hckrnws

Congrats on the launch!

I know it is truly the peak of the spirit of Hacker News to make the first comment a nitpick, but the fact that your name is a play on Pentagon but your logo is a hexagon causes me irrational levels of emotional distress.

Think of it as a polygon with about 4 km circumference: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/parsa#Noun

Their logo is also almost identical to a huge competitor in the monitoring space. Meltwater -> https://www.meltwater.com/

Oh interesting, we never actually thought of it that way—we just had a friend design this logo for us and this is what he came up with. And USPTO never complained, so we didn’t think about it too hard ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

LMAO, this is unironically the kind of feedback I love to see from HN

It still boggles my mind what mental & legal gymnastics are passed through to get 3 years of funding for what looks like someone last night put together a RAG of a cbp data dump that you get for free from their site.

Not saying it's not useful, just fascinated at what excuses have gone in endless meetings for 3 years to do whats basically an afternoons worth of work.

Yes I mean that literally. You start off an aws rag app or a huggingface container, you download the CSVs fom cbp public portal, and you add a sh*tty backgroundcolor and a border glow that doesn't go all the way around a button. 10-15 more years of this and maybe we'll get the next dropbox again who knows.

Honestly, if you or anyone else has a really easy way to get all communications/publications from every government/government-adjacent body, I genuinely would love to hear it. Especially at the regional/local level, cause those can be a real pain, and we'd love to save ourselves some time

At least for the US, the Federal Register would be a good place to start if you're not scraping it already: https://www.federalregister.gov/developers/documentation/api...

Federal news radio: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/

Government procurement announcements and opportunities: https://sam.gov/reports/awards/standard

In general, you might get more traction if you tilt this toward government contract capture a la Deltek GovWin and other companies. Lots of money in contract intelligence as well as proposal support (in addition to government relations / lobbying)

Yep we get the sources above. We've definitely thought about contract capture--we've just been hesitant because it seems like such a competitive space. But it's definitely tempting, and it wouldn't take much to convince us for sure

What's the order of magnitude of the amount of data sources? 100s, 1000s, tens of thousands?

Definitely many thousands, possibly the 10s of thousands depending on what you count as a source (e.g., if you get press releases from one part if an agency’s site, and speeches from another part, one could consider those separate sources I suppose).

It's interesting to hear about the twists and turns that got you here, thanks for sharing.

I happen to have built something in the same vein in a few months earlier this summer for the Gemini API developer competition.

For anyone interested, check out Gov Notes (https://app.gov-notes.com)

The site lets you dig into US house committee hearing videos posted to YouTube using AI search and chat. Even have some fairly powerful grounding in the chat - you can ask followups like "when was that discussed in the video?" and the chat will reply with a clickable link to a specific timestamp in the video where your current topic was discussed.

Congrats on the launch! While search with LLMs is quite popular nowadays, it is still hard to get it right.

As a smoke test, I tried the following queries, and they returned the same result. Good job!

    international relations Turkey
    international relations about the country with the capital city of Ankara

Thank you! It's been interesting to watch HN playing around with it. This community definitely phrases its search queries differently from how many government affairs professionals would (especially to try smoke tests like yours), so I'm glad it's holding up :)

Well if you ask GPT-4o the following:

Give me keywords to search for based on this sentence "international relations about the country with the capital city of Ankara"

You get the following:

- Turkey international relations - Ankara diplomacy - Turkey foreign policy - Turkey global partnerships - Turkey international politics - Turkey geopolitical strategy - Turkey foreign affairs - Turkey global relations - Turkey NATO relations (if relevant to your topic) - Ankara as a diplomatic hub

So it is not unsurprising that the same link was returned

This is a demo from a small startup dedicated to enhancing government transparency, which I greatly appreciate. As a result, my expectations are aligned with this goal, and I refer to this as a smoke test.

Achieving accuracy with RAG and LLMs is a challenging task that requires balancing precision and recall. For instance, when you type "Ankara" into GPT-4o, it provides information about Turkey. However, searching "Ankara" in their product does not yield articles related to Turkey.

> Achieving accuracy with RAG and LLMs is a challenging task that requires balancing precision and recall

The challenge is domain knowledge and not tech in my opinion. There are dozens if not hundreds of companies providing RAG and LLM, but the challenge is, like you pointed out, what should you do if you encounter something like "Ankara".

For BestBuy, this might not mean much, unless there is a BestBuy in Turkey. For a government related site, cities and geography is important, so trying to extract additional meaning from Ankara is probably important.

which category did you select? if you select custom, it just says to contact them. If I want to search for another region, why should I select UK or US?

Perhaps I am not using it right, I wanted to see if I could get a list of sources for "policy roadblocks to timely court justice" for the last 7 days in the UK.

I get some interesting articles, but only really one was relevant

even then it was only tangential.

Its kinda useful as a news cutting service, but its really not precise enough to replace a decent PR summary report.

for housing policy It either over indexes on hansard (good source, but not for policy) or the daily mail (would have been a good source for conservative policy, but not labour.)

What am I doing wrong?

So we actually have 2 search tools. One is the one you see here, which is made to be less precise, but returns more results and returns them faster.

The other sounds more like what you are looking for. It returns a more focused set of results and actually generates PR summary reports as PDFs for our customers.

However, we can't really give a public demo to HN of this second one, because it takes 1-3 minutes per run and is quite computationally intensive. (And we were told that our HN launch should demo something the community can easily play around with).

That being said, if you want an example of the output of this second search tool, you can see it here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sandy-suh-2ba05bb0_parsagons-...

In short, I don't think you're doing anything wrong. I think you're looking for a more precise version of our product that we weren't able to provide a demo for

Asking ChatGPT yields this: https://chatgpt.com/share/675181dd-4640-8006-b8d7-e558fb4907...

Not sure if grandfather can comment on whether those satisfies their request.

That is more relevant, but is limited by its data sources. Thank you for this.

thank you for your reply, it is most appreciated.

Congrats on the launch - there's a lot of unstructured public data as well (existing in the form of PDFs/Excel/PPT) are you planning to add support for those?

Also would be great to show the source in the list without having to click "source" :)

Absolutely! We're already doing this with PDFs from legislatures for our tool to track bills, which should be ready soon.

Also, thanks, that's great feedback :)

Our use case is similar to your "first" customer

at first we got zero results. tuning specific wording from "requirements" to "policies" got the intended results

thank you for this, excited to try it further

Glad to hear it!

If you have any questions or need anything, please reach out at https://parsagon.io/contact ! Working with non-profits has been some of the most fun work we've done, so we'd love to do what we can to make the platform work for you!

I see that you are quoting in extenso News articles (I read one from the DailyMail). How did you secure the copyright issues of reproducing full articles ?

Oh whoops, that seems like a bug. We typically show press releases verbatim, but our intention is to just provide the headline, link, and extracted facts for sources like the Daily Mail. Better see what's going on there; thanks for the catch!

Congratulations on the launch! A tangential use case to your current focus could also be smaller financial firms focused on fundamental analysis. I've done some work in the past setting up news datastreams for these sort of firms. Something like this that structures public government data could be really interesting for them.

Oh interesting, I'll be sure to look into that! Definitely an intriguing use case

1) You say that small startups had no budget for your previous tool, but isnt that an even bigger problem since you seem to be targeting non-profits? Whose biggest pain is getting donors, instead of policy monitoring?

2) why would your previous data pipeline tool or expertise give you an advantage with monitoring thousands of government sites? Did your previous AI tool have some sort of smart automated scraping or something? Otherwise, being able to process large amounts of data is a commodity these days. Its getting the data in an efficient manner thats the hard part, not analyzing it (anyone can do RAG and OpenAI calls)

1) I don't think we'll ever primarily target non-profits (our first customer happened to be a non-profit, but there's just inherently more business in for-profit spaces), but it has been incredibly fun and rewarding to work with non-profits, and if there's a need for policy monitoring there, we're happy to help (even if it's not our main target).

2) Yes, it's our proprietary AI that lets us generate thousands of custom web scrapers, find and clean the right RSS feeds, etc etc

This is neat; congratulations on launching. Curious what you do to assure users that you’re searching every corner they’d be checking manually, and that there haven’t been any regressions to the source set. This came up at work recently.

Thanks! I think the best thing we do to assure users that we check everything they'd check is that we add requested data sources pretty fast. E.g., one customer wanted to track announcements from the various state/regional commissions on higher education, and we added those within the hour.

For political monitoring in particular, I think this is pretty important. Different organizations in different industries will inevitably have very specific/obscure sources they want to track, so rather than promising that we already have everything they'd be checking, we just assure them that we can add anything missing really quickly.

Love the story about your journey sandy - its been great watching you stick through the pivots!

Could your software be used to create something like a specialized feed? For example like the newscatcher feed product (if you are familiar with them)

Thank you! And yeah, getting specialized feeds is one of the main things our current customers do!

Also, hope all is well at Laudspeaker :)

We were just discussing this TODAY in our weekly AI Playground meetup; that someone will soon make something like this.

I’m curious if private ngos or companies can use it as well? Can we track policy and potential impacts on industry? Etc?

Check out https://app.gov-notes.com/ - dig into US congressional committee hearing videos (for free)

Yeah absolutely! We have private companies using us right now! (We might have an private NGO as a customer--I'm always a little hazy on the exact definition of NGO)

I definitely think we're going to see a lot more people building in this space. There seems to be a growing consensus among the government affairs people I've talked to that it's just a matter of time

Seeing your launch hn made me happy. I tested one of your products in 2021. It's cool to see you and Parsagon working through iterations and finding customer traction. Mad props!

Aww, thank you! I'm impressed you even remember us from 2021 haha

Is there a custom search engine underneath this? My company's CIO has been asking about an LLM-driven search engine for the entire company.

If you're talking about search-as-a-service solutions, we didn't end up using any of them. There were certain optimizations we needed to make to our information retrieval algorithms that were pretty specific to political monitoring, and none of the out-of-the-box solutions seemed customizable enough for us.

same, anything suggested?

The upside to this tool is that it can bring greater informational efficiency to governments. But I think we should be careful, because this tool could also be used to make government overreach more effective. In the future, I'd imagine someone using this tool to incorporate greater analysis so that governments could type "show me any evidence of insurrection against our new draconian policy".

To be honest, maximal informational efficiency for governments is not a one-sided coin, and I think we ought to be a little more careful because this one-sided view of this as a tool to help with the good stuff ignores the danger of using it to silence potential movements against the government should it become primarily the bodyguard of the big corporation -- which frankly, is not far from the truth today.

it's not targeting govts though, but downstream users of policy

Love the PMF journey -- good luck!

You're RAGing over a DB of scraped news articles?

News articles, Requests for Comment and similar government announcements, speeches, parliamentary questions, government reports/statements/consultations--a pretty wide variety of sources

I do this with the federal register + the comments and attachments. Probably the most informative govt. website.

got a github to share it?

LLMs do not know what a number it is. public affairs and government are bean counters. these are conflicting ideas that any regex script can handle better.

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]