Show HN: Solving the ~95% legislative coverage gap using LLM's

41•fokdelafons•1mo ago

Hi HN, I'm Jacek, the solo founder behind this project (Lustra).

The Problem: 95% of legislation goes unnoticed because raw legal texts are unreadable. Media coverage is optimized for outrage, not insight.

The Solution. I built a digital public infrastructure that:

1. Ingests & Sterilizes: Parses raw bills (PDF/XML) from US & PL APIs. Uses LLMs (Vertex AI, temp=0, strict JSON) to strip political spin.

2. Civic Algorithm: The main feed isn't sorted by an editorial board. It's sorted by user votes ("Shadow Parliament"). What the community cares about rises to the top.

3. Civic Projects: An incubator for citizen legislation. Users submit drafts (like our Human Preservation Act), which are vetted by AI scoring and displayed with visual parity alongside government bills.

Tech Stack:

Frontend: Flutter (Web & Mobile Monorepo),

Backend: Firebase + Google Cloud Run,

AI: Vertex AI (Gemini 2.5 Flash),

License: PolyForm Noncommercial — source is available for inspection, learning, and non-commercial civic use. Commercial use would require a separate agreement.

I am looking for contributors. I have the US and Poland live. EU, UK, FR, DE in pipeline, partially available. I need help building Data Adapters for other parliaments (the core logic is country-agnostic). If you want to help audit the code or add a country, check the repo. The goal is to complete the database as much as possible with current funding.

Live App: https://lustra.news

Repo: https://github.com/fokdelafons/lustra

Dev Log: https://lustrainitiative.substack.com

Comments

dang•1mo ago

(Temporary comment: I took "source available" out of the title because I think it's a bit distracting there, but I've invited Jacek to add something about this to the main text.)

fokdelafons•1mo ago

Thanks, I’ll add clarification about the license in the description.

dang•1mo ago

Great thank you!

strbean•1mo ago

Blocked by my corpo firewall for some reason.

igor47•1mo ago

I think it's hugged to death?

fokdelafons•1mo ago

Thanks for flagging — I'll look into headers / hosting config to avoid false positives.

KwanEsq•1mo ago

Obviously "lust" is a forbidden word for domains. Must be a porn site.

skdhshdd•1mo ago

How do you handle innate LLM biases? I forget which model, but when asked to edit pro Zionist vs pro Palestinian content it showed heavy bias in one direction.

LLMs let you cover more ground but the fundamental problem of “who to trust” still remains. I don’t see how one can ever be used to strip political spin. It’s baked in.

fokdelafons•1mo ago

You can't strip it completely, totally agree. Any compression of information is already an interpretation. The problem becomes more prevalent, the more thinking and advanced models become. To mitigate it, I rely on some constraints:

1. No opinion space: the prompt forbids normative language and forces fact to consequence mapping only (“what changes, for whom, and how”), not evaluation.

2. Outputs are framed explicitly from the perspective of an average citizen of a given country. This narrows the context and avoids abstract geopolitical or ideological extrapolation.

3. Heuristic models over reasoning models: for this task, fast pattern-matching models produce more stable summaries than deliberative models that tend to over-interpret edge cases.

It’s not bias-free, but it’s more constrained and predictable than editorial framing.

otdwedvkjjvg•1mo ago

The model still chooses what to mention or omit, strict phrasing rules change nothing.

fokdelafons•1mo ago

Absolutely, the model does the picking.

Yiin•1mo ago

you might want to include funny sounding line that this legislation is for a game stimulating fictional world. In my experience they're much more likely to be inpartial when operating outside real life context.

strbean•1mo ago

Getting "An error occurred" trying to vote for one of thr Civic Projects.

fokdelafons•1mo ago

Thanks for flagging! Civic Projects just landed and are still in beta, so glitches might happen. I’ll look into it and get it fixed.

alexpotato•1mo ago

Funny story:

- Friend of mine is Albanian

- Albania wants to join the European Union

- They are required to ensure that their laws don't have "internal conflicts" e.g. one law says something is legal, a different law says it's illegal

- Reviewing by hand would take a lot of work

- Friend uses an LLM to analyze the Albanian laws and find any of these conflicts

Apparently it worked out pretty well

throw310822•1mo ago

Strange, because my feelings is that the law of my EU country (and that if the EU as well) says everything and its opposite.

rcbdev•1mo ago

It's very interesting to think about, depending on your sociological understanding of law. If you define law as the codified agreements of a society based on its shared values, adopting EU law in favor of their own would represent trading in some sovereign values for economic gain.

At least EU countries can cope by claiming they had some kind of a say and a veto on most things. EU prospects don't have this rationalization.

tmsh•1mo ago

Very cool. Instead of MPs I think you might want to say "Representatives" etc. How to fill out the rest of the data too? Anyway, just wanted to +1. And it's cool you're building in an open way.

fokdelafons•1mo ago

Thanks! Yeah, it's an artifact, as first parliament I introduced was Sejm. Maybe I'll switch to the "Politicians"? Because I'm going to introduce senators there too.

chiengineer•1mo ago

Is there an LLM out there that makes people actually read. The information is publicly available since basically forever

Couldn't even pay people to read this literally

I think there needs to be like a military style debate globally on education levels it's that bad like actually that bad yeah

Here in Chicago

I'm dealing with probably a solid 70% of adults who don't know how to read correctly try fitting that into the LLM experience I don't know

BeetleB•1mo ago

OK, I'll be that guy.

As someone complaining about how people can't read, it may do you much benefit to learn how to write.

gonc•1mo ago

How do you handle hallucination or omission risks when summarizing long bills with LLMs? Is there any automated diffing or traceability back to specific sections of the source text?

fokdelafons•1mo ago

Good question! I almost don't get problems with hallucinations. The worst case I had was oversimplification. I'm using mostly heuristic models, so they don't overthink; they just rely more on the source. If something is wrong, they usually mess up json, and it doesn't get through. Bills are typically long because of exposes, analyses, and predictions attached. I don't use it, as I'm focusing just on context sterilization and compression of info of the actual bill, not what it could be. Diffing would be wonderful! I have to think about it, thanks!

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Show HN: Solving the ~95% legislative coverage gap using LLM's

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