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Comment by kovek | Hacker News Reader

If only we could use software to query the text of the bills.

I can't tell if your joking or not, but wouldn't summarization at that level require some pretty insane AI? The closest I have seen is pretty decent and runs on some of the reddit news subreddits.

But it is far from the work of a person skilled in real summarization, because real summarization requires you to predict what I care about based on the world at large.

It's not so much summarizing the text of bills, but having an API to query just the text of bills would be really nice. Even better would be some kind of diff/git blame log of changes. I would love to know who voted for which amendments, or how a particular bit of text got into a law.

But, realistically, that would never happen as it's not information that I think people would be comfortable providing.

That's all available, fairly easily. At the federal level it's at congress.gov, including redlines for (some) amendments and versions. To be fair not every single amendment vote is available, but that's a quirk of how the legislative process works.

At the federal level, the US has a great bulk api from GPO/FDSys, including full bill text in plain, pdf, and XML.

At the state level Openstates.org does it, including with an API.

A lot of us in the space have mess with various "git diff" type solutions, but unfortunately the way bill text changes doesn't lend itself to this.

I know a few people on the commercial side have experimented with automated summarization, but it never out-competes the summaries provided by hand by the Government, and any mistakes will get you ridiculed by customers. There's a bunch of downside for no real upside.

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