Alternatives
Products that do what New search engine and free-FOIA-by-fax-via-web for US veteran records does
Hi HN. I'm the president and founder of a small non-profit called Reclaim The Records that identifies historical and genealogical materials and data sets held by government agencies, archives, and libraries -- and then returns them to the public domain, for free public use. Back in September 2017, our organization made a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the US Department of Veterans Affairs (the VA) asking for a copy of a database they maintain called "BIRLS", which stands for the Beneficiary Identification Records Locator Subsystem. While it's not exactly an index of every…
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Hey all, Throwaway in case this is assumed to be politcally motivated. I spent some time organizing the Eptstein files to make transparency a little clearer. I need to tighten the data for organizations and people a bit more, but hopeful this is helpful in research in the interim.
Nov 2025 · searchepsteinfiles.com
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2022 · github.com
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https://pardonned.com Inspired by the videos of Liz Oyer, I wanted to be able to verify her claims and just look up all the pardons more easily. Tech Stack: Playwright - to sccrape the DOJ website SQLite - local database Astro 6 - Build out a static website from the sqlite db All code is open source and available on Github.
Apr 2026
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2023 · clippings.june07.com
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Driving home from work one day, I wanted to know how many people we knew the names of who lived during the Roman era. Searching around, I found lists of Consuls and officials, but nothing that covered ordinary people or even most people like freedmen and slaves. So I ended up building a pipeline to process the more than 500k Latin inscriptions in the Epigraphic Database Clauss-Slaby https://edcs.hist.uzh.ch/en/ and extract the names of people (and attempt to cluster them, but this is a work in progress). There are databases where Classicists have done this manually for…
Jun 2026 · new.roman-names.com
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This project is a tool for engineers who live in the terminal and are tired of losing their command history to ephemeral servers or fragmented `.bash_history` files. If you’re jumping between dozens of boxes, many of which might be destroyed an hour later, your "local memory" (the history file) is essentially useless. This tool builds a centralized, permanent brain for your shell activity, ensuring that a complex one-liner you crafted months ago remains accessible even if the server it ran on is long gone. The core mechanism wants to be a "zero-touch" capture that happens at the connection…
Jan 2026 · github.com
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Hi HN, As many of you already know, Google has discontinued their coding competitions and is shutting down the competitions website. Before it's gone forever, I've scraped everything I could from their website and set up my own archive. (Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with Google besides participating in these contests years ago) While the initial version was ready back in March, today I'm rolling out big and hopefully the final update, so this might be a good time to share it with the HN community. Everything is static HTML and SQLite archives (with a very minimal backend to serve files…
2023 · zibada.guru
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2017 · nslarchive.org
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2015 · getfetch.net
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This site was set up in response to the HN story about a site getting taken down by another site that had the gall to plagiarize it then issue a DMCA. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5174121
2013 · dmcainjury.com
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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…
Dec 2025 · github.com
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Inspired by the ongoing call-to-action by the Internet Archive team over at /r/DataHoarder [1], I've decided I want to try to preserve all cybersecurity related subreddits. [2] For people that don't know what's going on: There's a likelihood that the try to monetize the Reddit API will lead to a lot of moderators quitting the platform, and it could be that a lot of subreddits are going to be set on private and/or their threads are going to be deleted. At least that's kind of the fear from the ongoing moderator strike. In my case I learned a LOT from reddits' discussions about…
2023
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2022 · lafrance.enchiffres.fr
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Hey. I’ve been working on Rearview, a browser extension that makes browsing history more useful. It’s available for Chrome, Edge, and Firefox. What it does: - Full-text Search: Search page content, not just URLs or titles. - More Filter: Organize history by date, time, or visits. - AI Assistant: Get insights from your history. (Optional, with your own api key.) Everything stays local in IndexedDB. Feedback & Feature request welcome. BTW, since Firefox does not provide a favicon URLs implementation (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1315616),I am currently requesting…
2025 · rearview-ai.vercel.app
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FOIA toolkit for journalists and citizens.
Mar 2026 · github.com
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