Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025)

Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025) by rorylaitila on Sunday July 27, 2025 @05:01PM (#44704643)

I'm digitally cataloging all US vintage print advertisements I can get my hands on (https://adretro.com). The backend is built on MySQL and Lucee and the full page ads published with Notion and Super.so. I'm using OpenAI vision to extract entity data from the images.

So far I've cataloged about 1500 advertisements out of the ~100,000 in my possession. Of which that is probably only 0.1% of all the major material out there. It's going to take a long time! I'm going at a rate of about 10,000/year. I'm going to have to speed this up :) But I've gotten the process to catalog a full magazine down from a week to a few hours.

I'm thinking of ways to support the archive. I am doing original art from the ads I may sell, or sell really nice copies of rare ads.

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Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025) by kvathupo on Sunday July 27, 2025 @05:48PM (#44705028)

This is awesome! Cigarette ads are so seductively cool, yet the embodiment of selling you a fantasy

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Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025) by rorylaitila on Sunday July 27, 2025 @06:07PM (#44705152)

Thank you! Yeah the cigarette ads are some of the most consistent. Once I get more in I am hoping to see some trends and themes in the messaging over time.

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Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025) by justbees on Monday July 28, 2025 @06:46AM (#44709427)

What about having a contribute button? I know this must be a lot of work and it's such a cool idea! If you had a way to contribute on the join page I would chip in for sure :) My husband is a writer and he uses newspapers.com to research a lot of vintage newspapers for historical context. I can imagine this being a great resource for him.

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Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025) by rorylaitila on Monday July 28, 2025 @08:39AM (#44710255)

Thanks I might try that! My impression of donation pages is the conversion rate is extremely low but it will be easy to add nonetheless. I might get better results with offering something in return, like Patreon (not sure what kind of patron content I want to regularly produce though) or products.

There is a much larger database of small ads that I am not publishing on the site, mostly because they add a lot of clutter. But to a researcher they may be valuable. Eventually I want to make the backend database available to people like your husband. Something like newspapers.com makes a lot of sense, thanks for the idea!

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Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025) by motohagiography on Monday July 28, 2025 @12:15PM (#44712281)

superb and immensely valuable, this is a history of desire.

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Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025) by rorylaitila on Monday July 28, 2025 @03:09PM (#44714274)

Indeed :) The aspect I like most is seeing through the advertisers lenses what they thought the public would care about the most.

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Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025) by elektor on Monday July 28, 2025 @01:16PM (#44712964)

This may be of interest to you:

The Stanford Research into the Impact of Tobacco Advertising (SRITA; https://tobacco.stanford.edu/) collection currently contains 62,553 tobacco advertisements.

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Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025) by rorylaitila on Monday July 28, 2025 @03:07PM (#44714254)

Thanks, I'll check it out!

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