- sh34r 10mo ago> Curious what is in the rest of it Probably a lot of CSAM, if the Mossad blackmail op theory of Epstein is true.
- Bender 10mo agoMaybe. I keep hearing that yet all I've seen are teens that would have been legal in several US states. Given they did not correctly redact the PDF's perhaps there will be some hints to actual children having been involved.
- amelius 10mo ago> I'm impressed. You guys cloned a whole suite of products in a short period of time that cost millions of dollars. Even the little bits of humor look costly. The cynic in me would assume that someone with a lot of money wants to hide some of the emails and the best way to do that (at this point) is to release them filtered with a great UI.
- brookst 10mo agoThat’s not cynicism, it’s conspiracy theorism. That leads you to “the whole Epstein thing is a hoax designed to distract from what’s really going on”.
- amelius 10mo agoNo, because the hypothesis is relatively easily falsifiable. This does not hold for conspiracy theories.
- wizzwizz4 10mo agoWould you like to do the work of falsifying it? (Since you made the claim, and posted it online, I'd argue you have some responsibility to do so.)
- jdironman 10mo agoThe thing I got from reading the majority of these emails is Epstein / trump connection was not that strong later years. I feel JE humored trump to a degree and disliked him to an even larger degree. He may have initially had strong relations in the beginning but he was NOT pleased he was winning the presidency at all. He mentioned multiple times references to dirt on DT and even at one point there was the question did Trump set him up. Not to say JE did no wrong, cause the evidence is 100% there for that but it's super interesting having read the actual files to see the various media spins on all sides. If anything though it's led me to believe there are much stronger ties to Russia with DT than I thought before. (Palm Beach House, the casino, models coming from those areas etc).
- the_arun 10mo agoThey also have “promotions” tab listing all promo content. I wonder is this real or mock data.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- downboots 10mo ago> it's likely even the government couldn't sift through all of them How could you tell?