24 comments

  • gregsadetsky5 hours ago
    This is 5% off topic, but just to say that Zack (the person behind this service + Infinite Digits) is (also) a super prolific (and extremely kind) developer&#x2F;maker&#x2F;hacker with a ton of exquisite software+hardware musical projects:<p>- check out <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;infinitedigits.co&#x2F;docs&#x2F;products&#x2F;zeptocore&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;infinitedigits.co&#x2F;docs&#x2F;products&#x2F;zeptocore&#x2F;</a> if you&#x27;re into sample-y, jungle&#x2F;breakcore-y audio mangling&#x2F;button mashing<p>- and his <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;infinitedigits.co&#x2F;docs&#x2F;software&#x2F;collidertracker&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;infinitedigits.co&#x2F;docs&#x2F;software&#x2F;collidertracker&#x2F;</a> terminal-based tracker<p>Signed, an honorary member of the Zack Fan Club :-) haha
    • pwenzel4 hours ago
      His contributions to the Monome Norns ecosystem are impressive as well! Barcode (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;infinitedigits.co&#x2F;docs&#x2F;software&#x2F;norns-scripts&#x2F;barcode&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;infinitedigits.co&#x2F;docs&#x2F;software&#x2F;norns-scripts&#x2F;barcod...</a>) is a classic and I still rock it.
    • smusamashah4 hours ago
      Oh! The maker of croc too <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;infinitedigits.co&#x2F;docs&#x2F;software&#x2F;croc&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;infinitedigits.co&#x2F;docs&#x2F;software&#x2F;croc&#x2F;</a> Used it a few times to send files from A to B
    • qrv3w4 hours ago
      Such kind words! I really appreciate it.<p>Thanks for making the internet a more positive (and springy!) space!<p>-Zack
  • notatoad5 hours ago
    &gt;How it works # YesNotice works by periodically checking the status of the item you care about<p>okay, but <i>how does it work</i>? how does it check the status of things?
    • TheDong5 hours ago
      There are two general options:<p>1. Scrape a google search for the question, feed that into OpenAI with the additional prompt of &quot;Given the above information, is the answer to &lt;user prompt&gt; yes or no&quot;. Or give the AI a &quot;google&quot; tool and just ask it directly.<p>2. Same thing, except instead of OpenAI feed it into underpaid people in the global south (i.e. amazon mechanical turk). These people then probably feed it into ChatGPT anyway.<p>Given there&#x27;s a free tier, and when you use it it produces very ai-sounding text, I think it&#x27;s pretty clearly 1.<p>Also, if you enter a clever enough question, you can get the system prompt, but this is left as an exercise to the reader (this one&#x27;s somewhat tricky, you have to make an injection that goes through two layers).
    • JimDabell5 hours ago
      I built something very similar a few months back and I just asked an LLM. You could optionally specify a CSS selector for HTML or JMESPath for JSON to narrow things down, but it would default to feeding the entire textual content to the LLM and just asking it the question with a yes or no response.
    • jotaen5 hours ago
      Their “About” site is (just slightly) more insightful:<p>&gt; Using AI-powered web search, we continuously monitor your questions and send you an email notification when the status flips to what you&#x27;re waiting for.<p>via <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yesnotice.com&#x2F;about&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yesnotice.com&#x2F;about&#x2F;</a><p>Without knowing whether they actually do it that way, if you give ChatGPT the following prompt, it returns `No.`:<p>&gt; Please answer the following question with just “yes” or “no”: Is the new iPhone 18 available for pre-order?
    • alwa1 hour ago
      …and how frequently?
      • hacb1 hour ago
        the frequency is specified later in the doc[1]:<p>&gt; We check free accounts daily and premium accounts up to every 15 minutes.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yesnotice.com&#x2F;about&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yesnotice.com&#x2F;about&#x2F;</a>
    • esafak5 hours ago
      You just curl the site or use its API, if it has one? Then you store the result in a database and see if its value has flipped. I don&#x27;t get the question; this is trivial.
      • scubbo5 hours ago
        &gt; Additionally, YesNotice will provide an estimated availability timeline for the question, so you can have some information about when to expect the change.<p>How is that trivial in the general case?
        • esafak4 hours ago
          Let&#x27;s see how accurate those predictions are before worrying about the how.
      • DougN75 hours ago
        And how exactly does it call any arbitrary API or know which site to curl for any arbitrary question a user might ask? Your answer doesn’t contemplate the how this actually works.
        • esafak4 hours ago
          According to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yesnotice.com&#x2F;about&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yesnotice.com&#x2F;about&#x2F;</a> it uses &quot;AI-powered web search&quot; so the heavy lifting is likely outsourced.
      • zahlman5 hours ago
        &gt; YesNotice works by periodically checking the status of the item you care about (e.g., product stock, website availability, domain status) and comparing it to the previous status. When it detects a change from no to yes, it sends you a notification via email.<p>How does it generalize arbitrary indications of status into yes&#x2F;no?<p>How does it know how to use arbitrary APIs to obtain arbitrary indications of status?
      • dylanowen5 hours ago
        That&#x27;s if the website you&#x27;re querying is a static html file but the web is much more dynamic and varied. Some of the questions I have: does yesnotice execute js, does it handle an answer appearing on a different page, does it handle ambiguous launch language. In essence: how does it work?
      • notatoad4 hours ago
        what site does it check? what api does it call?<p>one of the examples is to see if a new coffee shop is opened in town. what&#x27;s the API to call for that?
        • esafak4 hours ago
          <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.google.com&#x2F;maps&#x2F;documentation&#x2F;places&#x2F;web-service&#x2F;nearby-search" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.google.com&#x2F;maps&#x2F;documentation&#x2F;places&#x2F;web-...</a><p>You could use an LLM to pick the right API.
          • notatoad3 hours ago
            which is, of course, what i mean by &quot;how does it work&quot;
    • meindnoch5 hours ago
      From a database!
  • hamasho2 hours ago
    This post is not related to this, but as a fellow live coding fun, it makes me happy to find a new terminal based instrument like this found in the website ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;infinitedigits.co&#x2F;docs&#x2F;software&#x2F;collidertracker&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;infinitedigits.co&#x2F;docs&#x2F;software&#x2F;collidertracker&#x2F;</a> ). Especially there is another hot post about Strudel right now (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=46052478">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=46052478</a> ).
  • deanebarker4 hours ago
    Take a look at these posts --<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;deanebarker.net&#x2F;tech&#x2F;blog&#x2F;let-me-know&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;deanebarker.net&#x2F;tech&#x2F;blog&#x2F;let-me-know&#x2F;</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;deanebarker.net&#x2F;tech&#x2F;blog&#x2F;notify-one-time&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;deanebarker.net&#x2F;tech&#x2F;blog&#x2F;notify-one-time&#x2F;</a><p>I&#x27;m glad someone finally did something here. I wish you every success.
    • qrv3w4 hours ago
      Thanks! Had pretty much the same thought process as you, so I made this little tool (yesnotice) to do pretty much that. Its not perfect, but I&#x27;ve been using it a lot and its working great for me (mostly to get notified when certain new packages are updated and TV shows come out...then I don&#x27;t have to remember so many things!)
  • tyilo1 hour ago
    I got a 403 Forbidden error when trying to register a user.
  • samteeeee1 hour ago
    I made a free product out of one of the use cases for YesNotice &quot;Get notified when a new movie or TV show is released&quot;. It&#x27;s here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.premierepal.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.premierepal.com&#x2F;</a>
  • victorbuilds5 hours ago
    The &quot;yes&#x2F;no&quot; framing is a nice constraint that makes this actually useful vs generic &quot;page changed&quot; monitors. Do you rate-limit the checks to avoid hammering sources?
  • thehamkercat3 hours ago
    This is amazing, beat me to it, I had this in my TODO since last year.<p>I wanted to call it &quot;Remind-me-when&quot;<p>for example: &quot;remind me when Weapons movie has less than 7 days to be released&quot;<p>or &quot;remind me when the site something.com goes down&quot;
  • cyberclimb2 hours ago
    Is it possible to track a given URL without that URL becoming public knowledge as a posted question for anyone to see?
  • ChrisMarshallNY4 hours ago
    Pretty cool. I suspect it&#x27;s an AI implementation.<p>Reminds me of this classic: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;isabevigodadead.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;isabevigodadead.com</a>
  • denysvitali5 hours ago
    Can&#x27;t wait for the collab with <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.istheinternetonfire.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.istheinternetonfire.com&#x2F;</a>
  • xnx3 hours ago
    Good enhancement to existing services like Website Watcher, changedetection, etc.
  • VikingCoder5 hours ago
    Very much reminded of &quot;Daemon&quot; by Daniel Suarez, where the system is watching the news to find out when people were dead, etc.
  • CGMthrowaway4 hours ago
    It&#x27;s IFTTT all over again!
  • martypitt5 hours ago
    Cool idea. Just a heads-up that the Demo link at the bottom of the page leads to a 403.
  • felipelalli5 hours ago
    Nice idea.
  • knowaveragejoe3 hours ago
    The sign up link leads to a 403, just fyi.
  • cyanydeez3 hours ago
    Ok, I&#x27;ll only accept this use of AI if YesNotice can figure out how much their computer cycles cost to do whatever it&#x27;s doing.
  • mempko3 hours ago
    This is really cool! I always believed one valuable use case for AI is to take unstructured data and structure it.<p>I am building ThetaEdge (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thetaedge.ai" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thetaedge.ai</a>) which is in Beta now. We built a similar feature but specific to investing and markets. You get notified when certain market things you care about happen like &#x27;Alert me when nvidia releases a new product&#x27; or &#x27;tell me when a 20 delta call for Apple is more than $1&#x27;.<p>The challenge of building something like this is consistency and accuracy which is important in finance.<p>Awesome to see a clean focused product like YesNotice with a very clear utility.
    • IncreasePosts2 hours ago
      I agree about the importance of that use case, but how do you confirm that the AI doesn&#x27;t modify the data in some unwarranted manner during the process?
      • mempko2 hours ago
        Great question! Don&#x27;t use AI to process the data, especially when a computer can do the work :-). AI is good at taking unstructured data and structuring it. Computers are great at computing.<p>Here is an example of Google&#x27;s AI failing<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=is+2026+next+year" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=is+2026+next+year</a><p>Google screenshot: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;FOT4aDF" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;FOT4aDF</a><p>ChatGPT also fails: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;mb3rRgZ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;mb3rRgZ</a><p>and here is the ThetaEdge result: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;ZAZZgiR" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;ZAZZgiR</a>
  • marysminefnuf4 hours ago
    Love this idea
  • bbstats5 hours ago
    hug of death?
  • amarant3 hours ago
    Neat! Now I don&#x27;t have to remember to Google for new vaccine updates every week!
  • zhouzhao5 hours ago
    [flagged]
  • meindnoch5 hours ago
    &gt;Notifications are sent via email or SMS, depending on your preference.<p>This would be a perfect use case for RSS.
    • barbazoo4 hours ago
      And then a service on top that checks the feed and notifies you when there’s a new item.
      • etskinner3 hours ago
        I presume most mobile RSS readers do this already. With the added bonus that users can set their own settings of how often to refresh their feed rather than writing a service to do it
    • jauntywundrkind3 hours ago
      This would also be one excellent use case for web notifications! One I&#x27;d gladly use!!! <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;docs&#x2F;Web&#x2F;API&#x2F;Notifications_API" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;docs&#x2F;Web&#x2F;API&#x2F;Notificatio...</a>