You guys need to build more stupid shit
21 points by gnarbarian 10 hours ago
You guys are way to serious around here. Building stupid pointless shit is fun and it will teach you a lot.
21 points by gnarbarian 10 hours ago
You guys are way to serious around here. Building stupid pointless shit is fun and it will teach you a lot.
It wasn't too hard. Probate firms scan obits to look for their own clients. This made that task less tedious.
Not that difficult to monetise, dead people are not known for calling the cops for burglary and funeral homes, estate lawyers etc would pay for leads.
Given the audience on hacker news it's not even the worst thing people here do for cash because it's only one or so victim at a time instead of hyperscale. Old school artisan crime.
Because people are becoming more sensitive, everyone is scared of lawsuits.
you should try working for the federal government and getting shutdown for a month.
I once built an obit scraper to build a db of local recent decedents. It was just to ease some work I was doing for a probate attorney.
I eventually set it to compare against a church roster. It emailed the leadership on matches and they'd follow up to see if it was the same person.
Sometimes they got notified earlier than they would have otherwise. But there were a few matches every year that would have flown under the radar (snowbirds or less active). It allowed leaders to make assistance and support available to the family.