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.
Thanks! 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) are handling the manual redaction which has been very time consuming, even with tons of AI to help in the background.
Yes! We used our friends at Reducto (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 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.
while 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
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!!
As you say, it's not the same photo. If the one in the dump was in Epstein's possession, the reason for the redactions are either that some drone in the DOJ just redacted all children out of habit, or that it was deliberately done in such a way as to frame Clinton. I can't decide which I find more credible.
I think if it hadn't been those adults with the kids an alert staffer might have thought "whose kids are these, these aren't young teenage girls, I better double check" But Michael Jackson, kids, Clinton arms around him, Diana Ross with young male, they're thinking they walked into an armory filled with nothing but smoking guns!
>the reason for the redactions are either that some drone in the DOJ just redacted all children out of habit, or that it was deliberately done in such a way as to frame Clinton
They were supposed to redact all minors, not just "victims".
I 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
I'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
I 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)
Google 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).
But, 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?”
That’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.
Given how MTG went completely silent despite her high profile platform, I'm guessing the civil (or at this point, royal) servants don't want their families harmed.
I’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.
> 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.
Out 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?
A full featured mailed client is insanely complicated. If you think mail client is just smtp, you probably think word is just text with some styling and excel is just some cells and functions.
I’m sure, buried somewhere deep in Google systems, are vestiges of mail server code originally written in the 80s. But when people use the name Gmail, they are generally referring to the client facing web app, which does not have any such code.
If it exists, it's probably not at all related to Gmail or only used for testing. I don't think Google reuses a lot of third party code in its first party server software.
He 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.)
I mean it is so obvious causing me to find the use of the phrase cloned so weird that I feel it needs to be said.
The UI cloning doesn't feel exactly correct either there are things that are slightly off.
But I just find the "cloned" wrong, because obviously you cannot send an email from this account, you cannot log in to the service as Jeffrey Epstein, you cannot delete emails, create alerts based on searches, do actions on selected emails (create new tag, move under that tag)
there are so many functionalities that are not cloned because obviously they could not be cloned because they would make no sense for what this project is. So just the praise for cloning so quickly makes me sort of mad.
You could theoretically make something like this that allowed log in so you got a personalized epstein mails, and then could do all that, and perhaps get more mails sent in as files get released, and perhaps create Google alerts on epstein in the news etc. that would come as mails and maybe the code could put news that came in, into the appropriate the tags etc.
> 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.
no. google did not exist until the late 90s.
various forms of internet email sure did, but most popular mtas of the google era shared very little code with predecessors from the 80s and early 90s (maybe sendmail) and google almost certainly wrote their own from scratch.
but your first point. that an archive browser that looks like gmail is not equivalent to a full tilt email service backend is valid.
I'm not a physicist, but after getting into the rotten fruit this fall, I would bet my friend's horse could launch a space shuttle from her arse. Such a sweet mare, but she has no hesitation blasting Venetian atmosphere right into your face while you're scraping the shit out of her feet. At least she has the decency to make eye contact while doing it
All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system, public health, and GMail what have the Romans ever done for us?
All right, but apart from Google Wave, Google Reader, Google+, Inbox, Stadia, Project Ara, Google Glass, Loon, Picasa, Orkut, Hangouts, Allo, Duo, Google Domains, Google Health, Google Notebook, iGoogle, Knol, Jaiku, Daydream VR, Google Play Music, Nexus, Fusion Tables, Bump, Revolv, Songza, QuickOffice, Meebo, Panoramio, Milk, Schemer, Sparrow, Poly, Tilt Brush, Tour Builder, URL Shortener, Latitude, Spaces, Google Hire, Google Bulletin, Shoelace, and Neighbourly, Android Things, Project Tango, Ara Module Marketplace, Google TV, Nexus Q, Google Play Newsstand, Google Play Movies & TV, Google Podcasts, Google Now, Google Now Launcher, Google Goggles, Gesture Search, MyTracks, Google Play Edition, Android Auto for Phone Screens, All Access, Google Currents, Google SMS Search, Google Cloud Messaging, Android Beam, Androidify, Field Trip, Google Currents, and Google Play Artist Hub, what has Google ever done for us?
I mean the I would really only include the code for things like:
- Fetching email messages
- Parsing email headers
- Mime parsing
- Converting the text of email bodies into UTF-8
- Threading messages
- Eliding reply text
Given that the official story is that pb made the first version of Gmail in a day, does anyone actually believe that he wrote the code for any of those things in a day? If you honestly believe that I have a bridge to sell you.
Wait till you learn that the source code in Chrome also predates the existence of Google.
Maybe that and manipulating technical tools requires far less background knowledge than it did, meaning the definition of “technically inclined” has shifted, as it often does.
"less technically inclined" doesn't mean people can make whatever incorrect claims unchecked like on reddit, where you get banned because you post inconvenient facts in the wrong sub.
And this is exactly why I stopped participating in discussions on reddit and never on LinkedIn. Discussions on HN are so much civil and respectful here
P.S. if the top level comment was indeed posted by a "less technically inclined" person, I hope this is a humbling, positive educational experience, at least that's how I would take it
> 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.
The 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).
I read through 80% of them last night by myself. I mean, I didn't go to bed until 3am but spread across a handful of agents? yeah you could do it in an hour.
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.
> 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.
It’s ok, it follows the rules - I made the comment very thoughtfully and it is indeed substantive. It’s also not snarky and isn’t a shallow internet trope.
Three 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
Make 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.
> - 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.
Anyone reading thru these and filtering out the promotion spam should consider taking a look thru. All his Amazon orders, which mostly are uninteresting sure, but scattered in there are books and eBook purchases dealing with some relevant and interesting-in-context topics.
Indeed. Though the high school uniform thing seems to be a fairly mainstream fetish, with hormones raging at that time in people's lives. But granted, if it's not for your partner or (of age) mistress...
Yes, shoutout to our friend Aidan Dunlap for making an entire interface to see those Amazon orders! It's at https://www.jmail.world/jamazon
Jmail is the only place to see those Amazon order emails by the way! Those are from his Yahoo, which Bloomberg announced in September but Drop Site News actually let us release this month. It all came from https://ddosecrets.com/article/epstein-emails (redactions of the full dataset still taking place)
Awesome work guys. I am envious of anyone involved in the research (well besides those who are actually involved in the discovery process, those people's lives are not fun right now). If you're enlisting help please let me know! Keep up the good work.
Most of the Amazon orders look mundane, mostly books, what is weird is the quantity. It looks like it is all impulse purchases, and I guess that most of these will end up in the trash once it arrives, if it isn't picked up by someone else first.
I would have thought an quasi-billionaire like Epstein would have a personal concierge do the purchases for him. I certainly would if I was that rich. I would certainly not buy a shower head, I would show my concierge a picture of the shower I want and have him appoint a plumber so that I can have my shower the way I want it when I come back the next day. What's the point of being rich if that's to buy shower heads on Amazon?
Plenty of wealthy people are bad at delegating. The part that amazed me is him buying the cheap unpronounceable Amazon brands for medical equipment, like "DEDAKJ Oxygen Concentrator 2-9L/min Adjustable Portable Oxygen Machine for Home and Travel Use". I would've thought a billionaire would be surrounded by the best name brands in everything.
He also seemed bad at delegating his interior decorating to a professional, judging by the photos of his island.
I’ve seen that room before. I found it during an image search. Either this image you are sharing is not really epsteins or the image I found predated the catch of epsteins misdeeds. Or it’s AI/manipulation all the way down. Not sure what to think anymore
It looks pretty anonymous to me - a completely normal shoddy comms rack from the early-mid 2000s. The only real distinguishing feature is the fibre splice/breakout work taped to a bit of plywood at a funny angle, but even that's not so very out of the ordinary.
Perhaps you're confusing it with any of a hundred thousand pictures of similar setups from that era?
No one is going to spend time on this wild goose chase when you're the only person who's ever made this accusation with no proof to back it up and even refuses to present it when pressed.
You added icons and functionality to go to the beginning or end of search/inbox - Something that gmail just has never budged on having and always annoyed me! One of the first things I noticed. I must not be alone on this lol
Thank you! The night before launching the original Jmail we had this hunch that jump-straight-to-end and "random page" would make the site work for people.
Even just setting aside the criminal/salacious side... it is just so interesting to see the connections between the elite. Steve Bannon photographed chilling with Noam Chomsky, such a surprise. God, and Robert Trivers is in there too, eeh.
Bannon for a while was deeply ingrained in Hollywood. He still earns residuals on episodes of Seinfeld [0], and owns the film rights to Michael Lewis' Liars Poker (even supposedly writing a screenplay for it himself) [1].
He was very close to Epstein. So far as I know, the only mention of Bannon at Turning Point USA was a call to release the 12-15 hours of taped media training he gave Epstein in 2019.
correct me please if i am missing something, but i read that Chomsky messages and looks like normal conversations, i mean, surely Epstein offered dark services for some guest, but not for all. Even that conversations looks very smart. Social media people moves in majority cases on morbid assumptions. Correct me please if i am missing something, but Chomsky is a great guy, an one of the greatest minds on earth.
Well you might like Chomsky's ideas but can you say that you really know him? If no, then how can you be so sure of his character? Even if he was not involved in any of Epstein's illegal activities, a leftist individual secretly hanging out with billionaires on a secluded island is not a good look to say the least
I participated on this project, but I'm not the main contributor. In fact, I'm working on running an ML model to get some nice gaussian splat visualizations of some of the relevant images based on the recent release by Apple's model: SHARP. It allows doing inference of a PLY point-cloud based on a single JPG image.
Hopefully I can merge some UI for it soon, but I'm away from my main computer right now.
EDIT: I'm going to text my friend Luke to comment and answer any questions about the project.
EDIT2: I am also happy to expand on the technical details of the project once I get a stable internet connection.
I'm one of the co-creators of Jmail alongside Riley Walz. We launched a Gmail-like view of Epstein's inbox last month. It got millions of page views, tons of really amazing requests to collaborate on making more related data accessible, and even new Yahoo emails that no one else has allowed the public to see.
Yesterday's DOJ drop resulted in this very spontaneous rag-tag team of friends coming to my place in SF and each making their own app in the "Jmail" Suite. Riley and I are pretty shocked by how versatile this parody style is for visualizing Epstein's 20 year digital footprint.
It's been a ton of fun and we're working hard to polish each view here.
Thank you! I tried to optimize scrolling through the photos the most. Avoided any virtualization library, used Cloudflare for image transformations and for caching, etc. The masonry layout and polish you see here is all https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=walz though
Scale of the data behind the service likely contributes. This data is fixed. Therefore it’s easily indexed once into a cache or memory. Your Gmail is ever changing which results in some lost optimization without dramatic cost increase.
How complete is the material? I've seen "experts" in Swedish news paper DN claim so much is censored it looks like a cover up. Has that been your impression too?
1. DOJ (The White House's docs that they were required by law to drop yesterday plus many court documents, videos, and other docs from many news cycles this year)
2. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT (the House Oversight Committee's releases. giant November drop that led to the original Jmail, then some photo drops this month)
3. Yahoo emails (originally sourced by DDoSecrets, then provided to us, redacted and verified by Drop Site News)
There is so much material in HOUSE_OVERSIGHT that never appears in DOJ, and vice versa. And then the Yahoo drop reveals even more new material. It feels like three odd slices of a giant dataset that keeps getting released.
re: people's complaints about yesterday's release having way too many redactions, I have no idea how much they over-redacted. I hear that they will release even more quite soon though.
Re: the DOJ emails prefixed with "EFTA", I have no idea how over-redacted they are. They definitely seem dubious though.
Re: the DDoSecrets emails though (YAHOO dataset), I have more to share.
Drop Site News agreed to give us access to the Yahoo dataset discovered by DDoSecrets, but on the condition that we help redact it. It's a completely unfiltered dataset. It's literally just .eml files for jeeprojects@yahoo.com. It includes many attached documents. There is no illegal imagery, but it has photos of Epstein's extended family (nephews, nieces, etc) and headshots of many models that Epstein's executive assistant would send to him. I was quite shocked that this thing existed.
We built some internal redaction tools that the Drop Site team is now using to comb through all of this. We've released 5 batches of the Yahoo mail now, with the 1k+ Amazon receipts being the most recent.
Unlike the DOJ, we've tried to minimize the ambiguity about what was redacted.
For example: all redacted images are replaced with a Gemini-generated description of that photograph.
Another example: we are aggressively redacting email addresses and phone numbers of normal people to avoid spamming them. Perhaps others would leave it all in, but Riley and I don't want to be responsible for these people's lives getting disrupted by this entire saga. For example, we redacted this guy's email but not his name: https://www.jmail.world/thread/4accfb5f3ed84656e9762740081a4...
Riley and I were not expecting this type of scope when we first dropped Jmail. Jmail is an interesting side project for us, and this new dataset requires full-time attention. Thankfully we have help though. We're happy to take on this responsibility given how helpful, thoughtful and careful both the Drop Site and DDoSecrets team has been here.
Ah I was going to ask about the Yahoo emails.. are those distinct from the cloned Gmail messages or are they in the same inbox on your site?
Has anyone written a parser for the text messages? A messages-like UI to be able to read through all the texts would be super interesting too. The format DOJ released them in is impossible to follow.
Another person made an oddly beautiful ASCII ui for the text messages. All seem to be from HOUSE_OVERSIGHT (we have those plus DOJ, YAHOO. No dedicated text UI from us)
Yes, it has been redacted far in excess of what the law allows, and the material is a tiny fraction of what the administration was required by law to release by this date
It doesn't belong into the Epstein Files, and doesn't need to be censored either, but the way it is framed in the DoJ release implies guilt where there is none.
How can you be sure the image wasn't part of the files collected during investigation? What makes you so sure Epstein didn't have the file saved somewhere on a device, server, or account that was collected?
I don’t think I expressed a particular opinion here, I just stated where the suspicion comes from.
That being said, I think we can demand a level of due diligence from public institutions that entails only censoring actual victims on actual pieces of evidence, instead of mindlessly placing black squares on the faces of news article pictures found on his computer. Nevermind that nobody can explain yet how this particular picture ended up in the grand jury files anyway.
This is the same DOJ that released the edited Epstein jail video as "raw", with the attorney general claiming the missing minute was from how the video system reset for a new day, when they had the actual raw video with the missing minute.
Yes, though that was a different situation. If my wallet goes missing I'm not going to immediately blame a person while previously stole something with no other evidence.
That's not the exact same image, though. It's a separate image, from the same time and place. The one released may have been in Epstein's possession and therefore part of the files. Either some DoJ drone just redacted all children and non-celebrities due to procedure, or it was deliberately done in such a way as to make Clinton and Jackson look suspicious. Whatever the reason, this was not a Getty stock image planted in the files.
I know what picture we're talking about. 1) it's not the same as the Getty stock image everyone seems to mistake it for. 2) we don't know if the redaction is erroneous or intentionally misleading, but either way the non-celebrity faces were redacted even though another image of them exists in the public domain. Probably easier to just apply a blanket policy when handling all these images rather than observing edge cases.
This is incredible. How are you hosting all this? There's got to be considerable cost. Meanwhile, this is a genuinely great way to browse through all these files. Seriously impressive work.
The original site was on Railway and written in Pug! It crashed after Riley's tweet first went viral, then Riley did the heroic work of caching it all with Cloudflare after waking up to the site being down. After millions of unique visitors we racked up about $10 in costs.
This time we switched to Next.js 16 + Vercel, used Cloudflare R2 for asset hosting, and used Neon as the db. R2 has free egress, and Vercel + Next is cheap if cached correctly.
A special someone at Vercel gave us some tips on caching this one earlier today. We started by just using unstable_cache all over the place, and now we're migrating to ISR + full static pre-generation of as many pages as we can via generateStaticParams.
A lot of the files are hosted on Cloudflare so their $0 egress cost helps a lot. Especially given that so many of the files can be considered immutable assets, so we can configure aggressive caching.
I know that Luke was working on stuff so as not to hit the database as much, but I was in the middle of a flight as that was happening so he'll have to come and provide more details.
This is incredibly fascinating, not just because of who he was and the crimes he committed, but to see all this information on a specific person in one place is surreal.
As someone from the other side of the pond, I have to ask: what do people expect from all of this?
It feels like this is a big smoke screen used by the current admin, first to be reelected, and now to distract people from what they are actually doing (like repeating they decreased drugs price by 600%, that they ended dozens of wars while dropping bombs daily all around the World...).
It also looks like it allows everyone to peek in other's people lives, which feels quite disturbing.
Sure, some of them were/are terrible people.
But there's also the victims here.
Furthermore, is it how justice should work?
Share everything to the world, and let everyone make their own judgement based on what they see?
Is there going to be some actual outcome? Both for the victims and for their offenders?
Or is it just a show where everyone can see them as detective/judge?
Just to add a bit more context: after years of trials, one of our former President finally went to jail for a few weeks.
And now, they're invited by media all over the country so they can complain about how unfair it was, they published a book about it, sold in the tens of thousands, their son is the new TV's favorite...
So I'm wondering: is it actual justice at work, or just a distraction while nothing change and nobody is actually held accountable?
They are being forced to release the files by a new law passed by congress. This is malicious compliance and they’re not actually releasing what they’re supposed to be releasing.
Rich people are hiding their crimes against children with corruption. This law seeks to reveal this corruption. Why is that wrong?
The public in this case is effectively a defense attorney waiting for discovery - we only get what the other side determined to be worth providing and catching them breaking the law is extremely difficult.
Very true - the one caveat being that certain people know of the existence of things that should be published - lots of way to trip yourself up and get caught if you’re trying to conceal things or otherwise improperly redact information.
There's the police and the criminal justice system for that.
I suggest you post your e-mail login details and here and a dump of the contents of your phone, then all of HN can all check through and see what crimes you're guilty of.
I'm sure you'll say you haven't committed any crimes, but why should we be expected to believe you if you don't share all your information with the world?
> There's the police and the criminal justice system for that.
Well yes, however there was an orchestrated effort to convince people that the system is not working. That effort was successful enough to generate public interest we observe now. Beyond morbid curiosity, there is a belief that the exposure may force the system to do now what it was supposed to do in the first place
This is all supposedly Epstein's property. Dead people have a very short list of rights or things that resemble rights that belong to their estate. Privacy and protection from slander aren't among those rights. You could argue that digging him up and gratuitously posting pictures of a postmortem would violate the right to dignity for corporeal remains. But apart from that, if you emailed Jeffrey, he has no power to keep that correspondence private.
When you sue someone, you can subpoena for evidence. Any evidence from that presented to the court is then public record. The police and criminal justice system doesn’t usually enforce privacy like that in criminal proceedings.
Are you trying to say that these documents shouldn’t be public because it violates someone’s right to privacy?
But there's no reasonable indication that the person you're replying to has committed any crime, while there is evidence that some of the people on Epstein's list, including Trump, have committed crimes. In fact, Trump made a big deal of asserting this, back when he didn't expect this to blow back on him.
It's not the same to ask for public disclosure for people likely to be involved in a crime, for which there is at least some initial (albeit inconclusive) evidence than it is to ask the same of a random person for which there is no evidence at all.
I would agree that anyone who is specifically named in an Act of Congress requiring that to happen, which Act is then duly signed into law[1], should release their information. That doesn't currently apply to anyone other than the late Jeffrey Epstein, so we are all good.
> Just to add a bit more context: after years of trials, one of our former President finally went to jail for a few weeks. And now, they're invited by media all over the country so they can complain about how unfair it was, they published a book about it, sold in the tens of thousands, their son is the new TV's favorite...
Haha I was wondering where this other side of the pond was. This leaves no doubt. Quelle indignité.
For others: it's Sarkozy they are referring to, who was sentenced to 5 years of prison but spent only 20 days in it. He's free until his next trial. For having colluded with terrorists.
Sarkozy is out because in France you're free until proven guilty, unless you represent a risk to society or have a high risk of fleeing, neither apply to him, hence he's free until the final verdict
The other poster said sarkozy was sentenced to 5 years. How was that not the result of having been found guilty? I understand there are more trials to follow but do not see why that would free him.
You can appeal, and until every legal options have been pursued a verdict is not final. Since you're innocent until proven guilty, and you cannot be guilty untill all options have been pursued, you're free until the appeal has been completed.
It's interesting to see where the "too famous to prosecute" line lies. So far the highest profile casualty seems to have been Prince Andrew - as a result of the files, and NOT as a result of his actual court case with Virginia Giuffre, which he settled before her suicide.
Maybe it's possible. Berlusconi was brought down by his habit of young women eventually hitting one under 18.
When Berlusconi died, the current Italian government declared a national day of mourning broadcasted on national television. Never went to prison, convicted only 1 time for tax fraud, a lot of his quotes and videos are great source of memes that make the younger generations laugh (owning the Milan football helped him to be liked by younger people).
Please American people don't do the same mistakes as we did. It's like watching a remake (or a parody) of the same horror movie.
Epstein was running what he said was legal tax avoidance system for his clients.
I'm not saying they were breaking any laws in it, but Epstein is a dodgy guy (also he used to be involved in IIRC a Ponzi scheme and was previously sacked from a big firm - red flags galore with this guy) and the scheme worked off asset prices and trusts.
If a bunch of billionaires could manipulate asset prices (selling illiquid assets like mansions and artwork between each other and their trusts) I suspect they could really bring down their tax bills. This would be illegal (I think) but you'd need to untangle a large web of transactions to prove it.
Yes. IMHO, the parts that they really don't want to come out are the financial ties. It's the connections of money (and power and influence) that is being covered up, more then the child sex crimes that are now known.
The tax fraud can get a conviction, since there's a paper trail, and juries are more likely to think "yeah this billionaire might not be a monster but they probably cheated in their taxes".
Epstein didn't rape any children, he had a harem of young women. Some of the women were under 18, but all of them were old enough to be held responsible for their part in the crime, that is, being prostitutes. Many even have admitted to comitting "child" sex trafficking by inviting girls from their high schools to be prostitutes.
Sarkozy is free on appeal, not like he was pardoned or found unaccountable
I think your underlying question comes down to a relationship with the media, accountability and prosperity
By distraction, I think that’s media driven, can be ignored. State actions are transparent enough that you dont need the media to tell you what to pay attention to
In some religious dogma, Prosperity is tied to good deeds, conformity to what collaborative for society. With the expected contrary being suffering.
Seen as “Prosperity Preaching” in Christianity, the concept of karma outside of Abrahamic religions. This is a fiction that has never matched the real world so once that expectation is dropped it will be easier to navigate the world. There is no relationship to financial reward from conformity to a social collaborative behavior, in fact its mostly the opposite, maximum extraction is a core tenant of our system and what is incentivized. If the market is interested in something you can earn from it
And this goes finally into the relationship with accountability. The justice system acts on the rails of its own mechanizations. Its a perversion to want that to include total ostracization, total financial distress for an indeterminate time, I actually dont know the limits of what people want. It seems more so related to how it affects poorer people that way while wealthier and savvier people are exempt from distress, but it shouldnt be the case for poorer people either.
> after years of trials, one of our former President finally went to jail for a few weeks. And now, they're invited by media all over the country so they can complain about how unfair it was, they published a book about it, sold in the tens of thousands, their son is the new TV's favorite..
Yeah this is insightful. Another dictator went to jail in 1920s for staging a coup and used that time for writing his manifesto and getting sympathy from his followers. Some times (often these days) politics just lives on a plane outside the justice system. And it is really creepy.
The victims themselves want the files to be released. Also, we all know how terrible politicians are, but the whole of public opinion should be made aware of how low the bar is.
Do you know Berlusconi, from the Italian government? He was the Italian version of Donald Trump, and he was involved in a lot of scandals at the time, including being involved with the mafia and, you guessed it, underage girls.
I think for the duration of this four year term, at the very least, nothing will happen. But there's a bit of hope (possibly cope) that if these people accept an election loss in 2028 and voters keep this anger going, people involved may be charged and imprisoned.
History shows that it never happens in America and politicians always drop the "it's time for our nation to heal" line, but if the pendulum swings as far in the other direction as it did in the 2024 election, maybe things will be different. And the only hope of that happening is for people to stay pissed.
One thing I will say is the outrage about this has lasted longer than I initially imagined. America has had a lot of "this controversy won't be forgotten!" stuff that nobody remembers 2 months later. In contrast, I feel like this has been steadily ramping up and maintaining some degree of inertia for 2 years. Will it burn out by 2028? Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised. It was washed out of the news by trans people playing sports and that was somehow the biggest issue in the world. 2028 will undoubtedly have some weird "problem" that we can't yet imagine.
as history has proceeded these past 10 years, I am pretty confident american voters will have forgotten all about in 2028, assuming they still get to vote by then. Right now, I don't have faith in them to remember the purpose when they reach for the toilet paper roll,once they grab it :-/
> like repeating they decreased drugs price by 600%
The NYT and other media outlets like to point out that this claim is mathematically impossible. However, “cut prices by 600%” is understood perfectly well by most people (but not pedants) to mean “we undid price hikes of 600%.”
I suspect that this phrasing was chosen as a “wedge” to drive home to the MAGA faithful that the news media is biased against them.
Does that logic apply only when the claimed cut is over 100%?
If I advertise that my store "cut prices by 50%" but the prices are actually only 33% lower (which is the same as undoing a 50% price hike), would it be pedantic to call me out on my bullshit?
> Does that logic apply only when the claimed cut is over 100%?
Yes, I’d say.
It’s the same as the informal usage of “X times smaller” to describe scaling by 1/X. The idiom generally isn’t used unless X > 1. (The exception might be when several values of X are reported together. Then one might say “0.74 times smaller” to maintain parallel form with nearby “4 times smaller” and similar claims.)
No, it does not conform. As I wrote earlier, I have not seen that usage for less than 100%. So 600% conforms; 50% does not.
That is, expressions like "twice as slow/thin/short/..." or "2x as slow/thin/short/..." or "200% as slow/thin/short/..." have a well-established usage that is understood to mean "half as fast/thick/tall/..."
But "50% as slow/thin/short/..." or "half as slow/thin/short/..." have no such established usage.
For some evidence to support my claim, please see this 2008 discussion on Language Log:
Since HN has a tendency to trim URLs and might prevent this link from taking you to the relevant portion of a rather lengthy article, I'll quote the salent bits:
"A further complexity: in addition to the N times more/larger than usage, there is also a N times less/lower than [to mean] '1/Nth as much as' usage"
"[About this usage, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage reports that] times has now been used in such constructions for about 300 years, and there is no evidence to suggest that it has ever been misunderstood."
I believe that the history of English language usage is replete with examples such as "X times less than" when X > 1, but similar constructions for X <= 1 do not appear with appreciable frequency.
In any case, I think that continuing our conversation is unlikely to be productive, so this will be my last reply.
I will just say in closing that our conversation is a good example of why the MAGA folks have probably chosen phrasing such as this.
I've had the same exact feeling for a while: several people known to be in the files are not the purest people we know and I'm not sure them being there will have any effect whatsoever. Taking Trump, what would really change to his image? All his supporters are already ok with the stuff he did/said and his opponents are already against him.
All his political/business allies won't easily switch as they stay his connections and money, not his clean image.
It just feels like a real-life reality show to keep the news flowing and people just enough bewildered and curious to keep coming back for more. Basically the perfect material for a while.
Especially with all the hyper redacted parts, groups can start literally reading between the lines and make unfounded allegations to create even more clicks.
I think Trump being shown with underage girls (or irrefutably implicated in pedophilia) would damage his reputation with his MAGA fanbase. It's the one thing they won't forgive him for, if enough evidence is provided. They already clashed over this, with Trump lashing out against his supporters because of this, seemingly the only crack in their unflinching loyalty.
I think it's what happens when you cultivate a conspiratorial fanbase: eventually the conspiracies will mention you.
I’m not so sure. After years of ignoring every other sign, what would it take for them to believe? His suggestive comments about his own daughter on multiple occasions, his opinion of 12-year old Paris Hilton, his mentioning 12 years old as a limit with Howard Stern[1], turning up in beauty pageant changing rooms, the “grab em by the p*ssy” tape, the swerving between Epstein case is a hoax to frame him vs. it’s real but only implicates Democrats.
I think of JD Vance, when Trump’s Epstein birthday card had been described but not released, he scoffed they didn’t provide an image. Weeks later, we had an image released by Congress, so then JD Vance tweaked his arguments a bit but still denies basically everything. The evidence he requested did not change his mind anyway. Trump’s supporters, for the most part, will say it’s AI, faked images, paid liars, mentally ill accusers, Trump haters, fake news, Trump was only there to inform on Democrats, it’s not what it looks like, the media is lying about girls’ birthdates, etc etc before they’ll ever admit he’s a sick man. If they wanted to believe that, the evidence is already there.
Personally I have a fair amount of doubt that he has committed a crime against a minor, but he is obviously lecherous and well below the supposed moral sexual standards of many of his supporters. It should not matter to them whether a 60+ year old married man only peeks and banters about young girls or if he has actually touched them. If they’re still around, it will take a lot to snap them out of it.
[1] I know he didn’t actually say that 13 is okay or whatever, but what kind of pervert or fool jumps all the way down to 12 when asked? Way below the lowest age of consent in the States. This should be disqualifying on the grounds of horrendously bad judgment to phrase it that way in public, let alone what it may or may not reveal about his criminality.
I agree many Trump supporters will be able to spin -- even if just to themselves -- any damning news no matter what (especially in this age of easily spoofed photos and videos) but still, puzzlingly enough, his voting fanbase actually made the Epstein files a thing, so much that he publicly lashed against them when they wouldn't let go. It was the one crack in his armor, the only (mild) falling out with them he's ever had. Do you remember this?
I think Trump made the Epstein conspiracy such a thing, it's now hard to disentangle from the minds of his MAGA supporters. All it takes is for some of his political rivals (from within the party) to fan the flames.
I'm not sure about what Trump actually did, and we have no solid proof. I can only guess, judging from how the man behaves, and his general attitudes toward lying and women.
This is pretty easy to summarize from my point of view.
1) There is 0 non circumstantial evidence that Trump had a sexual encounter with a minor. There is 0 evidence (circumstantial or not) that there is any prepubescent children involved.
2) Calling anyone who voted (past tense) for Trump a "pedophile supporter".
Combining these two things togtheter seems pretty obvious why Maga supporters dismiss most of what the public outrage, in fact they will dig their heels in even harder since the "other side" is just attacking them personally.
Agreed. I would add to the mix, however, that MAGA and adjacent groups made the Epstein scandal a big deal. Remember among them you can count QAnon, the Pizzagate, the people who believe the elections were "stolen", the Capitol stormers, etc. Some of them are conspiracy-oriented people, fueled to rage by conspiracy oriented alt-right influencers. So they are very eager to call others cannibals, traffickers and pedophiles wihout a shred of evidence. It's just when someone they respect is in the eye of the storm that they reel and engage the reality distortion field.
Remember that even less than "circumstantial evidence" is what fuels 90% of Trump's bold assertions. And they lap it up. Even now they are trying to make this about Bill Clinton! (Can you imagine what would have happened if Clinton was Epstein's friend but Trump wasn't? Or if Hillary was in some photos? I can guarantee there'd be no redactions at all).
So now MAGA voters cannot complain when Trump is the target of unconfirmed rumors.
And indeed, even a portion of MAGA is susceptible to this particular scandal: Epstein. They had a minor falling out with their leader over this!
I do agree attacking all of MAGA is a counterproductive tactic though, because it puts them on the defensive. Mounting evidence against Trump without attacking his voters is more sensible.
It does seem like the most significant schism he’s had, with Massie, MTG, and some podcasters etc defecting over this. I may be out-of-date. But I don’t think it’s gone very far though, considering some of these defections are considered to be career suicides, and that he got away with reneging on one of the party’s big bogeymen that just happened to be his former best friend. If this was a big weakness, there would be screams for impeachment and ditching him.
Agreed on the general principle of building your movement on conspiracy theories of the elite and then becoming elite. The situation is even worse for him; he was already friends with the subject of the conspiracy theory long before the public at large even knew about it, and then by some combination of bad luck and hubris he let the party chase the conspiracy. We’ll see if there’s anything bad for him in there that sees the light of day, and what his opposition makes of it.
Yes I‘m also watching with disbelief. Even more so since media attention in the EU about it seems higher than in the US. Although the recent trove I found especially disturbing.
I recently watched a documentary where elites from beginning of the 20th century were also portrayed. Self-portrayed as Philanthropists. Moral bankruptcy became obvious, although in other manifestations such as shooting members of worker unions. And the US government did something in form of the New Deal, splitting monopolies and other policies.
In an optimistic scenario I’d expect something similar. New ways to hold elites accountable and keeping extreme differences in wealth in check.
Decades of unresolved corruption scandals , finally a chance to confirm what we suspected about sleazy and deplorable elites . Slim chances, but what else do we have
The victims themselves were asking for the files to be fully released so that their abusers are held accountable. This was a big "fuck you" to the victims when everything of significance was [REDACTED]
Foreign governments running honeytrap operations on powerful perverts like bill clinton is common knowledge amongst anyone interested in knowing about such things, but some people think it is a super big secret that needs to be revealed to the masses. Thomas Massie for instance. I don’t think it’s antisemitism but I’m pretty sure it’s not because of a sudden concern for teenage prostitution, which is a big ongoing problem that could be addressed by legislators crafting policy if they weren’t so busy slinging mud at each other looking for Epstein photos with their political opponents.
>i want you to realize that that dog that hasn't barked is trump.. virignia spent hours at my house with him,, he has never once been mentioned. police chief. etc. im 75 % there
The cost optimization here is impressive - $10 for millions of visitors using Next.js + Vercel + Cloudflare R2 (free egress).
I'm building an analytics SaaS with a similar stack and this validates our architecture choices. A few questions:
1. How are you handling ISR vs full static generation? You mentioned migrating to generateStaticParams - did you pre-generate all email pages or use on-demand ISR?
2. Did you hit any Vercel function limits with the email processing, or is everything cached aggressively enough that it doesn't matter?
3. R2's free egress is a game-changer - are you using Cloudflare's image transformations or handling resizing client-side?
The caching strategy here is the real MVP. Most people underestimate how far good caching with Next.js can take you before you need Redis or more complex infrastructure.
Most of the mails read like fake ones from a video game. Maybe it's because most of them were written by an older generation who uses more classic letter-style writing.
In general, his emails read like something I've observed people doing IRL; they coax smart people into talking by saying ambiguous, clever sounding things (which are actually nonsense). The actually intelligent person will give them the benefit of doubt by association with their connections, thinking they must be intelligent to have such friends, and assume they misheard or something. Quite surprising how often nonsense like that passes muster. From the bits I've skimmed so far, he looks like a very successful hanger on that leveraged each connection into other ones.
Oh my, I think that’s the most impressive work I’ve seen here on the HN. Very well done! I hope the public would explore the whole thing pretty quickly. Personally, I afraid they, the files, were highly tampered with, so obviously a lot could be hidden. Yet, still, that’s an achievement we have this opportunity to explore the whole thing, I guess. So this project is impressive in many ways. I enjoyed exploring the interface, can’t believe that’s just a clone, not a real Google product!
This project is truly next level rather fascinating. Particularly intriguing is observing JEE's considerable interest regarding human intelligence and artificial intelligence, engaging in discussions on these matters with Chomsky and Marvin Minsky.
Yes, also many were PPM images (or encoded as such) in PDFs and then I used (cheap/light) multimodal LLMs to classify documents from photos. It was surprisingly cheap: <$1 for a few thousand PDFs / Images.
Complete side note but anyone else bothered by how they type? I guess email was being used much like texting here but still. Seems it's not just Epstein either.
> Hi Jeffrey long time now hear don't sweat Patterson was with trump last week small dinner he really would make a good financial steward no agenda woody is busting his ass for him Rudy too wiki leaks tonight on Hillary stopped caring fed wants to raise I guess terrible luck brexit Deutschebank then probably some terror thing smart to be out of it best jonathan
Sorry about that. That Attachments tab shows you literal attachments found in the .eml files from the YAHOO dataset. We have released very few .emls that have attachments though. Expect more and more over time.
Releasing YAHOO responsibly has been time consuming, and we're relying on Drop Site to tackle the redactions. See this post for context.
I understand the desire to make a suite of apps, and to create something cool for people to play with. Is your motivation to involve your creation with this topic specifically because you desire to expose people doing bad things, for the righteousness and morality of such?
Also, do you feel it's more important that the information simply "gets out there" than there exist a coherent set of theses addressing questions like: 1) what was the nature, scope and purpose of the hustle Epstein was fronting/running? 2) Who unequivocally did bad things related to this?
It's not an either or, but right now it appears the topic is data without conclusion.
I think it would be interesting to target an AI at all the data and have it devise a set of theses with support. My feeling is the topic remains in a state of "100% data, 0% conclusions" - which appears to be a way to sate public curiosity while avoiding consequence.
Everytime I watch these private jets and helicopters I wonder why flying economy class has to be so miserable in terms of horizontal, vertical, and leg space.
Michael Tracey, who influenced Hanania, has been on a wild crusade against all Epstein victims and has tried to discredit them.
He also avoids all intelligence connections. He never asks why Epstein got the job at Bear Stearns after leaving as a teacher at an expensive private school where William Barr's father was the headmaster.
He never publishes material like the officially released birthday book entry from Eliot Wolk, trader at Bear Stearns, who confirmed that Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine's father, had an account at Bear Stearns and who teased Epstein about knowing teenage Ghislaine.
So it is now officially confirmed that Epstein knew Robert and Ghislaine much earlier than previously known. And that he knew Robert in the Iran Contra years where Robert was dealing with Adnan Khashoggi.
Tracey and Hanania are doing extremely poor journalistic work here by just focusing on the subset of Epstein victims that were over 18 and took money for the services.
Not reporting at all on the intelligence connections seems suspect as well.
"Especially since the MeToo era began, we’re too credulous about these things. So we have globs of money going to Epstein accusers and their lawyers, while nothing has ever been proved by the standards of the criminal justice system."
Feels like someone with an axe to grind over MeToo turning Jeffrey Epstein of all people (???) into a martyr figure for their pet issue. I don't know why someone would feel compelled to defend him when he's not even alive to thank you for it. The idea that vast amounts of evidence and accusations exist yet nothing bad happened whatsoever is so wildly implausible that I can't grasp the mindset that would lead to openly publishing this perspective on Epstein. We found out from the most recent disclosures that people reported Epstein's inappropriate behavior to the FBI as early as 1996 and it wasn't investigated. One need only look at the amount of detail on his Wikipedia page ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Epstein#First_criminal... ) to get a sense of why accusations against him are at least treated as credible.
I totally get not finding this issue interesting or not caring about what he did to his victims, though I can't really empathize with that position, I understand it. But writing like Hanania's feels beyond the pale and unnecessary.
> nothing has ever been proved by the standards of the criminal justice system
One of my #1 things about reading people's writing is that while everybody is allowed to make mistakes, making this kind of easily-verifiable falsehood a central plank of an argument is discrediting. I honestly don't know why people keep reading him. There are better thinkers and writers who will also tell you that women and people of color are subhuman, he's not the only outlet for that point of view if that's what you're looking to read.
>> nothing has ever been proved by the standards of the criminal justice system
This flabbergasted me at first. Admittedly I had to refresh my memory that he died in jail awaiting trial, but he was still convicted once before that! The fact it was pre-MeToo should make it more damning, per his logic. I guess he’s saying there were no convictions after he became infamous, but there’s a caveat that he died awaiting trial, and that plus the prior conviction just makes this statement seem disingenuous or sloppy at best.
Anyone who writes a newsletter and hosts a broadcast in defense of Epstein's child sex trafficking ring probably should be under some kind of enhanced scrutiny.
Please keep in mind that the Epstein case was argued in open federal court, where he was found guilty and was sentenced. When he died, there were further criminal proceedings pending in two countries.
Hanania's habit of seeing everything in the binary of "woke" vs "not woke" leads him to some incredibly questionable places, as evidenced here. It's "woke" to believe that a convicted child sex trafficker resumed his crimes when released from prison, so Hanania is ideologically forced to take the opposite view that the kerfuffle is mostly hysterics. I honestly don't know why people read him, the quality of thinking and analysis is simply not there. There are much better conservative writers out there who are not currently apologizing for child rapists.
Epstein was definitely guilty of prostituting, at least for himself, girls between 14 and 17 years old. I personally think young women of that age should know better than to be prostitutes for rich guys, and there's no evidence he ever coerced them to do anything. He lured them purely with money and promises of status. There is plenty of testimony of the girls refusing to touch him and they leave, often with money still in-hand and an offer to come back with more girls. They should know they are themselves "child sex traffickers" if they come back with their underaged friends, and they themselves should have been prosecuted along with Epstein and Maxwell.
Teenage girls cannot currently be charged with illegal sex acts when they sleep with older men, but they can be charged with "child sex trafficking" when they offend against other teenage girls.
Searched 'Ehud Barak' in Jmail and the results were disappointing. Which was odd because I recently read many interesting revelations about their relationship and Epstein's ties with Israel gleaned from emails between the two. The emails apparently revealed Epstein's vital role in forging security deals between Israel and the governments of Cote d'Ivore and Mongolia; Others showed Epstein offering to connect Putin with Ehud and trying to hatch a plot to replace Bashar-Al-Assad in Syria with another pro-Russian dictator - but one who would be pro-Israel also (it didn't pan out). And also emails showing Epstein setting up an introduction between Ehud Barak and Peter Thiel. Found none of this in the results.
Turns out most of the above revelations came from Ehud Barak's own hacked email account which were recently leaked by Handala, purportedly a pro-palestinian hacking group. None of the this stuff was covered in any of the mainstream news- Not by NYT , BBC, CNN, nothing. Most of the journalistic coverage had been from DropSite News. And what did The Guardian decide at the time to focus on in it's featured story regarding Epstein? Noam Chomsky.
That pretty much tells you everything you need to know about what Jeffrey Epstein was about and the role of the Governments and Media in all this. I don't believe the truth regarding Epstein will come from the 'Epstein Files', the US government, its allies or the mainstream western press. It will probably have to be from hackers, whistleblowers or the victims willing to break their confidentiality agreements. Or from any dead-mans-switches that the feds haven't manage to find and neutralize.
I saw, but the project has changed since then. There's now Google Photos, improvements to Drive, Jemini (LLM that can assist when understanding the files), and JFlights for flight tracking.
I sent an email to the hn email with more details!
Its cool to see the mail. I now think he did die absolutely.. i had a suspicion he didnt.. but him and chomsky are fucking retarded.. feels like scrolling through twitter for horrible handles trying to sound smart and just lil bitches.. It makes me happier that my work is not very smart, but compared to these guys we arent that bad. I mean he was a geopolitical analyst. he may have been book smart in some sense cause he ordered liebniz at some pont.. but also just sounded like he was super high (probably wasnt)... very surprsing..
How can you post those emails and make a joke out of them - they have this footer that clearly states that if you are not a recipient you must delete the email immediately. Whole business world have this footer for a reason, for situations like this, so you can be sure your emails will not go public.
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.
Thanks! 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) are handling the manual redaction which has been very time consuming, even with tons of AI to help in the background.
Would 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.
Hey, I’d be interested in your thoughts on this, or the key ideas/research results you relied on:
Yes! We used our friends at Reducto (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 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
It inferred and enriched multiple flight cards on JFlights (https://www.jmail.world/flights). I was really shook when I first saw this.
This might be our coolest case study yet. Thanks for the mention!
One 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-e...
promises all the sleuthing excitement of chasing the significance of Donald in a Drawer.
Images were also planted to falsely suggest incriminating evidence.
while 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://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!!
Is it possible that one is an input photo and the other is generative AI output?
As you say, it's not the same photo. If the one in the dump was in Epstein's possession, the reason for the redactions are either that some drone in the DOJ just redacted all children out of habit, or that it was deliberately done in such a way as to frame Clinton. I can't decide which I find more credible.
I think if it hadn't been those adults with the kids an alert staffer might have thought "whose kids are these, these aren't young teenage girls, I better double check" But Michael Jackson, kids, Clinton arms around him, Diana Ross with young male, they're thinking they walked into an armory filled with nothing but smoking guns!
>the reason for the redactions are either that some drone in the DOJ just redacted all children out of habit, or that it was deliberately done in such a way as to frame Clinton
They were supposed to redact all minors, not just "victims".
Everyone is distracted by the redaction policy discussion. The concern is that it is from a charity event that is seemingly unrelated to Epstein.
There’s no need to frame Clinton, there is plenty of evidence he was friends with and spent a lot of time with Epstein.
Similarly situation with Trump, for that matter.
It is perfectly possible, even common, to frame the guilty. It’s easier than finding real evidence.
Sure, but in this case there already is plenty of real evidence.
There is actually no evidence that isn't circumstantial. Or correct me if I'm wrong?
All the evidence I've seen is person A knew or spoke to Epstein. Where is the evidence linking any person to a specific sexual encounter?
I 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
The post you link to is deleted.
I'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
We found that Codex indeed refuses but Claude + Gemini are willing to RAG it
also, shoutout the Jason Liu (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jxnlco) for discovering that one. His turbopuffer-based version of Jemini is coming soon!
Usually 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.
I 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)
Google 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).
But, 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?”
The idea of spending the rest of their life in prison is what stops them
Yeah 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.
Part of the law mandates that all redactions will be listed for Congress within 15 days.
That’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.
People who they think will do this don't get to be redactors. It's all about power and relationships, not technology.
Given how MTG went completely silent despite her high profile platform, I'm guessing the civil (or at this point, royal) servants don't want their families harmed.
I’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.
> 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.
Out 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?
A full featured mailed client is insanely complicated. If you think mail client is just smtp, you probably think word is just text with some styling and excel is just some cells and functions.
I’m sure, buried somewhere deep in Google systems, are vestiges of mail server code originally written in the 80s. But when people use the name Gmail, they are generally referring to the client facing web app, which does not have any such code.
If it exists, it's probably not at all related to Gmail or only used for testing. I don't think Google reuses a lot of third party code in its first party server software.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/18-956_d18f.pdf
I mean it has happened in other Google products...
Even "just smtp" isn't trivial.
It is, or was at least. At the age of 13, I've created one for Windows. It was relatively widely used at the time.
it is not. gmail is 100% from paul bucheit.
He 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.)
If 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?
This is more like using a sauce that someone else made.
> Did they buy some code for Gmail from an older company?
They bought both Deja and Neotonic.
Gmail is not just a mail client.
The spam checker alone is an ton of work. It needs to handle millions of mails for millions of users a day.
Nitpick: pretty sure both of those are in the billions.
Mails could even be in the trillions.
I mean it is so obvious causing me to find the use of the phrase cloned so weird that I feel it needs to be said.
The UI cloning doesn't feel exactly correct either there are things that are slightly off.
But I just find the "cloned" wrong, because obviously you cannot send an email from this account, you cannot log in to the service as Jeffrey Epstein, you cannot delete emails, create alerts based on searches, do actions on selected emails (create new tag, move under that tag)
there are so many functionalities that are not cloned because obviously they could not be cloned because they would make no sense for what this project is. So just the praise for cloning so quickly makes me sort of mad.
You could theoretically make something like this that allowed log in so you got a personalized epstein mails, and then could do all that, and perhaps get more mails sent in as files get released, and perhaps create Google alerts on epstein in the news etc. that would come as mails and maybe the code could put news that came in, into the appropriate the tags etc.
But until that time "cloned" is just very wrong.
For the holidays, they should at least implement a Shockingly Distasteful Jeffrey Epstein Christmas Card Meme Generator.
> 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.
no. google did not exist until the late 90s.
various forms of internet email sure did, but most popular mtas of the google era shared very little code with predecessors from the 80s and early 90s (maybe sendmail) and google almost certainly wrote their own from scratch.
but your first point. that an archive browser that looks like gmail is not equivalent to a full tilt email service backend is valid.
Why stop there, I'm sure you can trace Gmail all the way back to the Roman aqueducts.
The Link Between a Horse's Arse and the Space Shuttle • Physics Forums https://share.google/UnmMwwQv9kyksKhkI
I'm not a physicist, but after getting into the rotten fruit this fall, I would bet my friend's horse could launch a space shuttle from her arse. Such a sweet mare, but she has no hesitation blasting Venetian atmosphere right into your face while you're scraping the shit out of her feet. At least she has the decency to make eye contact while doing it
Tracking-free link: https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/the-link-between-a-hor...
I mean technically if we didn't have Roman aqueducts, would we have Gmail today?
All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system, public health, and GMail what have the Romans ever done for us?
All right, but apart from Google Wave, Google Reader, Google+, Inbox, Stadia, Project Ara, Google Glass, Loon, Picasa, Orkut, Hangouts, Allo, Duo, Google Domains, Google Health, Google Notebook, iGoogle, Knol, Jaiku, Daydream VR, Google Play Music, Nexus, Fusion Tables, Bump, Revolv, Songza, QuickOffice, Meebo, Panoramio, Milk, Schemer, Sparrow, Poly, Tilt Brush, Tour Builder, URL Shortener, Latitude, Spaces, Google Hire, Google Bulletin, Shoelace, and Neighbourly, Android Things, Project Tango, Ara Module Marketplace, Google TV, Nexus Q, Google Play Newsstand, Google Play Movies & TV, Google Podcasts, Google Now, Google Now Launcher, Google Goggles, Gesture Search, MyTracks, Google Play Edition, Android Auto for Phone Screens, All Access, Google Currents, Google SMS Search, Google Cloud Messaging, Android Beam, Androidify, Field Trip, Google Currents, and Google Play Artist Hub, what has Google ever done for us?
I'm a little out of the loop. Are any of those still active projects?
Not a one. ;)
https://killedbygoogle.com/
At least to the Black Death.
I mean the I would really only include the code for things like:
- Fetching email messages
- Parsing email headers
- Mime parsing
- Converting the text of email bodies into UTF-8
- Threading messages
- Eliding reply text
Given that the official story is that pb made the first version of Gmail in a day, does anyone actually believe that he wrote the code for any of those things in a day? If you honestly believe that I have a bridge to sell you.
Wait till you learn that the source code in Chrome also predates the existence of Google.
I don't know if I'm just misremembering but it feels like over the last three years or so the technical knowledge on HN has gone down the toilet.
Could it instead be that less technically inclined people feel more empowered to hang out here?
Maybe that and manipulating technical tools requires far less background knowledge than it did, meaning the definition of “technically inclined” has shifted, as it often does.
"less technically inclined" doesn't mean people can make whatever incorrect claims unchecked like on reddit, where you get banned because you post inconvenient facts in the wrong sub.
And this is exactly why I stopped participating in discussions on reddit and never on LinkedIn. Discussions on HN are so much civil and respectful here
P.S. if the top level comment was indeed posted by a "less technically inclined" person, I hope this is a humbling, positive educational experience, at least that's how I would take it
Most *nix tools have their origins in the ‘70s-80s.
Email as a technology is ancient by today’s standards. SMTP protocol got established in 1982. Even sendmail dates as far back as the ‘70s.
This is a pretty good talk on the history of email: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrGfahzt-4Q
https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20...
Another great article
And the earlier technology of homing pigeons goes back even further
It's Reddit type conversation often
> 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.
That’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”.
No, because the hypothesis is relatively easily falsifiable. This does not hold for conspiracy theories.
Would 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.)
The 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).
What evidence of doing wrong exactly? Is there non circumstantial evidence?
Well there's only 2500 emails here. They definitely had time to sift through these to make sure friends weren't mentioned.
I read through 80% of them last night by myself. I mean, I didn't go to bed until 3am but spread across a handful of agents? yeah you could do it in an hour.
Regardless, it seems like they used the Ctrl-a key to speed up redacting
Yeah, there’s a ton of information. https://epsteinsecrets.com/network is another tool to pursue the data dumps.
> it's likely even the government couldn't sift through all of them
How could you tell?
They also have “promotions” tab listing all promo content. I wonder is this real or mock data.
there'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 [video][1hr12m]
"…there's a lot to sift through…"
A job for an LLM…
"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
> 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?
Please don't be snarky or post shallow internet tropes. We're trying for something else here.
You're welcome, of course, to make your substantive points thoughtfully.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It’s ok, it follows the rules - I made the comment very thoughtfully and it is indeed substantive. It’s also not snarky and isn’t a shallow internet trope.
Interpretations can differ, of course, but I don't think this was a borderline call.
Thinking 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.
To be fair, millions could be hundreds of millions.
Sure. And you are inches tall.
What do these million dollar salary employees at Gmail do?
Three 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
Make 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.
> - 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.
Anyone reading thru these and filtering out the promotion spam should consider taking a look thru. All his Amazon orders, which mostly are uninteresting sure, but scattered in there are books and eBook purchases dealing with some relevant and interesting-in-context topics.
Also, interesting that this one got by him (unopened, unread, filtered from inbox) and the timing of it being near his final arrest (coincidence, but still) https://www.jmail.world/eml/0b80588f551f3d097695f1c9507b6572
https://www.jmail.world/thread/94b742a9202b9782dcfef7d2aaed1... and this https://www.jmail.world/thread/3a2c95682ec730d0062d6d1c5bcf5.... Why did he order these, for who?
He sure bought a lot of books. I found this that is not a book.
>for who
Indeed. Though the high school uniform thing seems to be a fairly mainstream fetish, with hormones raging at that time in people's lives. But granted, if it's not for your partner or (of age) mistress...
Not surprisingly Lolita was one of them:
https://www.jmail.world/search?q=lolita
wow great findings
We're also working to have a RAG system on Jemini so you can talk to the files. many of the files have been embedded into vectors thru turbopuffer.
RAG doesn't have to be vectors. You can also make a regular full text search and it's gonna be RAG.
Will do a shameless plug here of Skald: https://www.useskald.com/
You'll get the whole RAG/context layer going in an hour. Can self-host too if you prefer.
This is really impressive btw!
A little while ago Bloomberg published a list of his books. I created two lists on Goodreads containing these books, using Bloomberg as a source.
2007 -> 2017:
https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/237057.Epstein_s_Library...
2018 -> 2019:
https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/237060.Epstein_s_Library...
You can only add 100 books in a Goodreads list so I had to create two. In the lists I linked back to the original Bloomberg article.
Looks like he didn't order any CS books. Maybe someone should recommend some to him /s
Yes, shoutout to our friend Aidan Dunlap for making an entire interface to see those Amazon orders! It's at https://www.jmail.world/jamazon
Jmail is the only place to see those Amazon order emails by the way! Those are from his Yahoo, which Bloomberg announced in September but Drop Site News actually let us release this month. It all came from https://ddosecrets.com/article/epstein-emails (redactions of the full dataset still taking place)
Awesome work guys. I am envious of anyone involved in the research (well besides those who are actually involved in the discovery process, those people's lives are not fun right now). If you're enlisting help please let me know! Keep up the good work.
Most of the Amazon orders look mundane, mostly books, what is weird is the quantity. It looks like it is all impulse purchases, and I guess that most of these will end up in the trash once it arrives, if it isn't picked up by someone else first.
I would have thought an quasi-billionaire like Epstein would have a personal concierge do the purchases for him. I certainly would if I was that rich. I would certainly not buy a shower head, I would show my concierge a picture of the shower I want and have him appoint a plumber so that I can have my shower the way I want it when I come back the next day. What's the point of being rich if that's to buy shower heads on Amazon?
Plenty of wealthy people are bad at delegating. The part that amazed me is him buying the cheap unpronounceable Amazon brands for medical equipment, like "DEDAKJ Oxygen Concentrator 2-9L/min Adjustable Portable Oxygen Machine for Home and Travel Use". I would've thought a billionaire would be surrounded by the best name brands in everything.
He also seemed bad at delegating his interior decorating to a professional, judging by the photos of his island.
The breathing apparatus makes me think Dennis Hopper as Frank in Blue Velvet. Chills.
His assistant may have used his account to place the order.
Never trust anyone with a network setup like this... https://www.jmail.world/photos?photo=EFTA00002627-0
Probably goes with this six monitor setup.
https://assets.getkino.com/photos/EFTA00000016-0
good catch! :-)
I’ve seen that room before. I found it during an image search. Either this image you are sharing is not really epsteins or the image I found predated the catch of epsteins misdeeds. Or it’s AI/manipulation all the way down. Not sure what to think anymore
>I’ve seen that room before. I found it during an image search.
Source?
I mean, it links to the source: https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%201/EFTA000026...
It looks pretty anonymous to me - a completely normal shoddy comms rack from the early-mid 2000s. The only real distinguishing feature is the fibre splice/breakout work taped to a bit of plywood at a funny angle, but even that's not so very out of the ordinary.
Perhaps you're confusing it with any of a hundred thousand pictures of similar setups from that era?
Nah fam. But considering what Epstein is guilty of I’m not going back to search for it. I’m sure some image search website can help you out
No one is going to spend time on this wild goose chase when you're the only person who's ever made this accusation with no proof to back it up and even refuses to present it when pressed.
>No one
If you cannot be arsed to perform an image search that’s on you. You don’t speak for the rest of HN readers. Have a good one!
Tons of this week's DOJ drop is old photos. These photos of his Upper East Side mansion and his Island estate are well known
We found that Volume 2 and Volume 4 had the most never-before-seen stuff.
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/doj-disclosures/data-set-2-f... https://www.justice.gov/epstein/doj-disclosures/data-set-4-f...
Also, this morning they quietly released volumes 5-7. Will have to find out how much of this is new.
Tinfoil! STAT!
Attack the messenger! GO!
You added icons and functionality to go to the beginning or end of search/inbox - Something that gmail just has never budged on having and always annoyed me! One of the first things I noticed. I must not be alone on this lol
Thank you! The night before launching the original Jmail we had this hunch that jump-straight-to-end and "random page" would make the site work for people.
Even just setting aside the criminal/salacious side... it is just so interesting to see the connections between the elite. Steve Bannon photographed chilling with Noam Chomsky, such a surprise. God, and Robert Trivers is in there too, eeh.
Bannon for a while was deeply ingrained in Hollywood. He still earns residuals on episodes of Seinfeld [0], and owns the film rights to Michael Lewis' Liars Poker (even supposedly writing a screenplay for it himself) [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Bannon#Media_and_investi...
[1] https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/movies/articles/steve-ba...
He was very close to Epstein. So far as I know, the only mention of Bannon at Turning Point USA was a call to release the 12-15 hours of taped media training he gave Epstein in 2019.
> it is just so interesting to see the connections between the elite.
Did you imagine rich and successful, high status people hang out with random wage workers they find in a bar somewhere in the midwest?
correct me please if i am missing something, but i read that Chomsky messages and looks like normal conversations, i mean, surely Epstein offered dark services for some guest, but not for all. Even that conversations looks very smart. Social media people moves in majority cases on morbid assumptions. Correct me please if i am missing something, but Chomsky is a great guy, an one of the greatest minds on earth.
A lot of it feels like mundane "life-living" with some salacious stuff in there.
Well you might like Chomsky's ideas but can you say that you really know him? If no, then how can you be so sure of his character? Even if he was not involved in any of Epstein's illegal activities, a leftist individual secretly hanging out with billionaires on a secluded island is not a good look to say the least
I participated on this project, but I'm not the main contributor. In fact, I'm working on running an ML model to get some nice gaussian splat visualizations of some of the relevant images based on the recent release by Apple's model: SHARP. It allows doing inference of a PLY point-cloud based on a single JPG image.
Hopefully I can merge some UI for it soon, but I'm away from my main computer right now.
EDIT: I'm going to text my friend Luke to comment and answer any questions about the project.
EDIT2: I am also happy to expand on the technical details of the project once I get a stable internet connection.
What benefit do you get from the splat-ification? Surely any relevant details are visible in the original jpegs?
Yes, thanks Diego! Really excited about this.
I'm one of the co-creators of Jmail alongside Riley Walz. We launched a Gmail-like view of Epstein's inbox last month. It got millions of page views, tons of really amazing requests to collaborate on making more related data accessible, and even new Yahoo emails that no one else has allowed the public to see.
Yesterday's DOJ drop resulted in this very spontaneous rag-tag team of friends coming to my place in SF and each making their own app in the "Jmail" Suite. Riley and I are pretty shocked by how versatile this parody style is for visualizing Epstein's 20 year digital footprint.
It's been a ton of fun and we're working hard to polish each view here.
Why does this site work better on mobile than the real google suite. Funny stuff
Thank you! I tried to optimize scrolling through the photos the most. Avoided any virtualization library, used Cloudflare for image transformations and for caching, etc. The masonry layout and polish you see here is all https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=walz though
Specifically at https://www.jmail.world/photos
Scale of the data behind the service likely contributes. This data is fixed. Therefore it’s easily indexed once into a cache or memory. Your Gmail is ever changing which results in some lost optimization without dramatic cost increase.
Hey OP, just FYI "in lieu of" means "instead of".
You probably meant to use "in light of"
In the absence of
How complete is the material? I've seen "experts" in Swedish news paper DN claim so much is censored it looks like a cover up. Has that been your impression too?
We have three datasets in Jmail now:
1. DOJ (The White House's docs that they were required by law to drop yesterday plus many court documents, videos, and other docs from many news cycles this year)
2. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT (the House Oversight Committee's releases. giant November drop that led to the original Jmail, then some photo drops this month)
3. Yahoo emails (originally sourced by DDoSecrets, then provided to us, redacted and verified by Drop Site News)
There is so much material in HOUSE_OVERSIGHT that never appears in DOJ, and vice versa. And then the Yahoo drop reveals even more new material. It feels like three odd slices of a giant dataset that keeps getting released.
re: people's complaints about yesterday's release having way too many redactions, I have no idea how much they over-redacted. I hear that they will release even more quite soon though.
Why and how is the data from DDoSecrets redacted?
Do you have a page about each dataset you're sourcing and the background on them like your provide here?
The "EFTA00000468" saga has me distrusting the authenticity of most of these datasets.
Re: the DOJ emails prefixed with "EFTA", I have no idea how over-redacted they are. They definitely seem dubious though.
Re: the DDoSecrets emails though (YAHOO dataset), I have more to share.
Drop Site News agreed to give us access to the Yahoo dataset discovered by DDoSecrets, but on the condition that we help redact it. It's a completely unfiltered dataset. It's literally just .eml files for jeeprojects@yahoo.com. It includes many attached documents. There is no illegal imagery, but it has photos of Epstein's extended family (nephews, nieces, etc) and headshots of many models that Epstein's executive assistant would send to him. I was quite shocked that this thing existed.
We built some internal redaction tools that the Drop Site team is now using to comb through all of this. We've released 5 batches of the Yahoo mail now, with the 1k+ Amazon receipts being the most recent.
A few thoughts on how we do redaction are here: https://www.jmail.world/about.
Unlike the DOJ, we've tried to minimize the ambiguity about what was redacted.
For example: all redacted images are replaced with a Gemini-generated description of that photograph.
Another example: we are aggressively redacting email addresses and phone numbers of normal people to avoid spamming them. Perhaps others would leave it all in, but Riley and I don't want to be responsible for these people's lives getting disrupted by this entire saga. For example, we redacted this guy's email but not his name: https://www.jmail.world/thread/4accfb5f3ed84656e9762740081a4...
Riley and I were not expecting this type of scope when we first dropped Jmail. Jmail is an interesting side project for us, and this new dataset requires full-time attention. Thankfully we have help though. We're happy to take on this responsibility given how helpful, thoughtful and careful both the Drop Site and DDoSecrets team has been here.
I appreciate the links and transparency. Answers a lot of my questions. Thanks
Ah I was going to ask about the Yahoo emails.. are those distinct from the cloned Gmail messages or are they in the same inbox on your site?
Has anyone written a parser for the text messages? A messages-like UI to be able to read through all the texts would be super interesting too. The format DOJ released them in is impossible to follow.
big motivation for the whole project is to help structure the mess that was released
Another person made an oddly beautiful ASCII ui for the text messages. All seem to be from HOUSE_OVERSIGHT (we have those plus DOJ, YAHOO. No dedicated text UI from us)
https://michelcrypt4d4mus.github.io/epstein_text_messages/
He also shouted us out last month which was very kind of him
Yes, it has been redacted far in excess of what the law allows, and the material is a tiny fraction of what the administration was required by law to release by this date
Images were also planted that were not part of the files.
Planted by whom? That were not part of the files? That seems dubious at best. What is your source? It doesn't even make sense.
There is a picture of Bill Clinton with Michael Jackson and Diana Ross that was just publicly available before: https://www.threads.com/@meidastouch/post/DSfEKJslM1H
It doesn't belong into the Epstein Files, and doesn't need to be censored either, but the way it is framed in the DoJ release implies guilt where there is none.
How can you be sure the image wasn't part of the files collected during investigation? What makes you so sure Epstein didn't have the file saved somewhere on a device, server, or account that was collected?
I don’t think I expressed a particular opinion here, I just stated where the suspicion comes from.
That being said, I think we can demand a level of due diligence from public institutions that entails only censoring actual victims on actual pieces of evidence, instead of mindlessly placing black squares on the faces of news article pictures found on his computer. Nevermind that nobody can explain yet how this particular picture ended up in the grand jury files anyway.
This is the same DOJ that released the edited Epstein jail video as "raw", with the attorney general claiming the missing minute was from how the video system reset for a new day, when they had the actual raw video with the missing minute.
Yes, though that was a different situation. If my wallet goes missing I'm not going to immediately blame a person while previously stole something with no other evidence.
Makes sense if you are a criminal.
Surely you can link me to the exact "planted" images you are talking about...
who planted them?
https://bsky.app/profile/meidastouch.com/post/3mag7myutmc2d
Here's at least one notable image.
That's not the exact same image, though. It's a separate image, from the same time and place. The one released may have been in Epstein's possession and therefore part of the files. Either some DoJ drone just redacted all children and non-celebrities due to procedure, or it was deliberately done in such a way as to make Clinton and Jackson look suspicious. Whatever the reason, this was not a Getty stock image planted in the files.
You can see the erroneously redacted image here: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8r38ne1x2mo
I know what picture we're talking about. 1) it's not the same as the Getty stock image everyone seems to mistake it for. 2) we don't know if the redaction is erroneous or intentionally misleading, but either way the non-celebrity faces were redacted even though another image of them exists in the public domain. Probably easier to just apply a blanket policy when handling all these images rather than observing edge cases.
The redaction is a distraction. The concern is that it is from a charity event that is seemingly unrelated to Epstein
If Epstein had the photo in his possession, then that would explain why it's there!
It wasn’t erroneous. The DoJ said they were redacting the faces of all non-celebrity women and children under the presumption they could be victims.
In that case it makes perfect sense
You don't have to lean on "experts" (or experts) or people at HN find these things out: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-08-01/epstei...
The most incriminating stuff isn't censored, it's been completely destroyed by now
This is incredible. How are you hosting all this? There's got to be considerable cost. Meanwhile, this is a genuinely great way to browse through all these files. Seriously impressive work.
Thank you!
The original site was on Railway and written in Pug! It crashed after Riley's tweet first went viral, then Riley did the heroic work of caching it all with Cloudflare after waking up to the site being down. After millions of unique visitors we racked up about $10 in costs.
This time we switched to Next.js 16 + Vercel, used Cloudflare R2 for asset hosting, and used Neon as the db. R2 has free egress, and Vercel + Next is cheap if cached correctly.
A special someone at Vercel gave us some tips on caching this one earlier today. We started by just using unstable_cache all over the place, and now we're migrating to ISR + full static pre-generation of as many pages as we can via generateStaticParams.
A lot of the files are hosted on Cloudflare so their $0 egress cost helps a lot. Especially given that so many of the files can be considered immutable assets, so we can configure aggressive caching.
I know that Luke was working on stuff so as not to hit the database as much, but I was in the middle of a flight as that was happening so he'll have to come and provide more details.
This is incredibly fascinating, not just because of who he was and the crimes he committed, but to see all this information on a specific person in one place is surreal.
As someone from the other side of the pond, I have to ask: what do people expect from all of this?
It feels like this is a big smoke screen used by the current admin, first to be reelected, and now to distract people from what they are actually doing (like repeating they decreased drugs price by 600%, that they ended dozens of wars while dropping bombs daily all around the World...).
It also looks like it allows everyone to peek in other's people lives, which feels quite disturbing. Sure, some of them were/are terrible people. But there's also the victims here. Furthermore, is it how justice should work? Share everything to the world, and let everyone make their own judgement based on what they see?
Is there going to be some actual outcome? Both for the victims and for their offenders?
Or is it just a show where everyone can see them as detective/judge?
Just to add a bit more context: after years of trials, one of our former President finally went to jail for a few weeks. And now, they're invited by media all over the country so they can complain about how unfair it was, they published a book about it, sold in the tens of thousands, their son is the new TV's favorite...
So I'm wondering: is it actual justice at work, or just a distraction while nothing change and nobody is actually held accountable?
They are being forced to release the files by a new law passed by congress. This is malicious compliance and they’re not actually releasing what they’re supposed to be releasing.
Rich people are hiding their crimes against children with corruption. This law seeks to reveal this corruption. Why is that wrong?
Exactly.
>Share everything to the world, and let everyone make their own judgement based on what they see?
What's the alternative to this? They don't share all the information with the world and we're expected to believe their evaluation of the evidence?
We have to believe their evaluation no matter what, they're only releasing what they decide to release and can redact along the way.
Only certain redactions are allowed under this law, so it’s not so cut and dry. There is an enforcement mechanism, tbd if it actually gets used.
The public in this case is effectively a defense attorney waiting for discovery - we only get what the other side determined to be worth providing and catching them breaking the law is extremely difficult.
Very true - the one caveat being that certain people know of the existence of things that should be published - lots of way to trip yourself up and get caught if you’re trying to conceal things or otherwise improperly redact information.
I certainly don't believe their evaluation.
The law specifies which redactions are legal. The enforcement mechanism, IIRC, comes through obstruction.
There's the police and the criminal justice system for that.
I suggest you post your e-mail login details and here and a dump of the contents of your phone, then all of HN can all check through and see what crimes you're guilty of.
I'm sure you'll say you haven't committed any crimes, but why should we be expected to believe you if you don't share all your information with the world?
> There's the police and the criminal justice system for that.
Well yes, however there was an orchestrated effort to convince people that the system is not working. That effort was successful enough to generate public interest we observe now. Beyond morbid curiosity, there is a belief that the exposure may force the system to do now what it was supposed to do in the first place
This is all supposedly Epstein's property. Dead people have a very short list of rights or things that resemble rights that belong to their estate. Privacy and protection from slander aren't among those rights. You could argue that digging him up and gratuitously posting pictures of a postmortem would violate the right to dignity for corporeal remains. But apart from that, if you emailed Jeffrey, he has no power to keep that correspondence private.
When you sue someone, you can subpoena for evidence. Any evidence from that presented to the court is then public record. The police and criminal justice system doesn’t usually enforce privacy like that in criminal proceedings.
Are you trying to say that these documents shouldn’t be public because it violates someone’s right to privacy?
But there's no reasonable indication that the person you're replying to has committed any crime, while there is evidence that some of the people on Epstein's list, including Trump, have committed crimes. In fact, Trump made a big deal of asserting this, back when he didn't expect this to blow back on him.
It's not the same to ask for public disclosure for people likely to be involved in a crime, for which there is at least some initial (albeit inconclusive) evidence than it is to ask the same of a random person for which there is no evidence at all.
I would agree that anyone who is specifically named in an Act of Congress requiring that to happen, which Act is then duly signed into law[1], should release their information. That doesn't currently apply to anyone other than the late Jeffrey Epstein, so we are all good.
1 - https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/4405
> Just to add a bit more context: after years of trials, one of our former President finally went to jail for a few weeks. And now, they're invited by media all over the country so they can complain about how unfair it was, they published a book about it, sold in the tens of thousands, their son is the new TV's favorite...
Haha I was wondering where this other side of the pond was. This leaves no doubt. Quelle indignité.
For others: it's Sarkozy they are referring to, who was sentenced to 5 years of prison but spent only 20 days in it. He's free until his next trial. For having colluded with terrorists.
Sarkozy is out because in France you're free until proven guilty, unless you represent a risk to society or have a high risk of fleeing, neither apply to him, hence he's free until the final verdict
The other poster said sarkozy was sentenced to 5 years. How was that not the result of having been found guilty? I understand there are more trials to follow but do not see why that would free him.
Because you can appeal a decision, and a verdict isn't final until every legal options have been pursued, appeal being one of them
It's simple really, but if course it's not as outrageous and can't be used as rage bait
Wait, in France the sentencing is done before trial? Why would he already be sentenced to 5 years without first being tried or convicted?
You can appeal, and until every legal options have been pursued a verdict is not final. Since you're innocent until proven guilty, and you cannot be guilty untill all options have been pursued, you're free until the appeal has been completed.
There was a special law (that his party voted for btw) that added sentencing enhancements for the specific crime he did iirc
It's surprisingly often the case that criminals assume everyone else is doing what they're doing, and want harsh punishments for it.
(see also: the rates of homosexuality among homophobes)
No, he was convicted, put in prison, appealed the verdict and was released after 20 days waiting for the next trial
Sarkozy is the whiniest bitch imaginable, and then he even has the gall to write a book about his prison experience.
Someone wrote in Le Monde, "it's like a man writing a feminist essay because he emptied the dish washer once", and that sums it up pretty well.
It's interesting to see where the "too famous to prosecute" line lies. So far the highest profile casualty seems to have been Prince Andrew - as a result of the files, and NOT as a result of his actual court case with Virginia Giuffre, which he settled before her suicide.
Maybe it's possible. Berlusconi was brought down by his habit of young women eventually hitting one under 18.
When Berlusconi died, the current Italian government declared a national day of mourning broadcasted on national television. Never went to prison, convicted only 1 time for tax fraud, a lot of his quotes and videos are great source of memes that make the younger generations laugh (owning the Milan football helped him to be liked by younger people).
Please American people don't do the same mistakes as we did. It's like watching a remake (or a parody) of the same horror movie.
There needs to be a RICO case on the entire criminal abuse network which operated as an open secret for over three decades.
Andrew Windsor needs to be extradited to the US and face trial.
We need a referendum about whether we want child rape to be a tool of US policy. I say no.
> Andrew Windsor needs to be extradited to the US and face trial.
Reciprocity is a thing...
Yes! I don't understand how any American can support this kind of hypocrisy. For those who didn't know
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Harry_Dunn
I want to see a tax audit.
Epstein was running what he said was legal tax avoidance system for his clients.
I'm not saying they were breaking any laws in it, but Epstein is a dodgy guy (also he used to be involved in IIRC a Ponzi scheme and was previously sacked from a big firm - red flags galore with this guy) and the scheme worked off asset prices and trusts.
If a bunch of billionaires could manipulate asset prices (selling illiquid assets like mansions and artwork between each other and their trusts) I suspect they could really bring down their tax bills. This would be illegal (I think) but you'd need to untangle a large web of transactions to prove it.
> I want to see a tax audit.
Yes. IMHO, the parts that they really don't want to come out are the financial ties. It's the connections of money (and power and influence) that is being covered up, more then the child sex crimes that are now known.
The tax fraud can get a conviction, since there's a paper trail, and juries are more likely to think "yeah this billionaire might not be a monster but they probably cheated in their taxes".
Epstein didn't rape any children, he had a harem of young women. Some of the women were under 18, but all of them were old enough to be held responsible for their part in the crime, that is, being prostitutes. Many even have admitted to comitting "child" sex trafficking by inviting girls from their high schools to be prostitutes.
Now first of all, women below the age of 18 are children. Feels strange to actually having to spell this out, but okay.
More importantly, you seem to know an awful lot more than anybody else right now, or how would you be so certain?
Sarkozy is free on appeal, not like he was pardoned or found unaccountable
I think your underlying question comes down to a relationship with the media, accountability and prosperity
By distraction, I think that’s media driven, can be ignored. State actions are transparent enough that you dont need the media to tell you what to pay attention to
In some religious dogma, Prosperity is tied to good deeds, conformity to what collaborative for society. With the expected contrary being suffering.
Seen as “Prosperity Preaching” in Christianity, the concept of karma outside of Abrahamic religions. This is a fiction that has never matched the real world so once that expectation is dropped it will be easier to navigate the world. There is no relationship to financial reward from conformity to a social collaborative behavior, in fact its mostly the opposite, maximum extraction is a core tenant of our system and what is incentivized. If the market is interested in something you can earn from it
And this goes finally into the relationship with accountability. The justice system acts on the rails of its own mechanizations. Its a perversion to want that to include total ostracization, total financial distress for an indeterminate time, I actually dont know the limits of what people want. It seems more so related to how it affects poorer people that way while wealthier and savvier people are exempt from distress, but it shouldnt be the case for poorer people either.
> after years of trials, one of our former President finally went to jail for a few weeks. And now, they're invited by media all over the country so they can complain about how unfair it was, they published a book about it, sold in the tens of thousands, their son is the new TV's favorite..
Yeah this is insightful. Another dictator went to jail in 1920s for staging a coup and used that time for writing his manifesto and getting sympathy from his followers. Some times (often these days) politics just lives on a plane outside the justice system. And it is really creepy.
The victims themselves want the files to be released. Also, we all know how terrible politicians are, but the whole of public opinion should be made aware of how low the bar is.
Do you know Berlusconi, from the Italian government? He was the Italian version of Donald Trump, and he was involved in a lot of scandals at the time, including being involved with the mafia and, you guessed it, underage girls.
I think for the duration of this four year term, at the very least, nothing will happen. But there's a bit of hope (possibly cope) that if these people accept an election loss in 2028 and voters keep this anger going, people involved may be charged and imprisoned.
History shows that it never happens in America and politicians always drop the "it's time for our nation to heal" line, but if the pendulum swings as far in the other direction as it did in the 2024 election, maybe things will be different. And the only hope of that happening is for people to stay pissed.
One thing I will say is the outrage about this has lasted longer than I initially imagined. America has had a lot of "this controversy won't be forgotten!" stuff that nobody remembers 2 months later. In contrast, I feel like this has been steadily ramping up and maintaining some degree of inertia for 2 years. Will it burn out by 2028? Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised. It was washed out of the news by trans people playing sports and that was somehow the biggest issue in the world. 2028 will undoubtedly have some weird "problem" that we can't yet imagine.
as history has proceeded these past 10 years, I am pretty confident american voters will have forgotten all about in 2028, assuming they still get to vote by then. Right now, I don't have faith in them to remember the purpose when they reach for the toilet paper roll,once they grab it :-/
"accept election loss" is a wild string of words, but such are th etimes we live in.
Regarding this error:
> like repeating they decreased drugs price by 600%
The NYT and other media outlets like to point out that this claim is mathematically impossible. However, “cut prices by 600%” is understood perfectly well by most people (but not pedants) to mean “we undid price hikes of 600%.”
I suspect that this phrasing was chosen as a “wedge” to drive home to the MAGA faithful that the news media is biased against them.
Does that logic apply only when the claimed cut is over 100%?
If I advertise that my store "cut prices by 50%" but the prices are actually only 33% lower (which is the same as undoing a 50% price hike), would it be pedantic to call me out on my bullshit?
> Does that logic apply only when the claimed cut is over 100%?
Yes, I’d say.
It’s the same as the informal usage of “X times smaller” to describe scaling by 1/X. The idiom generally isn’t used unless X > 1. (The exception might be when several values of X are reported together. Then one might say “0.74 times smaller” to maintain parallel form with nearby “4 times smaller” and similar claims.)
You ignored the 2nd part of their message, imagine this:
> We cut prices by 50%! Before $30, now $20
Would it be pedantic to call that price cut bullshit?
Sorry, I thought that my answer to the second question was implied by my answer to the first question.
To answer your question, no, it would not be pedantic to question that claim. It conforms to no common usage that I am aware of.
> It conforms to no common usage that I am aware of.
It conforms to:
> “cut prices by 600%” is understood perfectly well by most people (but not pedants) to mean “we undid price hikes of 600%.”
which I agree is no common usage that I am aware of
No, it does not conform. As I wrote earlier, I have not seen that usage for less than 100%. So 600% conforms; 50% does not.
That is, expressions like "twice as slow/thin/short/..." or "2x as slow/thin/short/..." or "200% as slow/thin/short/..." have a well-established usage that is understood to mean "half as fast/thick/tall/..."
But "50% as slow/thin/short/..." or "half as slow/thin/short/..." have no such established usage.
For some evidence to support my claim, please see this 2008 discussion on Language Log:
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=463#:~:text=A%20fur...
Since HN has a tendency to trim URLs and might prevent this link from taking you to the relevant portion of a rather lengthy article, I'll quote the salent bits:
"A further complexity: in addition to the N times more/larger than usage, there is also a N times less/lower than [to mean] '1/Nth as much as' usage"
"[About this usage, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage reports that] times has now been used in such constructions for about 300 years, and there is no evidence to suggest that it has ever been misunderstood."
> I have not seen that usage for less than 100%. So 600% conforms; 50% does not.
> For some evidence to support my claim
Please note that the 2008 discussion you linked does not support your claim in any way, so 50% does conform.
I guess we will have to agree to disagree.
I believe that the history of English language usage is replete with examples such as "X times less than" when X > 1, but similar constructions for X <= 1 do not appear with appreciable frequency.
In any case, I think that continuing our conversation is unlikely to be productive, so this will be my last reply.
I will just say in closing that our conversation is a good example of why the MAGA folks have probably chosen phrasing such as this.
To be fair our conversation can be summarized as:
> only pedants misunderstand this, here's a 2 decade old source that doesn't support my claim, I rather not continue the conversation
so it was never meant to be productive
I've had the same exact feeling for a while: several people known to be in the files are not the purest people we know and I'm not sure them being there will have any effect whatsoever. Taking Trump, what would really change to his image? All his supporters are already ok with the stuff he did/said and his opponents are already against him.
All his political/business allies won't easily switch as they stay his connections and money, not his clean image.
It just feels like a real-life reality show to keep the news flowing and people just enough bewildered and curious to keep coming back for more. Basically the perfect material for a while.
Especially with all the hyper redacted parts, groups can start literally reading between the lines and make unfounded allegations to create even more clicks.
I think Trump being shown with underage girls (or irrefutably implicated in pedophilia) would damage his reputation with his MAGA fanbase. It's the one thing they won't forgive him for, if enough evidence is provided. They already clashed over this, with Trump lashing out against his supporters because of this, seemingly the only crack in their unflinching loyalty.
I think it's what happens when you cultivate a conspiratorial fanbase: eventually the conspiracies will mention you.
I’m not so sure. After years of ignoring every other sign, what would it take for them to believe? His suggestive comments about his own daughter on multiple occasions, his opinion of 12-year old Paris Hilton, his mentioning 12 years old as a limit with Howard Stern[1], turning up in beauty pageant changing rooms, the “grab em by the p*ssy” tape, the swerving between Epstein case is a hoax to frame him vs. it’s real but only implicates Democrats.
I think of JD Vance, when Trump’s Epstein birthday card had been described but not released, he scoffed they didn’t provide an image. Weeks later, we had an image released by Congress, so then JD Vance tweaked his arguments a bit but still denies basically everything. The evidence he requested did not change his mind anyway. Trump’s supporters, for the most part, will say it’s AI, faked images, paid liars, mentally ill accusers, Trump haters, fake news, Trump was only there to inform on Democrats, it’s not what it looks like, the media is lying about girls’ birthdates, etc etc before they’ll ever admit he’s a sick man. If they wanted to believe that, the evidence is already there.
Personally I have a fair amount of doubt that he has committed a crime against a minor, but he is obviously lecherous and well below the supposed moral sexual standards of many of his supporters. It should not matter to them whether a 60+ year old married man only peeks and banters about young girls or if he has actually touched them. If they’re still around, it will take a lot to snap them out of it.
[1] I know he didn’t actually say that 13 is okay or whatever, but what kind of pervert or fool jumps all the way down to 12 when asked? Way below the lowest age of consent in the States. This should be disqualifying on the grounds of horrendously bad judgment to phrase it that way in public, let alone what it may or may not reveal about his criminality.
I agree many Trump supporters will be able to spin -- even if just to themselves -- any damning news no matter what (especially in this age of easily spoofed photos and videos) but still, puzzlingly enough, his voting fanbase actually made the Epstein files a thing, so much that he publicly lashed against them when they wouldn't let go. It was the one crack in his armor, the only (mild) falling out with them he's ever had. Do you remember this?
I think Trump made the Epstein conspiracy such a thing, it's now hard to disentangle from the minds of his MAGA supporters. All it takes is for some of his political rivals (from within the party) to fan the flames.
I'm not sure about what Trump actually did, and we have no solid proof. I can only guess, judging from how the man behaves, and his general attitudes toward lying and women.
This is pretty easy to summarize from my point of view.
1) There is 0 non circumstantial evidence that Trump had a sexual encounter with a minor. There is 0 evidence (circumstantial or not) that there is any prepubescent children involved.
2) Calling anyone who voted (past tense) for Trump a "pedophile supporter".
Combining these two things togtheter seems pretty obvious why Maga supporters dismiss most of what the public outrage, in fact they will dig their heels in even harder since the "other side" is just attacking them personally.
Agreed. I would add to the mix, however, that MAGA and adjacent groups made the Epstein scandal a big deal. Remember among them you can count QAnon, the Pizzagate, the people who believe the elections were "stolen", the Capitol stormers, etc. Some of them are conspiracy-oriented people, fueled to rage by conspiracy oriented alt-right influencers. So they are very eager to call others cannibals, traffickers and pedophiles wihout a shred of evidence. It's just when someone they respect is in the eye of the storm that they reel and engage the reality distortion field.
Remember that even less than "circumstantial evidence" is what fuels 90% of Trump's bold assertions. And they lap it up. Even now they are trying to make this about Bill Clinton! (Can you imagine what would have happened if Clinton was Epstein's friend but Trump wasn't? Or if Hillary was in some photos? I can guarantee there'd be no redactions at all).
So now MAGA voters cannot complain when Trump is the target of unconfirmed rumors.
And indeed, even a portion of MAGA is susceptible to this particular scandal: Epstein. They had a minor falling out with their leader over this!
I do agree attacking all of MAGA is a counterproductive tactic though, because it puts them on the defensive. Mounting evidence against Trump without attacking his voters is more sensible.
It does seem like the most significant schism he’s had, with Massie, MTG, and some podcasters etc defecting over this. I may be out-of-date. But I don’t think it’s gone very far though, considering some of these defections are considered to be career suicides, and that he got away with reneging on one of the party’s big bogeymen that just happened to be his former best friend. If this was a big weakness, there would be screams for impeachment and ditching him.
Agreed on the general principle of building your movement on conspiracy theories of the elite and then becoming elite. The situation is even worse for him; he was already friends with the subject of the conspiracy theory long before the public at large even knew about it, and then by some combination of bad luck and hubris he let the party chase the conspiracy. We’ll see if there’s anything bad for him in there that sees the light of day, and what his opposition makes of it.
Yes I‘m also watching with disbelief. Even more so since media attention in the EU about it seems higher than in the US. Although the recent trove I found especially disturbing.
I recently watched a documentary where elites from beginning of the 20th century were also portrayed. Self-portrayed as Philanthropists. Moral bankruptcy became obvious, although in other manifestations such as shooting members of worker unions. And the US government did something in form of the New Deal, splitting monopolies and other policies.
In an optimistic scenario I’d expect something similar. New ways to hold elites accountable and keeping extreme differences in wealth in check.
Decades of unresolved corruption scandals , finally a chance to confirm what we suspected about sleazy and deplorable elites . Slim chances, but what else do we have
Thanks for writing this. I also feel disturbing such morbid outlook to someone’s private digital life.
The victims themselves were asking for the files to be fully released so that their abusers are held accountable. This was a big "fuck you" to the victims when everything of significance was [REDACTED]
Foreign governments running honeytrap operations on powerful perverts like bill clinton is common knowledge amongst anyone interested in knowing about such things, but some people think it is a super big secret that needs to be revealed to the masses. Thomas Massie for instance. I don’t think it’s antisemitism but I’m pretty sure it’s not because of a sudden concern for teenage prostitution, which is a big ongoing problem that could be addressed by legislators crafting policy if they weren’t so busy slinging mud at each other looking for Epstein photos with their political opponents.
Great project, thanks for building it
>i want you to realize that that dog that hasn't barked is trump.. virignia spent hours at my house with him,, he has never once been mentioned. police chief. etc. im 75 % there
Hooo boy
That's definitely more than 15 GB of free space given by Google! Great work!
gaussian splats alone are >500GBs lol
(lot of bad quality ones though)
Can you add a “Trash” folder with the documents that have been unpublished?
The cost optimization here is impressive - $10 for millions of visitors using Next.js + Vercel + Cloudflare R2 (free egress).
I'm building an analytics SaaS with a similar stack and this validates our architecture choices. A few questions:
1. How are you handling ISR vs full static generation? You mentioned migrating to generateStaticParams - did you pre-generate all email pages or use on-demand ISR?
2. Did you hit any Vercel function limits with the email processing, or is everything cached aggressively enough that it doesn't matter?
3. R2's free egress is a game-changer - are you using Cloudflare's image transformations or handling resizing client-side?
The caching strategy here is the real MVP. Most people underestimate how far good caching with Next.js can take you before you need Redis or more complex infrastructure.
This is going to spin out of control for those desperate not to have their details released
It was stupid to accept the gift of young women
Stupid to promise to release the data
Really stupid to partially release
Unfathomably stupid to then try and pull some back
The media smell blood in the water, this is going to be a feeding frenzy
See also:
- JPhotos: https://www.jmail.world/photos
- JDrive: https://www.jmail.world/drive
- JAmazon: https://www.jmail.world/jamazon
No way. Next level.
Way better than the DOJ UI but a pity the photo captions got stripped away
what photo captions?
are you talking about OpenGraph metadata or something else that we can fix?
Keep up the good work boys this is great stuff and is actually a pretty intuitive way to view the files, ive been sharing it for weeks now.
The "Quora Digest" email killed me.
Most of the mails read like fake ones from a video game. Maybe it's because most of them were written by an older generation who uses more classic letter-style writing.
Some of these are wild. This one reads like him journaling on an acid trip:
24. questions = AI to the minus 1
If this was from 2025, I'd put his RADICAL BREAKTHROUGH down to spending too much time on ChatGPT.
https://www.jmail.world/thread/HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019871?view=i...
In general, his emails read like something I've observed people doing IRL; they coax smart people into talking by saying ambiguous, clever sounding things (which are actually nonsense). The actually intelligent person will give them the benefit of doubt by association with their connections, thinking they must be intelligent to have such friends, and assume they misheard or something. Quite surprising how often nonsense like that passes muster. From the bits I've skimmed so far, he looks like a very successful hanger on that leveraged each connection into other ones.
This reads like notes taken on a presentation.
I feel like this is in code, and we need to decipher it.
.world domain is a perfectly fit for this project, love to see more power brokers' profile joining this Jmail world
Oh my, I think that’s the most impressive work I’ve seen here on the HN. Very well done! I hope the public would explore the whole thing pretty quickly. Personally, I afraid they, the files, were highly tampered with, so obviously a lot could be hidden. Yet, still, that’s an achievement we have this opportunity to explore the whole thing, I guess. So this project is impressive in many ways. I enjoyed exploring the interface, can’t believe that’s just a clone, not a real Google product!
Not much to say other than that this is really impressive work. Thanks for putting it all together!
Incredible! Great work!
One suggestion: please add previous/next navigation on the images, so that one doesnt have to open an image, close, open again.
ditto for email. Usually I open one email on the phone and slide left-right or right-left to navigate between adjacent emails.
You might want to consider getting rid of the Google product logos to avoid a cease-and-desist.
Jemini is such a nice touch
This project is truly next level rather fascinating. Particularly intriguing is observing JEE's considerable interest regarding human intelligence and artificial intelligence, engaging in discussions on these matters with Chomsky and Marvin Minsky.
Epstein had a subscription to Intelligence Squared. I feel like his whole character has come into focus for me.
I would have put the “release” part in scare quotes as anything important has been redacted.
He has tshirts and hats that say "mossad" on them
He ordered Israeli Defense Force pants off of Amazon apparently: https://www.jmail.world/thread/a767cba6e082256743a1069708a4a...
He also ordered like 9 pairs of Crocs. He really liked the fuzzy lined Crocs: https://www.jmail.world/search?q=Crocs
You can’t be at the top of your child selling and money laundering game if your feet hurt.
Where did you get all the data? The justice.gov site didn’t have a mass download option that I could find.
https://www.jmail.world/about
"We compiled these Epstein estate emails from the House Oversight Committee release by converting the PDFs to structured text with an LLM"
and:
"Data Sources
TechnologyDocument parsing and extraction powered by reducto"
Yes, also many were PPM images (or encoded as such) in PDFs and then I used (cheap/light) multimodal LLMs to classify documents from photos. It was surprisingly cheap: <$1 for a few thousand PDFs / Images.
Wow, that’s impressive! Are you planning to open-source the project? =)
Yes we'd love to. Letting the dust settle first
Awesome. Looking forward to it :)
Is this the public release, or did you filter it down further?
Text-only, No Javascript:
https://www.jmail.world/api/emails.json
Coincidence that this release happens on the weekend before Christmas when everyone is busy and less likely to notice?
https://www.jmail.world/thread/HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_026632?email=...
Nice using self-emails as a knowledge base.
lol
Wonder how much that Clinton in a blue dress painting will go for.
The flight log data + visualizer is interesting. Apparently not into crossing the equator ...
P.S. feel like a private eye perusing the Amazon purchases. Nabokov and Nietzsche, oh my.
the J suite of products grows larger
Complete side note but anyone else bothered by how they type? I guess email was being used much like texting here but still. Seems it's not just Epstein either.
> Hi Jeffrey long time now hear don't sweat Patterson was with trump last week small dinner he really would make a good financial steward no agenda woody is busting his ass for him Rudy too wiki leaks tonight on Hillary stopped caring fed wants to raise I guess terrible luck brexit Deutschebank then probably some terror thing smart to be out of it best jonathan
The above is from Jonathan Farkas
Wild guess: some kind of elite status signaling. “no time for punctuation im so busy very important u understand”
I believe this is from people using some speech-to-text mechanism who don't know or don't care that you can literally spell out punctuation.
Should have called it Blackmail
Shoot I wish I would've have known there was a collab, would've loved to participate in this.
I clicked on attachments, then images. There are only 9 images in this whole release?
Sorry about that. That Attachments tab shows you literal attachments found in the .eml files from the YAHOO dataset. We have released very few .emls that have attachments though. Expect more and more over time.
Releasing YAHOO responsibly has been time consuming, and we're relying on Drop Site to tackle the redactions. See this post for context.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46347272
Instead of attachment, click on the second tab on top of the screen.
weird — there’s thousands
we should bugfix
which url did you do that?
can you help repro?
The back button doesn't work
In which app? Photos, email, etc? Tested across each.
Also which platform? Mobile? I’ve noticed some burger menus failing on mobile.
Site is down for me?
I understand the desire to make a suite of apps, and to create something cool for people to play with. Is your motivation to involve your creation with this topic specifically because you desire to expose people doing bad things, for the righteousness and morality of such?
Also, do you feel it's more important that the information simply "gets out there" than there exist a coherent set of theses addressing questions like: 1) what was the nature, scope and purpose of the hustle Epstein was fronting/running? 2) Who unequivocally did bad things related to this?
It's not an either or, but right now it appears the topic is data without conclusion.
I think it would be interesting to target an AI at all the data and have it devise a set of theses with support. My feeling is the topic remains in a state of "100% data, 0% conclusions" - which appears to be a way to sate public curiosity while avoiding consequence.
Jemini has access to the data to help make sense of it.
We are working on better embeddings including image embeddings.
Search for “LSJ”: Little Saint James, his island.
Lots of Bill Gates involvement, and Sergey Brin.
Everytime I watch these private jets and helicopters I wonder why flying economy class has to be so miserable in terms of horizontal, vertical, and leg space.
being able to search through the files when they're purposefully so obfuscated is great
Is this like JDate but for email?
Hmm, no mention of BTC origins :(
cody rudland is a hero
Good heroance.
Also related: https://epstein-files-browser.vercel.app/ - Epstein Files Browser - an infinite scroll through all the photos
Because of JDate it took a minute to realize JMail stood for Jeffrey
You made me imagine an alternate universe where there is a Jeffrey programming language and the man is named Java Epstein.
I would be interested to hear HN views on Richard Hanania's take on Epstein: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/the-inverted-reality-of-eps....
Michael Tracey, who influenced Hanania, has been on a wild crusade against all Epstein victims and has tried to discredit them.
He also avoids all intelligence connections. He never asks why Epstein got the job at Bear Stearns after leaving as a teacher at an expensive private school where William Barr's father was the headmaster.
He never publishes material like the officially released birthday book entry from Eliot Wolk, trader at Bear Stearns, who confirmed that Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine's father, had an account at Bear Stearns and who teased Epstein about knowing teenage Ghislaine.
So it is now officially confirmed that Epstein knew Robert and Ghislaine much earlier than previously known. And that he knew Robert in the Iran Contra years where Robert was dealing with Adnan Khashoggi.
Tracey and Hanania are doing extremely poor journalistic work here by just focusing on the subset of Epstein victims that were over 18 and took money for the services.
Not reporting at all on the intelligence connections seems suspect as well.
Tracey seems to me to be a dishonest broker that is paid to promote anti-interventionist and related agenda
"Especially since the MeToo era began, we’re too credulous about these things. So we have globs of money going to Epstein accusers and their lawyers, while nothing has ever been proved by the standards of the criminal justice system."
Feels like someone with an axe to grind over MeToo turning Jeffrey Epstein of all people (???) into a martyr figure for their pet issue. I don't know why someone would feel compelled to defend him when he's not even alive to thank you for it. The idea that vast amounts of evidence and accusations exist yet nothing bad happened whatsoever is so wildly implausible that I can't grasp the mindset that would lead to openly publishing this perspective on Epstein. We found out from the most recent disclosures that people reported Epstein's inappropriate behavior to the FBI as early as 1996 and it wasn't investigated. One need only look at the amount of detail on his Wikipedia page ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Epstein#First_criminal... ) to get a sense of why accusations against him are at least treated as credible.
I totally get not finding this issue interesting or not caring about what he did to his victims, though I can't really empathize with that position, I understand it. But writing like Hanania's feels beyond the pale and unnecessary.
> nothing has ever been proved by the standards of the criminal justice system
One of my #1 things about reading people's writing is that while everybody is allowed to make mistakes, making this kind of easily-verifiable falsehood a central plank of an argument is discrediting. I honestly don't know why people keep reading him. There are better thinkers and writers who will also tell you that women and people of color are subhuman, he's not the only outlet for that point of view if that's what you're looking to read.
>> nothing has ever been proved by the standards of the criminal justice system
This flabbergasted me at first. Admittedly I had to refresh my memory that he died in jail awaiting trial, but he was still convicted once before that! The fact it was pre-MeToo should make it more damning, per his logic. I guess he’s saying there were no convictions after he became infamous, but there’s a caveat that he died awaiting trial, and that plus the prior conviction just makes this statement seem disingenuous or sloppy at best.
Anyone who writes a newsletter and hosts a broadcast in defense of Epstein's child sex trafficking ring probably should be under some kind of enhanced scrutiny.
Please keep in mind that the Epstein case was argued in open federal court, where he was found guilty and was sentenced. When he died, there were further criminal proceedings pending in two countries.
Hanania's habit of seeing everything in the binary of "woke" vs "not woke" leads him to some incredibly questionable places, as evidenced here. It's "woke" to believe that a convicted child sex trafficker resumed his crimes when released from prison, so Hanania is ideologically forced to take the opposite view that the kerfuffle is mostly hysterics. I honestly don't know why people read him, the quality of thinking and analysis is simply not there. There are much better conservative writers out there who are not currently apologizing for child rapists.
Epstein was definitely guilty of prostituting, at least for himself, girls between 14 and 17 years old. I personally think young women of that age should know better than to be prostitutes for rich guys, and there's no evidence he ever coerced them to do anything. He lured them purely with money and promises of status. There is plenty of testimony of the girls refusing to touch him and they leave, often with money still in-hand and an offer to come back with more girls. They should know they are themselves "child sex traffickers" if they come back with their underaged friends, and they themselves should have been prosecuted along with Epstein and Maxwell.
I am not a lawyer, but I am fairly confident that this is not how the laws currently work.
Teenage girls cannot currently be charged with illegal sex acts when they sleep with older men, but they can be charged with "child sex trafficking" when they offend against other teenage girls.
Wow, you cloned GMail completely within a short timefram? It looks more or less like the original Google product.
You could make a spinoff after this Epstein wave is gone: Use the front end to build a commercially viable product! :-)
Thanks for the ton of work!
cool stuff boys
this is amazing
Searched 'Ehud Barak' in Jmail and the results were disappointing. Which was odd because I recently read many interesting revelations about their relationship and Epstein's ties with Israel gleaned from emails between the two. The emails apparently revealed Epstein's vital role in forging security deals between Israel and the governments of Cote d'Ivore and Mongolia; Others showed Epstein offering to connect Putin with Ehud and trying to hatch a plot to replace Bashar-Al-Assad in Syria with another pro-Russian dictator - but one who would be pro-Israel also (it didn't pan out). And also emails showing Epstein setting up an introduction between Ehud Barak and Peter Thiel. Found none of this in the results.
Turns out most of the above revelations came from Ehud Barak's own hacked email account which were recently leaked by Handala, purportedly a pro-palestinian hacking group. None of the this stuff was covered in any of the mainstream news- Not by NYT , BBC, CNN, nothing. Most of the journalistic coverage had been from DropSite News. And what did The Guardian decide at the time to focus on in it's featured story regarding Epstein? Noam Chomsky.
That pretty much tells you everything you need to know about what Jeffrey Epstein was about and the role of the Governments and Media in all this. I don't believe the truth regarding Epstein will come from the 'Epstein Files', the US government, its allies or the mainstream western press. It will probably have to be from hackers, whistleblowers or the victims willing to break their confidentiality agreements. Or from any dead-mans-switches that the feds haven't manage to find and neutralize.
https://sfstandard.com/2025/11/23/extended-courtship-linking...
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/jeffrey-epstein-ehud-barak-le...
https://www.dropsitenews.com/s/epstein-and-israel
impressive stuff
Jeffery Epstein: heyy it looks like your diet program has worked
Reid Hoffman: slow progress. planning to see you in August. Hope you're well.
"LIVE! Melinda Gates on How Empowering Women Changes the World"
lol
amazing
Where is Trump ?
this is so f cool ;)
with Epstein and ilk outed, the real question is who'll (or has) replace him?
My money is on Jared Kushner, as the front runner. He has access via Trump, connected to Russian jew mafia via his dad, & trusted by Mossad.
serch for lolli or cp smh this guy was trash
Discussion (144 points, 29 days ago, 11 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46004118
Despite the upvotes, that one only spent 8 minutes on HN's frontpage, so I think we can treat this repost as a non-dupe.
Is data about how long links are on the front page available publicly anywhere?
There are a number of third party sites that do this, such as hnrankings.info:
https://hnrankings.info/46339600/
https://hnrankings.info/46004118/
I saw, but the project has changed since then. There's now Google Photos, improvements to Drive, Jemini (LLM that can assist when understanding the files), and JFlights for flight tracking.
I sent an email to the hn email with more details!
Last night we made a ton of new apps and we added "the Epstein" files which DOJ dropped yesterday.
Also since that post we worked with Drop Site News + DDoSecrets to post new Yahoo emails that no one has let the public see yet.
Its cool to see the mail. I now think he did die absolutely.. i had a suspicion he didnt.. but him and chomsky are fucking retarded.. feels like scrolling through twitter for horrible handles trying to sound smart and just lil bitches.. It makes me happier that my work is not very smart, but compared to these guys we arent that bad. I mean he was a geopolitical analyst. he may have been book smart in some sense cause he ordered liebniz at some pont.. but also just sounded like he was super high (probably wasnt)... very surprsing..
How can you post those emails and make a joke out of them - they have this footer that clearly states that if you are not a recipient you must delete the email immediately. Whole business world have this footer for a reason, for situations like this, so you can be sure your emails will not go public.
Although in principle I agree with the sentiment, sometimes for difficult illnesses we need to accept the side effects of the cure.
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46004118
just link dupe, but not content dupe
read rest of the thread with more context on why