alt Hacker News>How it works # YesNotice works by periodically checking the status of the item you care about
okay, but how does it work? how does it check the status of things?
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I built something very similar a few months back and I just asked an LLM. You could optionally specify a CSS selector for HTML or JMESPath for JSON to narrow things down, but it would default to feeding the entire textual content to the LLM and just asking it the question with a yes or no response.
Their “About” site is (just slightly) more insightful:
> Using AI-powered web search, we continuously monitor your questions and send you an email notification when the status flips to what you're waiting for.
via https://yesnotice.com/about/
Without knowing whether they actually do it that way, if you give ChatGPT the following prompt, it returns `No.`:
> Please answer the following question with just “yes” or “no”: Is the new iPhone 18 available for pre-order?
You just curl the site or use its API, if it has one? Then you store the result in a database and see if its value has flipped. I don't get the question; this is trivial.
From a database!
There are two general options:
1. Scrape a google search for the question, feed that into OpenAI with the additional prompt of "Given the above information, is the answer to <user prompt> yes or no". Or give the AI a "google" tool and just ask it directly.
2. Same thing, except instead of OpenAI feed it into underpaid people in the global south (i.e. amazon mechanical turk). These people then probably feed it into ChatGPT anyway.
Given there's a free tier, and when you use it it produces very ai-sounding text, I think it's pretty clearly 1.
Also, if you enter a clever enough question, you can get the system prompt, but this is left as an exercise to the reader (this one's somewhat tricky, you have to make an injection that goes through two layers).