A dev built Pardonned.com using Playwright and SQLite to search US pardons. Hacker News erupted in political debates, edge-case bugs, and civic data rants.
Just another day on the internet where bored devs ignore their Jira tickets to scrape government data and stir up some spicy civic drama. This time, an indie hacker decided to build a search engine for US Presidential Pardons, and Hacker News is losing its collective mind.
The dev behind Pardonned.com got tired of trying to verify claims about presidential pardons, so they built a tool to do it. The tech stack is the ultimate indie-hacker pragmatism:
The whole thing is open-source. Honestly, scraping federal websites is a wild ride. If you're doing this at scale, you'd usually need a Proxy to unlock limitless web data collection just to survive the rate limits. But once you get the data, making sense of it is where the real headache begins.
The moment this hit HN, the keyboard warriors descended. The thread quickly derailed into three main combats:
1. Edge cases and Missing Data: People immediately started poking holes: "Where are the Jan 6th pardons? What about Biden's mass commutations?" The creator had to step in and admit the scraper has bugs. For example, Trevor Milton was slapped with a half-billion-dollar restitution, but since the DOJ's raw text doesn't standardize fine amounts, the parser completely missed it. Classic string manipulation hell.
2. The Preemptive Pardon Debate: Users clashed over Biden's 11-year preemptive pardon for his son. Was it unprecedented? An internet historian quickly chimed in with a link to Gerald Ford's absolute blanket pardon of Richard Nixon. Turns out, sweeping pardons aren't a bug in the system; they're a legacy feature.
3. The War on Drugs & Systemic Hotfixes: Some folks were shocked by Obama's sky-high pardon numbers until they realized most were for non-violent drug offenses. Back in the 90s, draconian laws locked people up for 30 years over minor weed possession. One user shared a heartbreaking story of a Native American woman doing 10 years in federal prison simply for refusing to testify against her husband. In these cases, the presidential pardon acts as an emergency hotfix for a broken justice system.
Politics aside, there's a massive lesson here for devs. Civic tech is a goldmine. Governments sit on mountains of public data, but their UI/UX and search capabilities are almost always trash.
You don't need a crazy microservices architecture. A simple stack (Playwright + SQLite) that solves a real accessibility problem is enough to make a splash. So grab a Free $300 to test VPS on Vultr, spin up a scraper, and build something cool. Just, you know, make sure your regex is solid before parsing government text blobs.
Source: Hacker News
