8 ms·

Show HN: Govbase – Follow a bill from source text to news bias to social posts

219 points by foxfoxx 7mo ago

Govbase tracks every bill, executive order, and federal regulation from official sources (Congress.gov, Federal Register, White House). An AI pipeline breaks each one down into plain-language summaries and shows who it impacts by demographic group. It also ties each policy directly to bias-rated news coverage and politician social posts on X, Bluesky, and Truth Social. You can follow a single bill from the official text to how media frames it to what your representatives are saying about it. Free on web, iOS, and Android. https://govbase.com https://govbase.com I'd love feedback from the community, especially on the data pipeline or what policy areas/features you feel are missing.

giantg2 7mo ago
"An AI pipeline breaks each one down into plain-language summaries and shows who it impacts by demographic group." What controls are in place for bias in this step? Most existing plaintext law coverage has bias in it, so how was it trained to convert the law to plaintext without that biased material? Edit: Also, where it says it hurts or helps a specific issue, it would be helpful to understand why it was rated that way, especially if there was nothing in it's summary specifically stated about that issue.
0xDEAFBEAD 7mo ago
>shows who it impacts by demographic group. Why do we need to bake this zero-sum mentality into everything?
- foxfoxx 7mo ago
  to be clear impact groups are things like government programs (e.g. snap benefits), disabilities, immigration status, etc. They're not "democrat vs republican". The whole point of Govbase is for users to be able to follow things that matter to them and see how the government is impacting their lives. You can take a look at https://govbase.com/methodology https://govbase.com/methodology for more info.
ekns 7mo ago
Interesting. I've been just now exploring something related or tangential, but for Finnish governance (why not all countries eventually). Idea: Pull in all related docs and statements from the law and its process. And analyze its mechanisms across all timeframes, and across all capital stocks including social/human/moral etc capital. (finding: no one understands game theory nor causal models apparently)
foxfoxx 7mo ago
Thank you all for the feedback! I have already started to incorporate some design changes based on suggestions and am looking into AI analysis improvements. I am also launching on Product Hunt tonight 12am PST if anyone sees this. Would love the support! https://www.producthunt.com/products/govbase https://www.producthunt.com/products/govbase
egonschiele 7mo ago
I subscribed. Awesome idea and execution. Hope I see more apps working to make this stuff more accessible!
OgsyedIE 7mo ago
Is it federal-only?
- foxfoxx 7mo ago
  Yes but state level actions are definitely on the roadmap!
petcat 7mo ago
> An AI pipeline breaks each one down into plain-language summaries and shows who it impacts by demographic group. Wont this process be inherently biased by itself? Usually attempts (by humans or computers) to "summarize" or frame things in "plain language" will apply a bias since it intentionally omits all the myriad context and legal/societal "gray areas" that will inform one perspective or another.
- foxfoxx 7mo ago
  Very true. We're constantly trying to refine this and eventually plan on hiring policy researchers for a human in the loop but we just don't have the funding for that currently. We are trying to be transparent for how our scoring does work which you can read more about here: https://govbase.com/methodology https://govbase.com/methodology The biggest issue we have found, as you have mentioned, is just the larger context. For example (I don't think this is a real example and would need to check), the TikTok purchase deal could be ranked as an overall benefit for gig workers making content since the outlined alternative was a flat out ban hurting their income. So a deal going through, alleviating that alternative of a ban, in a vacuum is good. However, that ignores the larger context of where that option even came from and the surrounding political context around that deal. So we know the system isn't perfect right now and we're constantly trying to optimize to get the larger picture.
- schreiaj 7mo ago
  As someone who has been working on this space for a while (not affiliated with govbase) this is really hard. Between eliminating the sycophancy that seems baked into LLMs and dealing with generalized hallucinations - it's freaking hard. I spent this weekend trying to figure out how to get my system to stop telling me the SAVE Act would be fine because it doesn't say what the process for if birth certificate doesn't match current id. No, I haven't found a good solution yet - I'm going down a rabbit hole of basically crawling the entire federal register for referenced legislation and then adding in an adversarial agent to see if that can spot gaps.
mellosouls 7mo ago
Looks interesting, but trending social only shows X which will lean conservative. Obviously Bluesky/Reddit will lean left but it should presumably show all bias influences? I don't think Truth Social should be included as its such a niche. Generally looks like a potentially excellent resource for marketing to media platforms. Edit: I found a Bluesky one but had to scroll down a lot. If that's to do with relative lack of activity it should probably be clearly explained.
- foxfoxx 7mo ago
  Thanks for the feedback! We mainly include Truth social since Trump and a few of his closest administration are active on there and a large goal of Govbase is to follow the story from Trump posting about tariffs, the news reacting, the EO happening, etc. I would love to include more Bluesky posts, besides it seeming more balanced - it's also free data compared to X. However, most political social posts happen on X. Even AOC, who is the most followed account on Bluesky still I think is more active on X than Bluesky.
- sourcegrift 7mo ago
  Sad news is that bluesky is on a decline while truth social is increasing. https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2025/11/07/bluesky-and-x-users-plummet-year-after-trumps-election-win-truth-social-makes-small-gains/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2025/11/07/bluesky-... I wonder what will happen to trans kids in the coming years. Trans people shape the soul of the country (since the last 3 years)
  - verdverm 7mo ago
    It doesn't look like truth social has grown much the last year, sits around 10% of bluesky by active user count. Would be interesting to see more detailed metrics about the amount of content and engagement. Transgender has been a part of humanity forever, just like we see in other areas of nature. Here's some history going back 150+ years: https://translash.org/articles/drawn-to-history-10-trans-trailblazers-who-changed-the-world/ https://translash.org/articles/drawn-to-history-10-trans-tra... Zine: https://translash.org/zines/transcestors-trailblazers-30-lives-30-legacies/ https://translash.org/zines/transcestors-trailblazers-30-liv... Some perspective, if you have an ARM CPU, it's thanks to Sophia Wilson. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Wilson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Wilson
pronouncedjerry 7mo ago
Not able to create account via Apple - invalid_request: Invalid web redirect url.
- foxfoxx 7mo ago
  Thank you! The web app launched less than a month ago so definitely still working on bugs. I will get this fixed today. I appreciate the notice.
- foxfoxx 7mo ago
  Should be fixed! If you'd like to try again. Thank you.
rgeers 7mo ago
This looks pretty interesting. How are you linking the related news for each policy item?
sourcegrift 7mo ago
If bluesky is included no reason to not include mastodon, threads, instagram,
- foxfoxx 7mo ago
  Understandable. Our priority right now is politician and agency posts though and these accounts are just not very active on mastodon or threads. We can look further into it and another comment mentioned this too.
- verdverm 7mo ago
  There are two parts here 1. Platforms politicians, governments, and media 2. Platforms which have an open (and free?) API Bluesky seems to be the only one covering both, though less coverage on #1 than others, minus Mastodon
j16sdiz 7mo ago
Can you prompt the AI to highlight some "hidden/unexpected causes"? For example, the bill title say fixing hospitals, but it contains some policy changes about housing.
- foxfoxx 7mo ago
  I think that's a good idea to highlight "unexpected impact". Our system gets the whole policy for analysis so if there is something like housing impacts within a medical focused bill, Renters and Home Owners impacts should show up.
healsdata 7mo ago
The current summary on the home page contains bias / one-sided reporting. > While the administration describes the strikes as a necessary move to stop nuclear weapons, the conflict has already seen accidental friendly fire and threats of a ground invasion. The balance to the assertion "this was necessary" isn't "but there's been some consequences" -- it is an exploration of the truth of the assertion.
- benzible 7mo ago
  And the legality of it as well.
- foxfoxx 7mo ago
  I agree and will be taking this feedback seriously. Daily briefings need more refinement since that is the first thing a user reads.
- 1shooner 7mo ago
  How are the consequences of war not germane to its necessity?
  - stonogo 7mo ago
    They are, of course, but there are two different consequences involved in this assessment. One is "stop nuclear weapons" (the converse would be "do not stop nuclear weapons") and the other is "friendly fire incidents" (the converse would be "no friendly fire incidents"). Neither are directly related to the other, since the former is specific to this engagement and the latter happens in any combat.
    - reverius42 7mo ago
      Yeah, the two sides are basically: * The war is necessary, regardless of friendly fire * The friendly fire happened, regardless of whether the war is necessary They're just totally orthogonal.
- gwerbin 7mo ago
xnx 7mo ago
Well intentioned, but very naive.
- foxfoxx 7mo ago
  We're early stage, but I believe there's a space between news and actual policy that no one's filling well. If you can show people that their representatives are making their lives better or worse, with real policy behind it, they'll care. Right now, too many people are consuming misinformation from sources they believe are legitimate, and increasingly from social media where real people are getting their news. We need to connect the policy, the personal impact ("you're losing your insurance because of X"), the news, and what politicians are actually saying, all in one place, to bring real facts to the misinformation and make government more transparent.
- legitas 7mo ago
  I agree but what's your reasoning? Politico pro subs or just generally that no one cares?
riteshyadav02 7mo ago
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tangotaylor 7mo ago
I like this. My strategy to stay sane in US politics is to follow what the government is actually doing and avoid distractions from ragebait influencers or unhinged statements from politicians.
- foxfoxx 7mo ago
  Thanks! The original goal of Govbase is to make US Policy impact easy to understand for citizens. For more government transparency so people know how their representatives are spending their time and who they're actually working for.
- LPisGood 7mo ago
  This works great for international geo-politcs as well. It’s much more important to watch what leaders do than listen to what they say.
tangotaylor 7mo ago
This is actually really nice. Web page feels pretty snappy, way more so than congress.gov. I've learned some interesting things just scrolling for a few minutes, like the "Energy Freedom Act" cutting appliance rebates or the constitutional amendment for a balanced budget (wtf).
- foxfoxx 7mo ago
  Thanks! This actually started as a mobile app. I hope you check that out too!
eiiot 7mo ago
The dismiss button on the top banner doesn't work after I click onto the trial page.
- foxfoxx 7mo ago
  Thanks for the feedback! We've tested it on a few different browsers. Can I just get what browser you're using and if on mobile? Thanks!
cwoodyard 7mo ago
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foxfoxx 7mo ago
For context, this is a solo project I've been building over the past year while working full-time. I've been responding as "we" in the comments since I got used to doing it other places lol Looking for feedback and advice. I'm an engineer, not a journalist or policy researcher, so a lot of this domain is still new to me despite working on it for a year.
- southerntofu 7mo ago
  Hello,i don't mean to be dismissive but i think lawmaking definitely needs less AI and less pretendly-neutral summaries. It's already a problem when researching a law proposal that dozens of news outlets will just copy-paste a bland summary of arguments from both sides, neither being explored fully. I would recommend giving direct links to actually partisan information so people can situate the bill's intent and consequences in a broader context. Where it helps: - sometimes a bill's proponent is just an industry puppet whose talking points will be repeated in the media, but aren't solid enough to warrant a proper article… unlike opponents criticizing specific (for example deregulation) points - sometimes, there are strong feelings and arguments on both sides of a bill and it makes sense to view them in their entirety; seeing one's side unhinged logic sometimes reveals more about the bill than the bill's text itself - "same-side" opposition: sometimes a bill is perceived as "left-wing" or "right-wing" but receives opposition from the same side; for example, the democrat party is very divided on helping the rich vs taxing the rich, while the republican party is (less than 20 years ago) divided between hardcore authoritarian trumpists and libertarians defending civil liberties All in all, i believe AI is a plight for society. We are only starting to understand the ecological and psychological costs. There are areas where machine learning can be useful (translation), but i strongly believe politics is not one of them. Please don't try to apply it to anything serious. Don't take it from me, take it from James Mickens in a talk where he explains both how ML works and how it related to the field of computer security: https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity18/presentation/mickens https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity18/presentat...
- rancar2 7mo ago
  I would recommend a more systemic mapping like Power Scorecard from Demos.org [1] to help ground the mappings to impacts on populations. Ideally, one would be able to swap the system mappings based on the preferred context, as there are different policies that should be looked at in different ways to assure optimal positive impacts with minimal secondary negative impacts. I haven’t seen a perfect way of doing this yet, but this will be directional correct on the pathway to something even better for all of us. Thank you for your labor of love and efforts! [1] https://power.demos.org/ https://power.demos.org/
LPisGood 7mo ago
I started but could not finish a project I was calling “g(overnm)it blame” - the idea was to track each bill through committee and to the end either a sort of commit history to see which legislator (or at least which committee) added what part of the final bill. I found it infeasible, but I’m wondering if you saw rich enough data while making this that you think such a project is viable?
- jrussino 7mo ago
  Maybe I'm too software-engineer-brained now, but to me it seems like lawmakers should just be using a tool like git directly. The legal code is a codebase, every bill is a PR, the arguments and proposed changes are captured in review comments, and the PR is accepted/rejected on a vote. Aside from "lawmakers don't/won't understand the tool", why not do it this way?
  - LPisGood 7mo ago
    I think they pretty much do, it’s just not recorded as such in an easily retrievable format.
    - bc569a80a344f9c 7mo ago
      From what I understand, it depends on the stage. The United States Code certainly tracks any and all amendments, and you can fully trace which member introduced which amendment, when and where it passed, and even verbatim floor debate. However, the draft stage isn't documented this way. Members negotiate whatever between themselves (well, really their staffers) and this happens over email, in discussions, via Word documents - whatever works. I guess in the git metaphor, drafts are in flux while being worked on as a commit, and are squashed and then accessible as such squashed commits once initially introduced or whenever they lead to bill amendments. You can't necessarily track down what member was responsible for a specific sentence in an amendment.
      - LPisGood 7mo ago
        The thing is that there is a voting process eventually so it can at least in principle be known which version is proposed by which legislator, or which committee.
cyrusradfar 7mo ago
Curious about the X/social feature, technically. How are you getting the data? Is it via official APIs or scraping
measurablefunc 7mo ago
Some of the headlines do not make sense, e.g. https://govbase.com/story/pvxDaH9fXqXUj8yu9Plc https://govbase.com/story/pvxDaH9fXqXUj8yu9Plc. But overall I think this is a great idea.
- foxfoxx 7mo ago
  Yes I just noticed this bug today where there is some character limit impacting story headlines. I appreciate the feedback and will be looking into it today.
nonameiguess 7mo ago
Feels a bit strange to use or at least not what I was expecting. I'm not sure having a "feed" the way it does is even appropriate, but assuming that's what it will be, so be it. The titles, however, read like headlines even under the "Policy" tab, and it isn't until clicking through that I can see the title of the bill in question and some brief description of it. I was expecting something more like a list of bills with outbound links to discussions and press releases where they may be. I'm not sure the bullet points make a lot of sense on the impacts, either. The first one right now is a bill to change security rules for hospitals and healthcare systems that offer remote logins to retrieve patient details. You only find that's what it is by scrolling all the way to the bottom and finally reading the summary, but first you see a list of impacted parties and it highlights people with chronic illnesses and tribal members. I think I at least understand the logic of the first one, assuming chronically ill log into patient portals more often than healthier people, but it feels somehow facile, like saying a bill about highway maintenance affects drivers more than non-drivers. No shit. That isn't really an insight and shouldn't be above the actual content of the bill. The "source information" is also all the way at the bottom even though, personally, it's what I would care about the most. And it has no links at all. You can look up the bill number and find it in the congressional database, but why not include a direct link? The news snippets link to the sources they came from. Why not the bills themselves? So actually, I can see now there is a link to the bill itself. It's just all the way at the bottom and not part of the source summary, whereas the news summaries are tiles that also act as links all on their own. I guess the question is why make that different and why put the link I most care about all the way at the bottom beneath all of the information? Not gonna lie, though. I almost hesitate to ask because I fear the answer is there is no known reason. You asked an AI to put together a page and this is what it did. There is no knowable "why" and even though you're publishing this as if it's your product being created based on your design decisions, it isn't.
- foxfoxx 7mo ago
  So policy feeds are dynamic news headlines because no one really wants to click on or understands: "Making further consolidated appropriations for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2026, and for other purposes." This is similar to how most people don't want to read the raw source bill text which is why it's at the bottom. The reason policies aren't direct links to congress.gov is because I've spent more time than most on congress.gov and the federal register and on one wants to do that. My first commit on this project was Feb 22, 2025 so I'm sure you're happy to find out there is plenty of "why" to my answers and that these are all my design decisions.
scronkfinkle 7mo ago
I've been working on the data processing side of legal text with https://www.wordstodata.com/ https://www.wordstodata.com/ Your work seems more targeted at tracking the real world impact of the bill rather than the changes it makes to the legal code, but a feature on my roadmap is having bill data also be easily linkable to the votes of politicians so you can track the effect politicians have on the legal code per member. Do you plan to build a member tracker on top of this as well? I think it would be super cool to be able to tie news events to a track record of votes by member of congress.
- foxfoxx 7mo ago
  Yes! If you go to the engage tab you can look up some reps and the policies they're sponsoring but I plan on giving impact scores and where certain reps are focusing their time in the future.
- 3eb7988a1663 7mo ago
  Could you expand out the Examples section to print the output? Would give me a better at-a-glance of what I could expect from the library.
lunatuna 7mo ago
Amazing start and look forward to see it evolve. Reminds me a lot of MIT's Open Government Information Awareness [0]. But really like the different track that this takes. I really hope to see this become something people go to. Suggestion that you increase the education of what you're doing and how. For example looking at the Home Energy Freedom Act [1] some direction to more understanding for each of the sections would be great - what is the process for Legislative Progress - how is the Impact Analysis done. I also couldn't quite figure out if there was a narrative that was being pushed by the parties and how that aligns with media. I like the media ratings though. [0] - https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/open-government-information-awareness/ https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/open-government-infor... [1] - https://govbase.com/policy/bill-119-hr-4758 https://govbase.com/policy/bill-119-hr-4758
seany 7mo ago
What's the recommended way to consume this with other ai? What kind of api is available?
some_random 7mo ago
Overall I love it, my biggest critisism so far is that the impact score seems overly opinionated and overly broad in some cases. For example, https://govbase.com/policy/fr-2026-03380 https://govbase.com/policy/fr-2026-03380 lists on the policy page as positively affecting "Snap Food Stamps" which doesn't seem to be relevant although I don't have pro to see the reasoning.
foxfoxx 7mo ago
Checkout has been fixed for anyone who wanted to try Pro!
cyanydeez 7mo ago
One would, naively assume, there's some skew that slowly happens between the source text and the social posts. In reality, the social posts no longer need to do anything but lie about whatever the title might mean.
- foxfoxx 7mo ago
  Right and the goal with Govbase is to show that disconnect in plain view. Hold representatives accountable to their actions against their words having them right next to each other.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
sonu27 7mo ago
We need something similar for the UK
abangser 7mo ago
Hey nice site. The Ledge (https://the-ledge.ai https://the-ledge.ai) is a site I developed over the past year with more of a focus on bill content. Ultimately I found it useful to use all three LLM (Gemini, Claude, OpenAi) to ingest and dissect bill text en route to producing useful reports. Especially challenging for bills that run 1000+ pages.
- foxfoxx 7mo ago
  super cool to see a similar project! I'll take a look. Yes I use a mix of Gemini and Claude for certain simple categorizing to full impact analysis.
- egonschiele 7mo ago
  This looks super useful, but why hide your identity? There's nothing on the website about who you are and I notice you're using a new HN account.
brightball 7mo ago
I have long thought about doing something like this with news in general, but I like the specific focus on bills. What I’d planned to do with news might be a good addition to this system though. If you can, collect news articles from different sources and try to highlight what is left out. I’ve noticed that 99% of news bias isn’t factual incorrectness, but intentional omission of details to frame the story in a specific context.
- thegrim33 7mo ago
  What you've identified, I call the 2x2 attack (since it can be imagined as a 2x2 grid), which is: - Report on stuff that helps the positions you support - Report on stuff that hurts the positions you don't support - Don't report on stuff that hurts the positions you support - Don't report on stuff that helps the positions you don't support It's one of the many, many, fake news tactics that allows them to manipulate and present a false picture of reality, without having to tell a lie.
koinedad 7mo ago
If you can figure out how to actually make it sound unbiased on the front page and then route to both sides biased versions that would be something.

219 points by foxfoxx 7mo ago

giantg2 7mo ago

"An AI pipeline breaks each one down into plain-language summaries and shows who it impacts by demographic group." What controls are in place for bias in this step? Most existing plaintext law coverage has bias in it, so how was it trained to convert the law to plaintext without that biased material? Edit: Also, where it says it hurts or helps a specific issue, it would be helpful to understand why it was rated that way, especially if there was nothing in it's summary specifically stated about that issue.

0xDEAFBEAD 7mo ago

>shows who it impacts by demographic group. Why do we need to bake this zero-sum mentality into everything?

foxfoxx 7mo ago
to be clear impact groups are things like government programs (e.g. snap benefits), disabilities, immigration status, etc. They're not "democrat vs republican". The whole point of Govbase is for users to be able to follow things that matter to them and see how the government is impacting their lives. You can take a look at https://govbase.com/methodology https://govbase.com/methodology for more info.

ekns 7mo ago

Interesting. I've been just now exploring something related or tangential, but for Finnish governance (why not all countries eventually). Idea: Pull in all related docs and statements from the law and its process. And analyze its mechanisms across all timeframes, and across all capital stocks including social/human/moral etc capital. (finding: no one understands game theory nor causal models apparently)

foxfoxx 7mo ago

Thank you all for the feedback! I have already started to incorporate some design changes based on suggestions and am looking into AI analysis improvements. I am also launching on Product Hunt tonight 12am PST if anyone sees this. Would love the support! https://www.producthunt.com/products/govbase https://www.producthunt.com/products/govbase

egonschiele 7mo ago

I subscribed. Awesome idea and execution. Hope I see more apps working to make this stuff more accessible!

OgsyedIE 7mo ago

Is it federal-only?

foxfoxx 7mo ago
Yes but state level actions are definitely on the roadmap!

petcat 7mo ago

> An AI pipeline breaks each one down into plain-language summaries and shows who it impacts by demographic group. Wont this process be inherently biased by itself? Usually attempts (by humans or computers) to "summarize" or frame things in "plain language" will apply a bias since it intentionally omits all the myriad context and legal/societal "gray areas" that will inform one perspective or another.

foxfoxx 7mo ago
Very true. We're constantly trying to refine this and eventually plan on hiring policy researchers for a human in the loop but we just don't have the funding for that currently. We are trying to be transparent for how our scoring does work which you can read more about here: https://govbase.com/methodology https://govbase.com/methodology The biggest issue we have found, as you have mentioned, is just the larger context. For example (I don't think this is a real example and would need to check), the TikTok purchase deal could be ranked as an overall benefit for gig workers making content since the outlined alternative was a flat out ban hurting their income. So a deal going through, alleviating that alternative of a ban, in a vacuum is good. However, that ignores the larger context of where that option even came from and the surrounding political context around that deal. So we know the system isn't perfect right now and we're constantly trying to optimize to get the larger picture.
schreiaj 7mo ago
As someone who has been working on this space for a while (not affiliated with govbase) this is really hard. Between eliminating the sycophancy that seems baked into LLMs and dealing with generalized hallucinations - it's freaking hard. I spent this weekend trying to figure out how to get my system to stop telling me the SAVE Act would be fine because it doesn't say what the process for if birth certificate doesn't match current id. No, I haven't found a good solution yet - I'm going down a rabbit hole of basically crawling the entire federal register for referenced legislation and then adding in an adversarial agent to see if that can spot gaps.

mellosouls 7mo ago

Looks interesting, but trending social only shows X which will lean conservative. Obviously Bluesky/Reddit will lean left but it should presumably show all bias influences? I don't think Truth Social should be included as its such a niche. Generally looks like a potentially excellent resource for marketing to media platforms. Edit: I found a Bluesky one but had to scroll down a lot. If that's to do with relative lack of activity it should probably be clearly explained.

foxfoxx 7mo ago
Thanks for the feedback! We mainly include Truth social since Trump and a few of his closest administration are active on there and a large goal of Govbase is to follow the story from Trump posting about tariffs, the news reacting, the EO happening, etc. I would love to include more Bluesky posts, besides it seeming more balanced - it's also free data compared to X. However, most political social posts happen on X. Even AOC, who is the most followed account on Bluesky still I think is more active on X than Bluesky.
sourcegrift 7mo ago
Sad news is that bluesky is on a decline while truth social is increasing. https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2025/11/07/bluesky-and-x-users-plummet-year-after-trumps-election-win-truth-social-makes-small-gains/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2025/11/07/bluesky-... I wonder what will happen to trans kids in the coming years. Trans people shape the soul of the country (since the last 3 years)
- verdverm 7mo ago
  It doesn't look like truth social has grown much the last year, sits around 10% of bluesky by active user count. Would be interesting to see more detailed metrics about the amount of content and engagement. Transgender has been a part of humanity forever, just like we see in other areas of nature. Here's some history going back 150+ years: https://translash.org/articles/drawn-to-history-10-trans-trailblazers-who-changed-the-world/ https://translash.org/articles/drawn-to-history-10-trans-tra... Zine: https://translash.org/zines/transcestors-trailblazers-30-lives-30-legacies/ https://translash.org/zines/transcestors-trailblazers-30-liv... Some perspective, if you have an ARM CPU, it's thanks to Sophia Wilson. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Wilson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Wilson

pronouncedjerry 7mo ago

Not able to create account via Apple - invalid_request: Invalid web redirect url.

foxfoxx 7mo ago
Thank you! The web app launched less than a month ago so definitely still working on bugs. I will get this fixed today. I appreciate the notice.
foxfoxx 7mo ago
Should be fixed! If you'd like to try again. Thank you.

rgeers 7mo ago

This looks pretty interesting. How are you linking the related news for each policy item?

sourcegrift 7mo ago

If bluesky is included no reason to not include mastodon, threads, instagram,

foxfoxx 7mo ago
Understandable. Our priority right now is politician and agency posts though and these accounts are just not very active on mastodon or threads. We can look further into it and another comment mentioned this too.
verdverm 7mo ago
There are two parts here 1. Platforms politicians, governments, and media 2. Platforms which have an open (and free?) API Bluesky seems to be the only one covering both, though less coverage on #1 than others, minus Mastodon

j16sdiz 7mo ago

Can you prompt the AI to highlight some "hidden/unexpected causes"? For example, the bill title say fixing hospitals, but it contains some policy changes about housing.

foxfoxx 7mo ago
I think that's a good idea to highlight "unexpected impact". Our system gets the whole policy for analysis so if there is something like housing impacts within a medical focused bill, Renters and Home Owners impacts should show up.

healsdata 7mo ago

The current summary on the home page contains bias / one-sided reporting. > While the administration describes the strikes as a necessary move to stop nuclear weapons, the conflict has already seen accidental friendly fire and threats of a ground invasion. The balance to the assertion "this was necessary" isn't "but there's been some consequences" -- it is an exploration of the truth of the assertion.

benzible 7mo ago
And the legality of it as well.
foxfoxx 7mo ago
I agree and will be taking this feedback seriously. Daily briefings need more refinement since that is the first thing a user reads.
1shooner 7mo ago
How are the consequences of war not germane to its necessity?
- stonogo 7mo ago
  They are, of course, but there are two different consequences involved in this assessment. One is "stop nuclear weapons" (the converse would be "do not stop nuclear weapons") and the other is "friendly fire incidents" (the converse would be "no friendly fire incidents"). Neither are directly related to the other, since the former is specific to this engagement and the latter happens in any combat.
  - reverius42 7mo ago
    Yeah, the two sides are basically: * The war is necessary, regardless of friendly fire * The friendly fire happened, regardless of whether the war is necessary They're just totally orthogonal.
gwerbin 7mo ago

xnx 7mo ago

Well intentioned, but very naive.

foxfoxx 7mo ago
We're early stage, but I believe there's a space between news and actual policy that no one's filling well. If you can show people that their representatives are making their lives better or worse, with real policy behind it, they'll care. Right now, too many people are consuming misinformation from sources they believe are legitimate, and increasingly from social media where real people are getting their news. We need to connect the policy, the personal impact ("you're losing your insurance because of X"), the news, and what politicians are actually saying, all in one place, to bring real facts to the misinformation and make government more transparent.
legitas 7mo ago
I agree but what's your reasoning? Politico pro subs or just generally that no one cares?

riteshyadav02 7mo ago

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tangotaylor 7mo ago

I like this. My strategy to stay sane in US politics is to follow what the government is actually doing and avoid distractions from ragebait influencers or unhinged statements from politicians.

foxfoxx 7mo ago
Thanks! The original goal of Govbase is to make US Policy impact easy to understand for citizens. For more government transparency so people know how their representatives are spending their time and who they're actually working for.
LPisGood 7mo ago
This works great for international geo-politcs as well. It’s much more important to watch what leaders do than listen to what they say.

tangotaylor 7mo ago

This is actually really nice. Web page feels pretty snappy, way more so than congress.gov. I've learned some interesting things just scrolling for a few minutes, like the "Energy Freedom Act" cutting appliance rebates or the constitutional amendment for a balanced budget (wtf).

foxfoxx 7mo ago
Thanks! This actually started as a mobile app. I hope you check that out too!

eiiot 7mo ago

The dismiss button on the top banner doesn't work after I click onto the trial page.

foxfoxx 7mo ago
Thanks for the feedback! We've tested it on a few different browsers. Can I just get what browser you're using and if on mobile? Thanks!

cwoodyard 7mo ago

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foxfoxx 7mo ago

For context, this is a solo project I've been building over the past year while working full-time. I've been responding as "we" in the comments since I got used to doing it other places lol Looking for feedback and advice. I'm an engineer, not a journalist or policy researcher, so a lot of this domain is still new to me despite working on it for a year.

southerntofu 7mo ago
Hello,i don't mean to be dismissive but i think lawmaking definitely needs less AI and less pretendly-neutral summaries. It's already a problem when researching a law proposal that dozens of news outlets will just copy-paste a bland summary of arguments from both sides, neither being explored fully. I would recommend giving direct links to actually partisan information so people can situate the bill's intent and consequences in a broader context. Where it helps: - sometimes a bill's proponent is just an industry puppet whose talking points will be repeated in the media, but aren't solid enough to warrant a proper article… unlike opponents criticizing specific (for example deregulation) points - sometimes, there are strong feelings and arguments on both sides of a bill and it makes sense to view them in their entirety; seeing one's side unhinged logic sometimes reveals more about the bill than the bill's text itself - "same-side" opposition: sometimes a bill is perceived as "left-wing" or "right-wing" but receives opposition from the same side; for example, the democrat party is very divided on helping the rich vs taxing the rich, while the republican party is (less than 20 years ago) divided between hardcore authoritarian trumpists and libertarians defending civil liberties All in all, i believe AI is a plight for society. We are only starting to understand the ecological and psychological costs. There are areas where machine learning can be useful (translation), but i strongly believe politics is not one of them. Please don't try to apply it to anything serious. Don't take it from me, take it from James Mickens in a talk where he explains both how ML works and how it related to the field of computer security: https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity18/presentation/mickens https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity18/presentat...
rancar2 7mo ago
I would recommend a more systemic mapping like Power Scorecard from Demos.org [1] to help ground the mappings to impacts on populations. Ideally, one would be able to swap the system mappings based on the preferred context, as there are different policies that should be looked at in different ways to assure optimal positive impacts with minimal secondary negative impacts. I haven’t seen a perfect way of doing this yet, but this will be directional correct on the pathway to something even better for all of us. Thank you for your labor of love and efforts! [1] https://power.demos.org/ https://power.demos.org/

LPisGood 7mo ago

I started but could not finish a project I was calling “g(overnm)it blame” - the idea was to track each bill through committee and to the end either a sort of commit history to see which legislator (or at least which committee) added what part of the final bill. I found it infeasible, but I’m wondering if you saw rich enough data while making this that you think such a project is viable?

jrussino 7mo ago
Maybe I'm too software-engineer-brained now, but to me it seems like lawmakers should just be using a tool like git directly. The legal code is a codebase, every bill is a PR, the arguments and proposed changes are captured in review comments, and the PR is accepted/rejected on a vote. Aside from "lawmakers don't/won't understand the tool", why not do it this way?
- LPisGood 7mo ago
  I think they pretty much do, it’s just not recorded as such in an easily retrievable format.
  - bc569a80a344f9c 7mo ago
    From what I understand, it depends on the stage. The United States Code certainly tracks any and all amendments, and you can fully trace which member introduced which amendment, when and where it passed, and even verbatim floor debate. However, the draft stage isn't documented this way. Members negotiate whatever between themselves (well, really their staffers) and this happens over email, in discussions, via Word documents - whatever works. I guess in the git metaphor, drafts are in flux while being worked on as a commit, and are squashed and then accessible as such squashed commits once initially introduced or whenever they lead to bill amendments. You can't necessarily track down what member was responsible for a specific sentence in an amendment.
    - LPisGood 7mo ago
      The thing is that there is a voting process eventually so it can at least in principle be known which version is proposed by which legislator, or which committee.

cyrusradfar 7mo ago

Curious about the X/social feature, technically. How are you getting the data? Is it via official APIs or scraping

measurablefunc 7mo ago

Some of the headlines do not make sense, e.g. https://govbase.com/story/pvxDaH9fXqXUj8yu9Plc https://govbase.com/story/pvxDaH9fXqXUj8yu9Plc. But overall I think this is a great idea.

foxfoxx 7mo ago
Yes I just noticed this bug today where there is some character limit impacting story headlines. I appreciate the feedback and will be looking into it today.

nonameiguess 7mo ago

Feels a bit strange to use or at least not what I was expecting. I'm not sure having a "feed" the way it does is even appropriate, but assuming that's what it will be, so be it. The titles, however, read like headlines even under the "Policy" tab, and it isn't until clicking through that I can see the title of the bill in question and some brief description of it. I was expecting something more like a list of bills with outbound links to discussions and press releases where they may be. I'm not sure the bullet points make a lot of sense on the impacts, either. The first one right now is a bill to change security rules for hospitals and healthcare systems that offer remote logins to retrieve patient details. You only find that's what it is by scrolling all the way to the bottom and finally reading the summary, but first you see a list of impacted parties and it highlights people with chronic illnesses and tribal members. I think I at least understand the logic of the first one, assuming chronically ill log into patient portals more often than healthier people, but it feels somehow facile, like saying a bill about highway maintenance affects drivers more than non-drivers. No shit. That isn't really an insight and shouldn't be above the actual content of the bill. The "source information" is also all the way at the bottom even though, personally, it's what I would care about the most. And it has no links at all. You can look up the bill number and find it in the congressional database, but why not include a direct link? The news snippets link to the sources they came from. Why not the bills themselves? So actually, I can see now there is a link to the bill itself. It's just all the way at the bottom and not part of the source summary, whereas the news summaries are tiles that also act as links all on their own. I guess the question is why make that different and why put the link I most care about all the way at the bottom beneath all of the information? Not gonna lie, though. I almost hesitate to ask because I fear the answer is there is no known reason. You asked an AI to put together a page and this is what it did. There is no knowable "why" and even though you're publishing this as if it's your product being created based on your design decisions, it isn't.

foxfoxx 7mo ago
So policy feeds are dynamic news headlines because no one really wants to click on or understands: "Making further consolidated appropriations for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2026, and for other purposes." This is similar to how most people don't want to read the raw source bill text which is why it's at the bottom. The reason policies aren't direct links to congress.gov is because I've spent more time than most on congress.gov and the federal register and on one wants to do that. My first commit on this project was Feb 22, 2025 so I'm sure you're happy to find out there is plenty of "why" to my answers and that these are all my design decisions.

scronkfinkle 7mo ago

I've been working on the data processing side of legal text with https://www.wordstodata.com/ https://www.wordstodata.com/ Your work seems more targeted at tracking the real world impact of the bill rather than the changes it makes to the legal code, but a feature on my roadmap is having bill data also be easily linkable to the votes of politicians so you can track the effect politicians have on the legal code per member. Do you plan to build a member tracker on top of this as well? I think it would be super cool to be able to tie news events to a track record of votes by member of congress.

foxfoxx 7mo ago
Yes! If you go to the engage tab you can look up some reps and the policies they're sponsoring but I plan on giving impact scores and where certain reps are focusing their time in the future.
3eb7988a1663 7mo ago
Could you expand out the Examples section to print the output? Would give me a better at-a-glance of what I could expect from the library.

lunatuna 7mo ago

Amazing start and look forward to see it evolve. Reminds me a lot of MIT's Open Government Information Awareness [0]. But really like the different track that this takes. I really hope to see this become something people go to. Suggestion that you increase the education of what you're doing and how. For example looking at the Home Energy Freedom Act [1] some direction to more understanding for each of the sections would be great - what is the process for Legislative Progress - how is the Impact Analysis done. I also couldn't quite figure out if there was a narrative that was being pushed by the parties and how that aligns with media. I like the media ratings though. [0] - https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/open-government-information-awareness/ https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/open-government-infor... [1] - https://govbase.com/policy/bill-119-hr-4758 https://govbase.com/policy/bill-119-hr-4758

seany 7mo ago

What's the recommended way to consume this with other ai? What kind of api is available?

some_random 7mo ago

Overall I love it, my biggest critisism so far is that the impact score seems overly opinionated and overly broad in some cases. For example, https://govbase.com/policy/fr-2026-03380 https://govbase.com/policy/fr-2026-03380 lists on the policy page as positively affecting "Snap Food Stamps" which doesn't seem to be relevant although I don't have pro to see the reasoning.

foxfoxx 7mo ago

Checkout has been fixed for anyone who wanted to try Pro!

cyanydeez 7mo ago

One would, naively assume, there's some skew that slowly happens between the source text and the social posts. In reality, the social posts no longer need to do anything but lie about whatever the title might mean.

foxfoxx 7mo ago
Right and the goal with Govbase is to show that disconnect in plain view. Hold representatives accountable to their actions against their words having them right next to each other.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

sonu27 7mo ago

We need something similar for the UK

abangser 7mo ago

Hey nice site. The Ledge (https://the-ledge.ai https://the-ledge.ai) is a site I developed over the past year with more of a focus on bill content. Ultimately I found it useful to use all three LLM (Gemini, Claude, OpenAi) to ingest and dissect bill text en route to producing useful reports. Especially challenging for bills that run 1000+ pages.

foxfoxx 7mo ago
super cool to see a similar project! I'll take a look. Yes I use a mix of Gemini and Claude for certain simple categorizing to full impact analysis.
egonschiele 7mo ago
This looks super useful, but why hide your identity? There's nothing on the website about who you are and I notice you're using a new HN account.

brightball 7mo ago

I have long thought about doing something like this with news in general, but I like the specific focus on bills. What I’d planned to do with news might be a good addition to this system though. If you can, collect news articles from different sources and try to highlight what is left out. I’ve noticed that 99% of news bias isn’t factual incorrectness, but intentional omission of details to frame the story in a specific context.

thegrim33 7mo ago
What you've identified, I call the 2x2 attack (since it can be imagined as a 2x2 grid), which is: - Report on stuff that helps the positions you support - Report on stuff that hurts the positions you don't support - Don't report on stuff that hurts the positions you support - Don't report on stuff that helps the positions you don't support It's one of the many, many, fake news tactics that allows them to manipulate and present a false picture of reality, without having to tell a lie.

koinedad 7mo ago

If you can figure out how to actually make it sound unbiased on the front page and then route to both sides biased versions that would be something.