from Hacker News

Show HN: I made a tool to receive alerts when answers change

by saran945 on 7/28/24, 1:55 PM with 81 comments

• by colonwqbang on 7/28/24, 9:56 PM

  A public demo of some kind is necessary. I saw nothing that was available to view without registration. This made me lose interest very quickly.

  Even a quick screenshot would be better than nothing.

• by oezi on 7/28/24, 6:20 PM

  Some public Alerts would be cool to showcase the idea. Potentially publicly visible alerts could be free.

  A generic version of https://istheshipstillstuck.com/

• by playingalong on 7/28/24, 6:19 PM

  The page would benefit a lot from an example or two.

  "Who is the current NBA champion?"

  "How many MPs do the Toddies have?"

• by craigdalton on 7/29/24, 11:25 AM

  I would really like this to work - lots of public health applications monitoring for events - but it didnt work for the query below - any idea why not, I thought the prompt would be fairly simple given the amount of news coverage on this issue, the result was: There have been no reported events of animal to human transmission of avian influenza H5N1 in the USA since March 2024. Additionally, searches for general news and historical cases related to H5N1 also yielded no results. Therefore, it can be concluded that there have been no significant events or cases reported during the specified timeframe.

  Source:

  Bing search results for "events of animal to human transmission of avian influenza H5N1 in the USA since March 2024" Bing search results for "avian influenza H5N1 USA news July 2024" Bing search results for "historical cases of avian influenza H5N1 animal to human transmission USA" Bing search results for "CDC avian influenza H5N1 updates" Bing search results for "WHO avian influenza H5N1 updates" Date Time: July 29, 2024, 5:49 a.m.

• by jll29 on 7/28/24, 9:40 PM

  Neat. Such services ("delta filters" in information filtering, a sub-part of information retrieval, "diff alerts" in Web mining, another sub-part of information retrieval) are useful to implement anything from price comparison to legal canaries (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary).

  It would be useful to have a language to specify exactly what kind of event triggers an alert (e.g. regex, presence/absence of keyword or phrase, or domain from SERP).

• by muratsu on 7/28/24, 7:57 PM

  Interesting idea, how do you decide if the answer has changed? Or to put it differently, which types of questions do you think this works best? eg stock price changes every second VS presidential elections are every few years

• by tectonic on 7/29/24, 12:05 AM

  This is more or less why I created Huginn. Excited to see more people thinking about systems that let you set complex triggers to know when the world changes.

• by aurareturn on 7/28/24, 6:56 PM

  Love seeing these creative ideas using LLMs to solve existing problems - however small the problem may be.

  I also have many ideas similar to this using LLMs. They're not money makers. But they do solve personal problems for me. However, my ideas are usually bottlenecked by context size, $/token, or models not being capable enough. Luckily, all 3 are improving at an incredible pace.

• by gtirloni on 7/29/24, 2:56 AM

  Great app! I have several uses for this.

  Some sort of organization of queries into categories would be nice.

  Most of my queries don't need to be checked every 6 hours. Some are fine being checked weekly.

  You could have a free tier with limited numbers of queries and 24-hour interval to attract new customers.

  Someone else mentioned public quereis being free. If I can still get a personal notification for those, then you only spend on sending notifications and not re-running the query for many users. If my needs are served by public queries alone I may not subscribe. I'd weight the risks.

  Different methods of receiving notifications are usually only needed for enterprises. I'd weight the benefits of doing that for non-enterprise customers because the cost of debugging is high (think hooking that up to AWS SQS or, worse, some proprietary webhook).

• by saran945 on 7/28/24, 4:38 PM

  To clarify, my app is the equivalent of SearchGPT + web alerts, using in-app notifications rather than email alerts.

• by instagraham on 7/29/24, 6:45 PM

  This is an interesting experiment in truth-seeking. People often ask "which media outlet/truth source should I trust", as if there was a single point of contact for facts. In reality, it is more of a moving investigation. It is better to assess over time than to conclude in an instant.

• by richardreeze on 7/30/24, 5:34 PM

  This is a very cool idea!

  Obviously, it needs some work (especially judging from all the comments here). You already added an example to the homepage, but my feedback would be:

  1. Add more examples of possible alerts. You can honestly just look at the Zapier homepage and copy how they show examples.

  2. Include pricing information. I see the "create account" button, but I don't know how much you'll charge (If you don't charge, let me know if I need to add my API keys).

  Still, it's a cool idea. It reminds me of existing tools that alert you to flight price changes, Amazon product price changes, etc... There's definitely something here.

• by zoogeny on 7/29/24, 4:55 PM

  I think this is a good idea for a LLM wrapper app.

  I've heard the leaders of the foundational models say a similar thing: bet on the technology getting better. That is, if your business idea becomes less valuable given a smarter model then it isn't a good business idea. Alternatively, if your business idea becomes more valuable given a smarter model then it is a good business idea. (Not that I totally trust them, but this does seem like good advice)

  So, even if your current product has some issues now with the diff provided by current models - consider that it will only get better as the models get better.

  You are going to see a lot of competition in this space.

• by thih9 on 7/29/24, 5:11 PM

  Feedback: I like the idea and wanted to check out the demo, but the link took me to Twitter/x and I don't have an account there. I could only see one post right until "Here are some use cases I tested . . .". Only on the second visit I noticed the Vimeo embed.

• by msnkarthik on 7/29/24, 7:19 AM

  Checked your site. It is pretty cool. What AI models are you working with to find answers in real time? And what's the frequency of re-running these searches for updating the answers? Are you doing it once daily, weekly or monthly?

• by thrownaway561 on 7/29/24, 2:18 PM

  I'm just not getting it at all. The video is silent so you have to wrap your head around what is happening. I would strongly suggest you try explaining the concept better.

• by rmbyrro on 7/29/24, 5:44 AM

  The use cases for your product are too broad. Focus on a promissing niche that has a problem and are willing to spend money on it. Specialize the product and communication to it.

• by mattfrommars on 7/29/24, 1:24 PM

  How is this different from RAG and Langchain? Sorry for the ignorant question, I recently understood what these concept mean in the scope of LLM.

• by mrgoldenbrown on 7/29/24, 6:54 PM

  >Alertfor finds the most relevant answer on the web.

  Are you intentionally being vague about HOW it finds/decides on the best answer?

• by gravity2060 on 7/28/24, 10:19 PM

  I absolutely love this and I have a use case right now. In terms of pricing, what are you thinking?. Wow, this is very cool.

• by adamontherun on 7/28/24, 10:26 PM

  My use case failed

  Asked if there were any available 3 bedroom units currently for rent in my building

  There aren’t in reality

  But service came back saying there were 4

• by bigyikes on 7/28/24, 9:54 PM

  I tried to sign up but never got a confirmation email.

• by gerroo on 7/29/24, 7:10 PM

  What did you use to make the demo video?

• by Bharathkumar12 on 7/29/24, 7:39 AM

  Good and useful tool