Some friends just made this: https://www.congressionalrag.com/ - they need help from anyone interested, especially around pulling in more data sources.
Ask HN: Any good tools for viewing congressional bills?
11–20 of 44 posts
Re: Ask HN: Any good tools for viewing congressional bills?
#12There should at least be an AI sidebar on congress.gov. I think Americans would learn a whole lot with such a thing, but who wants to foot the bill for this one.
It's easy to imagine a non-technical user asking the AI a question and implicitly trusting the response as factual, without understanding anything about hallucinations.
Re: Ask HN: Any good tools for viewing congressional bills?
#13Should be at fun little XML parser to write, converting the thing to HTML. Except that it's a government thing so the parser's probably not going to be little. :) Edit: The thing's basically XHTML without any kind of header. UTF-8 encoding, it looks like. So a conversion tool would just need to wrap it up and add styling. Edit: Despite hints that it's XHTML, it's not valid XHTML. Edit: Stick this at the top of the fi…
and are optional but I didn't try it with this file
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
Re: Ask HN: Any good tools for viewing congressional bills?
#14There should at least be an AI sidebar on congress.gov. I think Americans would learn a whole lot with such a thing, but who wants to foot the bill for this one.
It's easy to imagine a non-technical user asking the AI a question and implicitly trusting the response as factual, without understanding anything about hallucinations.
Versus what? An intractable archive of unreadable documents? At the very least they'll get tractable information, which humans will always use on social media to make a point, which will then get fact checked. I prefer that loop. Right now the information is hidden in coffers and never gets taken for a loop.
Re: Ask HN: Any good tools for viewing congressional bills?
#15I made an iOS app a while back that lets you read through/follow bills in congress: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/easy-congress/id1522413054
seems to be broken on the "Big Beautiful Bill" right now though :(, I'm taking a a look to see what's going on
Re: Ask HN: Any good tools for viewing congressional bills?
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's easy to imagine a non-technical user asking the AI a question and implicitly trusting the response as factual, without understanding anything about hallucinations.
Versus what? An intractable archive of unreadable documents? At the very least they'll get tractable information, which humans will always use on social media to make a point, which will then get fact checked. I prefer that loop. Right now the information is hidden in coffers and never gets taken for a loop.
A root cause analysis would probably suggest the question - Why are our representatives passing intractable, unreadable documents as law and how can we prevent them from doing that? Or more generally, what changes can be made to our government institutions to improve clarity in communicating actions and decisions to votes?
Yeah, it's naive thinking, and I'm well aware the obfuscation is sometimes the point.
But I digress... My main takeaway here is that we should be considerate of what problems adding AI to the equation may cause. I'm old enough to have seen how "the new big thing" ends up getting applied to every problem space, without really thinking about the consequences.
Re: Ask HN: Any good tools for viewing congressional bills?
#17I always go to https://www.govtrack.us/ to view this sort of thing. I don't know if it is _good_ but it's a pretty good tool from my point of view
Re: Ask HN: Any good tools for viewing congressional bills?
#18Paste the entire thing into the LLM! Maybe people can stop relying on unreliable partisan sources to interpret bills if they have tools to grok the dense weird language in them themselves. I say this even though I was embarrassed yesterday when the LLM misinterpreted something and I posted it - read the reference text behind any summary :/
Government Publishing Office and Library of Congress provides XML formatted bills and all their amendments and a feed of all changes to every bill.
Oh and on the topic of party politics, Bill Clinton was the one who had them put things online in the first place with the GPO Electronic Information Access Enhancement Act, and Barack Obama and the Democrats expanded it via American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 - not the do-nothing Republicans.
Re: Ask HN: Any good tools for viewing congressional bills?
#19Paste the entire thing into the LLM! Maybe people can stop relying on unreliable partisan sources to interpret bills if they have tools to grok the dense weird language in them themselves. I say this even though I was embarrassed yesterday when the LLM misinterpreted something and I posted it - read the reference text behind any summary :/
So use an LLM even though you admit immediately they make mistakes and you need to read the entire bill anyways?
Re: Ask HN: Any good tools for viewing congressional bills?
#20notebooklm.google.com?