Hacker News Reader

Comment by V__ | Hacker News Reader

What field are you in, sounds interesting that one would need such a tool?

It's not just for people doing interesting things. It just helps people answer questions about stuff. The stuff can be interesting or boring or dangerous or silly. The last question I tested the ACH tool on was "Did William Shakespeare really author all of the works he was credited for?" - You can use this stuff to research whatever you want. That's the point of it - it's no one's business what you are interested in getting to the bottom of.

I can say, from a business perspective, I've needed to use similar methodologies, though far from needing air-gap requirements and relying heavily on web search, to evaluate potentially fraudulent transactions and relationships between parties.

What are the competing hypotheses, other than fraud, when a person makes a massive luxury purchase, but with red-flag-adjacent inconsistencies in other information provided? If we need to identify whether there's a weird or competitive ownership relationship behind a potential opportunity, how do we determine if an initial hypothesis about relationships is correct?

If ArkhamMirror has an online mode with web search as a tool call, I'd be curious to try it out to automate some of these ACH-adjacent workflows.

It doesn't have an online mode yet - although there's a lot of stuff in the works. However, since docker and LM Studio are already included in the setup, you can turn on MCP Toolkit in Docker and add the Docker MCP to LM Studio. With Docker Toolkit on, you get access to over 300 different MCPs for your local LLM including web search via DuckDuckGo or Brave Search, automation tools like n8n, web manipulation stuff with playwright, and all sorts of potentially useful stuff. (not a sponsor :P) Then your "local" LLM can suddenly do all sorts of agential stuff. This isn't out-of-the box capability, since I'm only building offline, local, privacy-focused features at the moment, but turning it on isn't a huge undertaking. If you are up for messing with some prompts in the files, you could even specify to the LLM what tool you want it to use for which task if it's not automatically using them when the need arises.

Description on the repo says it's for journalism, but I build similar rigs that I use for research in companies that have entered bankruptcy proceedings.

Commonly there is a lot of information and it might as well be unstructured, and then I need to get answers quickly because my clients aren't going to pay me for going about it slowly.

It's mainly useful for journalism purposes, yes. Audit and compliance uses were also a consideration. It's a unified tool for right now, but I'm working on turning the base of it into the frame and adding individual shards for specialized applications.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com