searchepsteinfiles.com
Data
document search index
SHOW HN2025
How HN took it
6 positive, 10 neutral or asking, 0 mixed, 3 critical, out of 19 comments about the project. Thread score +0.17.
Design: 4 for, 1 againstIdea: 1 for, 1 againstExecution: 0 for, 1 against
The thread, comment by comment
Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.
positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker
What HN said
What people liked
Useful, well-done searchable interface
From 3 comments
Great job! Would be nice if the messages are formatted with just date, sender and message and the metadata is hidden in a popup or whatever.
tacker2000 on HNLooks great and terrifying, as expected.
berbec on HNThis is great! I made an attempt at something similar, but putting it online was a bit beyond what I know how to do. https://github.com/JonGerhardson/Epsteindb
notjulianjaynes on HN
Objections
Documents are poorly formatted raw text with weak search and no clear dates
From 3 comments
I would say these are 'tagged'; organized is a bit of a stretch, IMO. This is some sort of searchable index that reminds me a lot of what the web was like prior to Google; the…
garciasn on HNGreat job! Would be nice if the messages are formatted with just date, sender and message and the metadata is hidden in a popup or whatever.
tacker2000 on HN> It's just a jumble of poorly formatted text that isn't really contextually aware and is largely useless for the volume of textual documents. I did a quick spot check and the…
baby_souffle on HN
Requests
Cleaner formatting, readable metadata, and images
From 2 comments
Thank you for the feedback. Unfortunately it's several thousand raw text files, and determining a single relevant date, sender and message for each file is a bit more complex…
searchepstein on HNNice finds! Yep, I've had a snoot-full of this project this week - but next week I'll start pulling in the images and making improvements. Thank you for the feedback!
searchepstein on HN
Shareable search URLs
From 1 comment
This is the kind of web site that makes we wish searches were encoded in the URL (...search?page=40), so URL edits allow me to jump anywhere, especially to the last page.
sema4hacker on HN
AI-based semantic search or damning-score sorting
From 2 comments
You need an AI to go through each one and assign a score of how damning it is so we can sort all files by that.
deadbabe on HNHow long until people build EpsteinGPT that does semantic search on this?
CactusBlue on HN
Questions
What is the underlying tech?
From 1 comment
Would love to know more about the underlying tech
mickael-kerjean on HN
How did an unrelated AI book end up in the files?
From 2 comments
This is an odd one; it seems to be the text of an AI book by James Tagg ? https://searchepsteinfiles.com/file/text/HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_015675.txt
trebligdivad on HNVery curious how it got in there. I found this snippet while searching for the connection: “James Tagg, a tech entrepreneur, wanted to found a Penrose Institute in San Diego to…
y-curious on HN
Alternatives named
Zeteo/Google Pinpoint searchable archive
From 1 comment
Zeteo News published some searchable archive. It seems this links the original (?) PDFs and provides a Google-based search.…
ks2048 on HN
Courier Newsroom searchable database
From 1 comment
https://couriernewsroom.com/news/we-created-a-searchable-database-with-all-20000-files-from-epsteins-estate/
jimt1234 on HN
Epsteindb GitHub project
From 1 comment
This is great! I made an attempt at something similar, but putting it online was a bit beyond what I know how to do. https://github.com/JonGerhardson/Epsteindb
notjulianjaynes on HN