[HN Gopher] Git for the US Code
___________________________________________________________________
Git for the US Code
Author : alansaber
Score : 437 points
Date : 2026-10-28 01:47 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (lexifina.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (lexifina.com)
| octoberfranklin wrote:
| Fraudulent title, you can't git-clone this.
| doezi wrote:
| Not really. It is arguing for version controlled legislation.
| So who's responsible for what portions of literal laws and
| policy. I hope your "not clone-able" is in jest
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _who's responsible for what portions of literal laws and
| policy_
|
| This makes sense for bills. It doesn't for laws. Once a bill
| is a law, it's the will of the Congress.
| rileymat2 wrote:
| You could tag yes/no/abstains to it.
| dathanb82 wrote:
| That's like saying that the code in a repo belongs to the
| whole team once a PR is merged, so it doesn't make sense to
| track its provenance back to its original authors.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _so it doesn't make sense to track its provenance back
| to its original authors_
|
| The legislative process is inherently collaborative in a
| way that's ordinarily undocumented. Who introduced an
| amendment and who supported it are entirely separate.
| Someone who introduced language can wind up not
| supporting it because of where the mix of trade-offs
| winds up.
|
| At the level of a bill, knowing who wrote language
| matters. At the level of law, you should only care who
| voted for it. (I'm not even tackling the inherent
| subjectivity in tracing _e.g._ language in the CFR to
| specific language in a bill.)
| blitzar wrote:
| > you should only care who voted for it
|
| even then you have three-line whips and numerous reasons
| to vote for / against things that are wrapped up in party
| politics and other stupid games
|
| once something is passed; the intent of the writer, the
| intent of those that voted for it and the meaning of the
| words in the final legislation can all be wildly
| different.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| There is complexity behind the vote, yes. But the vote is
| what matters. Who initially introduced text into a bill
| that did or didn't pass, with or without their vote, is
| on the legislative side. That's a lot more complicated to
| track than the USC.
| edflsafoiewq wrote:
| There's actually two kinds of changes here: changes to the law,
| and changes to your description of the-law-and-its-changes
| (metachanges). For example, if you make a mistake in recording
| a change to the law, you need to fix that (unlike eg a source
| repo where mistakes in a commit message are forever).
|
| So to make this a git repo, I guess you'd make the snapshots be
| the law plus markup for all the changes, and the diffs are the
| metachanges. For each snapshot S, you could generate a git repo
| whose snapshots are the law and the whose diffs are the changes
| in the law (as described by S). However, this probably isn't
| the best way to query S.
| alansaber wrote:
| Actually, you can now. https://github.com/lexifina/global-law /
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50283329
| mushufasa wrote:
| I'm not an expert in this domain but I'm aware there has been
| prior work to attempt this. I'd appreciate if someone
| knowledgeable could post some of that context.
| tdhz77 wrote:
| You are correct the library of congress and the gpo do this.
| tpmoney wrote:
| Something akin to this is a big part of the products that
| companies like LexisNexis or Thompson Reuters charge your
| lawyers a whole lot of money for. Because for a lot of legal
| questions, you don't just need to know what the law says now,
| but what it said at the time of the incident in question. And
| every legislative body around the country (at least at the time
| I was working in this space a decade ago) publishes legislative
| changes in completely different and often times not easily
| parsable forms. Web scraping and PDF scraping was far more
| common than you'd think. Some state legislatures published
| changes in more reasonable forms, and some states contract
| their official legislative compilation to companies like
| LexisNexis or Thompson Reuters and work to publish an actual
| change stream with proper standardized references. There's a
| lot of manual work that goes into making stuff like this work,
| a lot of lawyers and other legal professionals manually
| reviewing that the right pieces were removed or added in the
| right places, matching up references to parts of the law that
| might have changed between the time the legislation was passed
| and the time the change was published and figuring out what
| order everything actually goes in. And the actual text of the
| law is only part of the equation. Legal decisions from courts
| can dramatically impact the reading of the law, or effect
| effectively strike laws from the books (even if the laws are
| technically still on the books, just not enforceable). So often
| the right way to represent a diff of two points in time depends
| on the question you're trying to answer.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| I wanted to do something like this for a single section in
| Washington law, to show why a particular funding restriction
| had been added, but was no longer achieving the intended
| goal. Git alone wasn't enough of a UI, because the 'why' was
| only in the introductory text of the bill that changed the
| law, and not in the law itself - and then there was the move
| of that article to a different section, and a re-numbering of
| sections, and a change in definition in a different section
| that affected the scope of this one... fascinating stuff!
|
| I thought legal document versioning software would cover some
| of these problems but it doesn't seem like a similar enough
| process.
| tpmoney wrote:
| Following renumbers has to be one of the worst parts of
| this. As an example, the text of the US code that was
| modified by the BCRA in 2002 has been renumbered / moved
| since Citizens United v FEC was decided. But the text
| itself is the same as it was since the BCRA passed, because
| courts don't remove the actual law text with their
| decisions. So if you want to know what parts of the current
| US code were ruled unconstitutional by the courts in that
| decision and are therefore unenforceable, you need to first
| find the text of the BCRA, because the ruling refers to the
| sections of that piece of legislation. Then you need to
| find the version of the US code that was on the books when
| the BCRA was passed to find the section references that the
| law talks about. Then you need to find the law that
| renumbered that part of the US Code and find the new parts.
| Then you need to see if any changes have been applied since
| (there hasn't really) and then you need to match the
| changes to the referenced sections in the old version of
| the code to the equivalent text in the current version of
| the code, modulo any changes to references that changed as
| part of the renumbering but are otherwise the same.
|
| I'm not saying lawyers aren't really really expensive, but
| you don't have to spend a long time digging into just a
| simple question like "what parts of the law are no longer
| enforceable after a supreme court decision" before you
| start to understand why they charge the prices they do.
| 7kago_yomi wrote:
| Unlike code, natural language laws have many exceptions and
| context dependencies, so trying to manage them cleanly with Git
| seems like it would be tough as data structuring costs and
| exception handling (hardcode-style responses) increase.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _natural language laws have many exceptions and context
| dependencies_
|
| The complexity is in common law, not natural-language laws.
|
| The U.S. Code and Code of Federal Regulations can be completely
| presented through a Git-like system. The complexity comes in
| when attaching court cases.
| 7kago_yomi wrote:
| I see. The laws are completely different from my country, so
| this is very educational. My country uses civil law, but I
| see that is how it is under common law. Thank you very much.
| jcranmer wrote:
| Nah, it's pretty damn common in any legal system.
|
| If you've got a statute like "no vehicles in the park," the
| fundamental issue is that you have to interpret "what is
| meant by 'vehicle'?" and no legal drafting is going to be
| good enough to actually cover all the possible cases well
| enough. The main difference between a common law and a civil
| law system here is that in a common law system, you _have_ to
| cite the previous similar cases (because precedent is
| binding) whereas in a civil law system, you 're merely using
| those previous similar cases as persuasive evidence. At the
| end of the day, it boils down to arguing for your
| interpretation.
|
| And in my experience working on language standardization
| (which is closer to a civil law system than a common law
| system), it's fairly often that I have to resort to looking
| up not just when a change in the text occurred, but dive deep
| into the discussions of the paper proposing the change to
| understand what the committee thought it was doing with the
| change. The complexity of law is fairly similar--the changes
| to the law themselves often require understanding the
| legislative and interpretative history of the law to
| understand what the intent of the drafter was to be able to
| rule on how the law is extended to an unanticipated scenario.
| thenewnewguy wrote:
| Yeah but none of this matters for the "git for legislation"
| idea right? The point here is to record the history of the
| text of the laws, not their meaning.
| tpmoney wrote:
| It depends on the question you're trying to answer. The
| text of the US law which Citizen's United struck down
| remains on the books today (though has changed since it
| was moved to a different part of the code, so references
| have been updated), but the actual effective law has most
| certainly changed from when it was written to now. Since
| courts can't write or modify the law, the literal text
| remains, even if some of that text is effectively
| stricken as if the text had been removed.
|
| If you want to know the literal text (that may or may not
| be enforceable), then sure a plain text diff is
| sufficient to know that nothing at all has changed about
| federal communication laws since this section was last
| amended in 2002. But if you want to know what the actual
| law is, you definitely need more than just a text diff.
| beau_g wrote:
| See my response to the parent, but git blame solves the
| issue of "what did they mean" because the person (if
| alive) can just be asked. The same way git blame is used
| all the time to ask why a programmer did something some
| certain way, there's more to code too than just how
| exactly does it compile/execute. The higher level idea
| should be to stop legislation seemingly written by
| nobody, that nobody wants to answer for, but is used to
| make important decision about lives and livelihoods.
| Having courts needed to interpret verbiage that was
| written by living people is completely preposterous. If
| it's written by dead people, sure, that's a harder
| problem.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _If you 've got a statute like "no vehicles in the park,"
| the fundamental issue is that you have to interpret "what
| is meant by 'vehicle'?"_
|
| Maybe. Maybe it's a court finding the legislature never had
| the power to pass that rule. Maybe it's what constitutes a
| park.
|
| Visualizing changes in statute with git is fine. It would
| have real difficulty in presenting changes in law, as a
| whole, as well as an annotated supplement. (At the end of
| the day, redlines, git trees and annotated supplements are
| just visualization methods. The actual federal law lives in
| the USC, CFR and opinions of our courts.)
| deathanatos wrote:
| > _Unlike code, natural language laws have many exceptions and
| context dependencies,_
|
| In the interpretation of the law, yes, but that doesn't matter
| for version controlling the _text_ of the law, and in that
| sense, you can absolutely manage the text pretty cleanly in
| git. Most laws are just text. Many bills are literal git-diffs,
| except _in prose_ , which can make it hard to understand a
| bill.
|
| > _exception handling (hardcode-style responses)_
|
| This is basically non-sequitur (there no such thing as a
| "hardcode-style response" in git...), and again, I think you're
| misunderstanding the idea here.
| beau_g wrote:
| This brings us to my even more unlikely idea - when whoever
| wrote that line in the legislation dies or retires, the line
| enters a short review period where it's either renewed with a
| new author on the line to speak to it or is deprecated. This
| way someone would always be there to just answer for the
| intent. Also would help garbage collect legislation that is no
| longer useful.
| autoexec wrote:
| > when whoever wrote that line in the legislation dies or
| retires, the line enters a short review period where it's
| either renewed with a new author on the line to speak to it
| or is deprecated.
|
| That seems like a great way to turn functional legislation
| into swiss cheese as one line at a time things are either
| kept or removed based on chance/circumstance and the whims of
| the current people in power.
|
| Laws are collectively voted for as a complete package, and a
| law that worked and was passed as being acceptable can become
| useless, dangerous, and undesirable with a very small number
| of lines removed from them. I want lawmakers to spend their
| time focused on the entirety of a bill. Your idea would
| result in them fighting over who should or shouldn't be
| recorded as the official author of each and every line. We
| don't need nonsense like "Senator X will retire soon so
| Senator Y should author it!", or "I'll agree to author line
| 405 if you agree to author line 30!"
|
| Your idea, like so many ideas where laws just fade away
| unless something happens to keep them, also sounds like a
| great way for you to lose longstanding freedoms and
| protections that should never be at risk of simply
| deprecating just because some one gets voted out or dies or
| retires.
|
| The intent of a law should be clear from the text. It isn't
| always, but at least now it's possible. To have the intent of
| a law, or even worse the intent of specific lines within a
| law, subject to change at any time would make interrupting
| that law and establishing precedent a nightmare for the
| courts.
|
| We really should have a system in place to help clear out old
| and unnecessary laws on the books, but this would be a
| terrible way to accomplish that.
| TomAbel wrote:
| Reminds me of a similar project for french law
|
| French bills evolution versioned in git and visualized The Law
| Factory: french bills as git, opendata and dataviz
| https://www.lafabriquedelaloi.fr/
|
| "Law is Code" on The Law Factory: french bills as git, opendata
| and dataviz - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7817357 May
| 2014 (0 comments)
| Xirdus wrote:
| Poland has an official, somewhat manual version of this - the
| ISAP system.
|
| Actual bills are written in the form of patches ("SS1. In the
| law X paragraph 5, the words "such and such" are replaced with
| "this and that". SS2. The law X paragraph 4 is striked. SS3.
| After law X paragraph 8, a new paragraph 8a is added that says
| "etc. and so on".)
|
| After a patch or a collection of patches are passed, they are
| combined together and a unified version of the law is
| published. These documents aren't technically the law, they
| just show a snapshot of what the law is at the specific moment.
|
| ISAP system is an online collection of all bills that were
| passed, plus crosslinks between laws that
| change/supercede/otherwise interact with each other, plus
| current and archival unified versions, plus related
| administrative orders and other miscellanious documents. Makes
| looking up laws and changes to laws very easy.
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| It's the European law, inspired mostly by French, IIRC.
| Belgium has the same, for instance.
| Xirdus wrote:
| I mostly meant the web app. Forgot to link it.
| https://isap.sejm.gov.pl/isap.nsf/home.xsp Unfortunately
| it's only in Polish.
|
| Example page for the traffic code https://isap.sejm.gov.pl/
| isap.nsf/DocDetails.xsp?id=WDU19970...
|
| First PDF is the original, second PDF is the unified
| version, then there's links - 4 others changed, 4
| explicitly obsoleted, 12 implicitly obsolete, 707
| administrative orders, 12 Constitutional Tribunal rulings,
| 11 previous + current unified versions, 212 patches, 14
| relevant EU directives.
| LelouBil wrote:
| And the officially maintained website (that only tracks the
| final law changes instead of the whole process):
| https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/
| xlayn wrote:
| YES PLEASE, but I suspect it will degenerate into another paid
| service with 1000 tiers... I think you cannot access the US law
| without paying for it? odd... I will wait for claude law to
| appear and hope they share the torrent...
| Matticus_Rex wrote:
| Legislation you can generally access for free. Case law you
| often cannot.
| iAMkenough wrote:
| Should that change? In my opinion, in the age of AI, both
| should be generally accessible for free.
| deathanatos wrote:
| Yes, it should absolutely change (both should be freely
| available), since ignorance of the law is not a defense,
| and case law is law (here, in the US, since we're a common
| law country). But the flip side of that is that the law has
| to be knowable, if ignorance is not a defense, or you're
| just going "lol too bad for you for not knowing the secret
| law".
|
| Also, because how the judicial branch decides case law
| needs to be reviewable by the People, so that we can inform
| the various legislatures to adjust the law if the judicial
| system is not ruling to the will of the People.
| autoexec wrote:
| Even without AI it should be. Honestly the less AI has to
| do with giving people access to our laws and court records
| the better since the value of having that access would
| decline with hallucinated laws/interpretations/attribution.
| A post about how AI isn't even fit to write wikipedia
| articles just fell off the front page a few hours ago, and
| providing something like this to the public seems at least
| as important.
| macintux wrote:
| Electrical & building codes are also paywalled, IIRC.
| kooi wrote:
| Its outrageous.
|
| Thing which are public law should be publicly accessible.
|
| There's an online portal for NEC code book, but they made
| it awful, no search, no hyper links, the bare minimum.
|
| I used codex in computer mode to collect the relevant pages
| to my project. (Electricity to shed).
| burnJS wrote:
| I had this idea over 10 years ago but never finished it. I hope
| this takes off. I do fear it's not very practical for many big
| pieces of legislation which are often written in secret.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Don't worry about that. Even if we only saw voted-upon
| revisions in the Git history, it will still be a huge
| improvement.
|
| Version control for the public parts will make both public and
| secretive law-drafting better.
| EddieRingle wrote:
| Likewise, a younger, more idealistic me thought it'd be great
| to use a GitHub-esque platform for laws. Pull Requests to
| suggest laws, gated behind reviews/approvals, branches so each
| house could work on their own versions before finally
| reconciling and merging into the Code, literally.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Why should any bit of the lawmaking process be secret?
| dizzant wrote:
| Transparency has a cost. There are several good reasons, but
| my favorite is intellectual freedom. Policy makers would be
| much less likely to explore bold reforms or risky bipartisan
| compromises if their draft quality notes and correspondences
| were publicly tied to their political reputation. It takes
| significant work to produce successful legislation, and much
| of that work can be productively and safely done without
| direct public oversight. This is the same reason an
| individual might value a private journal.
|
| If you have a problem with your representative's behavior,
| call their office and ask about it. They will certainly have
| a reason. Tell them if you disagree, and vote when you can.
| autoexec wrote:
| > Policy makers would be much less likely to explore bold
| reforms or risky bipartisan compromises if their draft
| quality notes and correspondences were publicly tied to
| their political reputation.
|
| Only if those bold reforms weren't in the interests of the
| people they serve. Risky bipartisan compromises should
| still be transparent along with what was gained in exchange
| for them. If the people feel that the compromise wasn't
| worth it they should be empowered to vote accordingly come
| election time. It's the job of representatives to assure
| the people who elected them that they are doing a good job
| and if they can't do that they deserve to lose their
| position. Refusing to support bold reforms that the people
| they represent want, or refusing to compromise when it
| would be beneficial to voters would become just as costly
| to their career.
|
| > It takes significant work to produce successful
| legislation, and much of that work can be productively and
| safely done without direct public oversight.
|
| Often most of that work is done entirely for them by
| corporations and lobbying groups and "law makers" just vote
| how they are paid to vote without even reading the bill put
| before them. Just because something can be done in secrecy
| doesn't make that the ideal way to do it. We've have
| extremely poor results with the system as it stands right
| now, so a change to introduce more transparency and
| accountability seems like a very good idea.
|
| > This is the same reason an individual might value a
| private journal.
|
| A public servant representing the people by making edits to
| laws and performing the duties they were elected to carry
| out is nothing at all like someone keeping a private
| journal. Their work is not their personal affairs, it is
| the public's affairs. How that work is being done matters
| to the public. Legislators would still remain free to go
| home at the end of the day and write in their private diary
| all they like.
|
| > If you have a problem with your representative's
| behavior, call their office and ask about it.
|
| When their behavior is conducted in secrecy behind closed
| doors the public doesn't have the ability to hold them
| accountable for it, which is exactly why it takes place in
| secrecy. Increasing the public's ability to hold elected
| officials accountable by increasing transparency can only
| improve outcomes for voters, and it would certainty be
| inconvenient for elected officials who want to put their
| own interests above the interests of the people who elected
| them.
| dizzant wrote:
| > Only if those bold reforms weren't in the interests of
| the people they serve.
|
| This is my point exactly: the creative process is
| impossible to do perfectly. If you want to find potential
| policies to enact, you need to examine very many policies
| that don't work and aren't in your constituents best
| interest. Those get left on the table and not advanced to
| actual congressional actions, sparing the legislator
| scrutiny for their creativity.
|
| Some creative solution-seeking will happen in a
| bipartisan way through negotiation. I understand the
| desire to see the whole process, but removing the veil
| would change the behavior the participants. If every word
| were subject to partisan scrutiny from the wings, how
| could congresspeople possibly get anything productive
| done? See as evidence congressional committee hearings,
| in which the members spend significant time grandstanding
| for C-SPAN sound bites instead of productive questioning.
|
| > When their behavior is conducted in secrecy behind
| closed doors the public doesn't have the ability to hold
| them accountable for it
|
| This is obviously not true. Every bill has publicly
| documented sponsors and goes through a lengthy, public
| process with several rounds of procedural votes,
| committee approvals, amendment debates, etc. At some
| point there must be a minimum granularity of attribution.
| Track Changes from blank page to finished law would be
| useless anyway, because it would show some unpaid staffer
| actually typed most of the changes. Even Git history uses
| commits, and very mature projects like the Linux kernel
| revise their patches rather than keeping a detailed
| history of the patch creation. The champion who landed it
| and their reviewers are credited with the patch, as also
| in Congress.
|
| > Often most of that work is done entirely for them by
| corporations and lobbying groups
|
| The drafting and ideation? Sure! I wouldn't want it any
| other way. It's much better that we have an entire
| industry of people studying the law, finding solutions,
| and advocating their preferred options, rather than a
| group of Philosopher Kings making the law in isolation.
| You're also dramatically downplaying the effort of
| coalition building, balancing constituent pressure, and
| passing procedural hurdles that is required to take a
| bill all the way from draft to law.
|
| I think we may agree that provenance of bill text
| originating from outside of Congress could potentially be
| more transparent. But then again, the relevant interest
| groups are usually very well known by the time a bill
| reaches the floor anyway because that is their whole
| purpose, and they want to take credit for their
| victories. And "Monsanto drafted these provisions" is
| pretty far from the vision of absolute transparency and
| zero congressional privacy that you seem to be
| suggesting.
|
| Do you have other specific ideas to increase
| transparency? If bill sponsor attribution, public debate
| and amendment, and recorded voting record are
| insufficient to understand a legislator's actions, what
| would you suggest instead?
| Oarch wrote:
| Look into the debacle that happened when UpCodes tried to make
| building legislation widely available. They were sued for
| copyright infringement!
| alansaber wrote:
| I've expanded this and made it publicly available >
| https://github.com/lexifina/global-law /
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50283329
| iAMkenough wrote:
| Sounds neat, but not something a private company should be
| responsible for.
|
| If transparency is the goal, the entire codebase for this should
| be public domain and not profitable. Otherwise there's a profit
| motive to rewrite history.
| alansaber wrote:
| I've expanded this and made it publicly available >
| https://github.com/lexifina/global-law /
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50283329
| iAMkenough wrote:
| Neat! Are you going to add a LICENSE.md with CC0?
|
| https://creativecommons.org/public-domain/
| counters wrote:
| Major party foul for not calling this "legitslate"
| barrrrald wrote:
| Cool idea but I can't find anywhere on the linked page to try it?
| It reads like a neat concept but it's not clear if this is a
| thing they've actually made or not (or am I just missing
| something super obvious?)
| catskul2 wrote:
| Same. I even signed up thinking there would be an obvious way
| to reach the demo, but didn't find one.
| catskul2 wrote:
| Looks like they have not provided any public access. Seems to
| be an internal thing right now.
| alansaber wrote:
| Sorry about that. There is a small-scale mock-up
| https://lexifina.com/watch which is what was on the video.
| I'll provide full public access/forkability in a few hours,
| watch this space.
| alansaber wrote:
| I've expanded this and made it publicly available >
| https://github.com/lexifina/global-law /
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50283329
| pcblues wrote:
| I hadn't thought of using git to track the changes in
| legislation. This is a cool idea.
|
| In Australia, I spent a bit of time trying to work out how to
| find which politician voted for what (both at state and federal
| level), so that when elections come, you can single out the
| individuals who voted for what legislation. I think AI may make
| this easier, but the challenge is in not spamming the "free and
| open" access to the online record of our legislation.
|
| So far, it's probably a one-person $50K per year job to do this
| task manually, and the language of the public legislation record
| didn't lend itself easily to determining the laws or rights that
| actually changed when bills were passed into legislation. They
| are explicitly stated, but hard to distill with regexes, filters
| or other analysis tools (e.g. "Who voted to stop electric
| scooters going over 25km/h?") If you try reading the legislation,
| you will know what I mean.
|
| "A complete and open record of the proceedings of our parliament"
| still needs people spend a good chunk of time interpreting and
| summarising it (e.g. the media, commentators, etc) which means
| it's a time-consuming hobby or a paid gig.
| awesome_dude wrote:
| > In Australia, I spent a bit of time trying to work out how to
| find which politician voted for what (both at state and federal
| level), so that when elections come, you can single out the
| individuals who voted for what legislation.
|
| That's an interesting project - I am guessing it's only
| targeting federal level, but could also include state level
|
| The first problem I have in my mind is proxy votes, and votes
| that are made mandatory by the party they belong to - eg. a
| backbencher would struggle to go against the wishes of their
| party unless they felt it was worth risking their career over
|
| > "A complete and open record of the proceedings of our
| parliament" still needs people spend a good chunk of time
| interpreting and summarising it (e.g. the media, commentators,
| etc) which means it's a time-consuming hobby or a paid gig.
|
| https://www.aph.gov.au/parliamentary_business/hansard and
| (linked from that page)
| https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Chamber_docume...
| would likely be good places to start
| kneyed wrote:
| https://theyvoteforyou.org.au/
|
| > How does your MP vote on the issues that matter to you?
|
| previously covered on hn:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8485809
| chrysoprace wrote:
| https://theyvoteforyou.org.au/ is a good resource at a federal
| level, but I don't know of a state or local equivalent.
| bongofizzbuzz wrote:
| The same should be done for news articles. We should have full
| edit history of which words were interested why, etc.
| alansaber wrote:
| I've expanded this and made it publicly available >
| https://github.com/lexifina/global-law /
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50283329
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| The Hacker News Community (hah) needs to lobby hard to pass a law
| (what boostrapping!) to require the
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_the_Law_Revision_Cou...
| to maintain the repo as part of their duties, and do it
| retroactively for the entire history of the US Code.
|
| It's a simple idea; it's cheap; there are no outstanding
| technical questions; it benefits almost everyone. Let's get this
| done.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| why not just do it?
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Because I have want my government to use the right tool for
| the job.
|
| I don't want to privatize this core civic function to some
| NGO.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| It sounds lazy tbh. No one said privatize. It can be open
| source can't it?
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| It's easy and fun for volunteers to put in the effort
| _once_. It 's doing the work on an ongoing basis that is
| less fun and less motivating. The ongoing work --- done
| without modern tools --- is already that office's
| responsibility, so this should be too.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Who said anything about easy and fun?
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| What's lazy then?
|
| I took lazy to mean "waiting for the gov rather than
| doing it ourselves". I'm saying that may be true for the
| initial catch-up but it's not true for the work going
| forward.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _it benefits almost everyone_
|
| I want to see a practical benefit to maintaining this with
| public funds versus the usual redlines.
| AdieuToLogic wrote:
| >> The Hacker News Community (hah) needs to lobby hard to
| pass a law (what boostrapping!) to require the https://en.wik
| ipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_the_Law_Revision_Cou... to maintain
| the repo as part of their duties, and do it retroactively for
| the entire history of the US Code.
|
| > I want to see a practical benefit to maintaining this with
| public funds versus the usual redlines.
|
| The US government works _for_ the people and, as such,
| changes made to the US Code over time must be traceable,
| discoverable, and therefore justifiable by or condemnable to
| those who are responsible for said changes without fear or
| favor.
|
| That is as practical as it gets.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _changes made to the US Code over time must be traceable,
| discoverable_
|
| They are. The history of the USC is public. This is one way
| of visualizing it. It's good. But I want to see the
| advantage of this presentation.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50280101
| hk__2 wrote:
| > The Hacker News Community
|
| *from the US. Please remember that the Hacker News community is
| not limited to this single country.
| nish__ wrote:
| Y Combinator is based in the US.
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| Which has no relevance to how the HN community has grown.
| nish__ wrote:
| It definitely does...
| tonymet wrote:
| don't be jealous
| barney54 wrote:
| What do you see the value? What would this add? All of the data
| is currently available? What am I missing?
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Did you read the linked piece?
|
| The data is "there" in some some sense, but it is messy,
| coarse-grained, and arrives slowly.
|
| Once the office is familiar with Git, we can start the
| conversation about having the new version of the US code
| instantly ready when a bill is passed. In particular, rather
| than voting on the informal patch, congress should vote on
| the final result. (bills are patches, but votes should be on
| the new state with the patch applied.) Then the office merely
| supervises the Git repo, and is freed up to focus on other
| codification tasks, such as hyperlinking definitions,
| overseeing formalization of the tax code like France did,
| etc.
|
| Previous discussions often foolishly conflate version control
| with "no force pushing of any branch" and "all branches must
| be public". That is stupid. Vote trading will continue to
| make drafting happen in secret, since it is simple game
| theory that an "atomic transaction" of many possibly-
| unrelated things is an efficacious coordination mechanism.
| This is just about getting the final version and its already-
| public history cleaned up and mechanized to the greatest
| degree possible.
| LPisGood wrote:
| Wow! This is very cool. I had an idea for something very similar
| to this when I found out the US federal government offered API
| keys, maybe three or four years ago. I found that while Congress
| did list bill revisions as they were made the format and
| retrieval of these was not an easy task. The idea was that I
| wanted to look at any line of any bill and see who proposed it
| that particular line's inclusion.
|
| For the record, and feel free to steal it if you like it, I
| called it "G(overnm)it-blame"
| BrokenCogs wrote:
| Maybe at this point we should just git revert
| jcranmer wrote:
| I think it's useful to link to a lawyer's take on the utility of
| a similar tool that was built by somebody else here:
| https://bsky.app/profile/questauthority.bsky.social/post/3mj...
|
| The tl;dr is that doing git-style change-tracking of the
| legislation isn't as helpful in practice as you'd think
| (especially because a lot of the very basic change-tracking is
| already available in the existing tools that lawyers use!).
| layla5alive wrote:
| Being able to git blame politicians and such would be very useful
| indeed (at first..) :-)
| zaik wrote:
| Why only at first?
| adamdennis wrote:
| Wasn't this one of the original pitches for blockchain?
| bowmessage wrote:
| Not that I've ever heard.
|
| Why would one need a trustless distributed system to store
| document deltas published by an inherently trusted entity
| (federal government)?
| yieldcrv wrote:
| I put a lot of thought into this last decade, I find that some
| bills are big blocks of new text, and other bills are convoluted
| instructions to modify other blocks of existing law, sometimes
| saying "strike this word and that word" other times referencing
| just a subsection of another law. hyperlinks to that other law or
| a model of what the legal code would look like is necessary
|
| Agentically this could be done now, but it would still just be
| the tip of the iceberg
|
| You're looking at quantum states of law and regulations, and
| that's just for one jurisdiction
| aizk wrote:
| If you're like me and also eager for cool uses for git, I'll
| share a cool one I use -- try out git for your resume! Commits
| change as you progress in life, and make branches for
| individually tailored resumes.
|
| Blew my mind when I realized I could do that.
| driftnet wrote:
| If you maintain your canonical resume in Markdown this is easy.
| Branches for tailoring are a good idea. Modular blocks are not.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Without 64-bit time though, can't use it historically. Since
| current legislation is always changes built upon legislation from
| long before unix epoch, it kind of falls flat.
| nico wrote:
| I love this, and I feel every legal document (of which there are
| many, for example, a random one: insurance companies' policies)
| should have something like this (and no, Word is not good for it)
|
| Does it already exist?
| omoikane wrote:
| See also:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47625366 - United States
| Code (federal laws) in Git (2026-04-03, 15 comments)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47621591 - Every Law a
| Commit - US Law in GitHub (2026-04-02, 32 comments)
|
| I think it's parsing this data:
|
| https://uscode.house.gov/download.html
|
| Which was discussed here:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6135504 - The entire US Code
| is now online in XML (2013-07-31, 237 comments)
| kfogel wrote:
| NYT, 2007:
|
| "... Think of what version control software could mean for the
| Congress [...]. If bills were created under a system where
| strike-throughs and additions were carefully tracked, the public
| would know which legislator made which change to a proposed piece
| of legislation as it made its way through the Capitol.
|
| At last, there would be transparency in the legislative process.
| Best-case scenario, it would shame legislators from inserting
| language against the public interest and only meant to reward
| political contributors; at worst, it would make such insertions
| public and allow the voters to punish the politicians who made
| them. ..."
|
| (from
| https://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/23/business/media/23link.htm... )
| jonahhorowitz wrote:
| I've always wanted this. It's such an obvious idea when you're
| a software engineer.
| sixdimensional wrote:
| Same. What I would like to see is Git for non-technical
| users, built as a public platform that is open source,
| hosting this.
|
| I do think there are some Markdown-based open source projects
| that might fit the bill.
| p-e-w wrote:
| There are a million frontends designed to simplify Git for
| non-programmers. In fact, lots of office software now has
| version management built-in. Very few people use it. This
| isn't a technology problem.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| To be fair, version control built into office suits are
| often hidden away or have other UX patterns that aren't
| comfortable for nontechnical folk. So they either still
| get scared by it, or don't even know it exists.
|
| Yet there is a demand for version control for
| nontechnical people. And I know this because I've seen
| enough files called "copy of important thing" or
| "important thing 2".
| p-e-w wrote:
| > Yet there is a demand for version control for
| nontechnical people. And I know this because I've seen
| enough files called "copy of important thing" or
| "important thing 2".
|
| This demonstrates LACK OF demand for technical version
| control, since the system you describe has been used
| since forever and found to be good enough.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| No. It demonstrates nontechnical people adapting the
| skills they're familiar with to suit a requirement they
| have.
|
| It doesn't prove that they don't want a better solution
| should it have the right UX. And, as I said in my
| original comment, the current UX for version control in
| documents both sucks and is often hidden away where
| people might not even be aware it exists.
| sixdimensional wrote:
| Yes, thank you, I agree exactly with your comment. Track
| changes doesn't seem to have the right user experience
| for non-technical users.
| phoghed wrote:
| Track changes in office is used heavily. Version history
| in Google Docs also
| unsnap_biceps wrote:
| Wouldn't a wiki basically be exactly that?
| sixdimensional wrote:
| Yes, it is, but the issue is ease of use for non-
| technical users.
|
| I was trying to avoid naming any products on purpose,
| but, for example, there is a commercial product that is
| easy enough for most people and affordable that would
| work for this- and there are a few open source clones
| that come close.
|
| The open source clones are not quite polished enough for
| non-technical users, but they are the closest thing I can
| think of, basically crossing over a wiki + Markdown for
| knowledgebase creation with Git-like versioning.
| talon8635 wrote:
| They'd use some hyper-expensively-licensed Google/Microsoft
| doc web product far before even considering git
| p-e-w wrote:
| We don't need version control for legislative bills. We need
| journalists that track down who tried to insert what,
| summarize it, and present it to the public with context. That
| would satisfy the oversight purpose without getting lost in
| technicalities.
|
| Our problem is that the press isn't doing their job, not that
| legislation doesn't have a commit graph. The latter, even if
| it existed, would not fix the former.
| aspect0545 wrote:
| Why not both. I'm sure that more visibility would result in
| more requests for press inquiries.
| msdz wrote:
| Exactly, it'd make the press' work easier, and maybe
| enable more people or entities to look into this topic
| over all, too.
| teiferer wrote:
| A revision control system is a tool the journalists could
| use to achieve this. Commits to the 'enacted' branch could
| have commit messges documenting the context (when, how,
| why, who). Unmerged branches could represent proposed but
| ultimately rejected (or still in progress) changes with the
| same amount of meta data.
|
| Of course a tool itself doesn't solve the problem. You need
| somebody to use the tool. But the tool makes it easier to
| solve the problem.
| callmeal wrote:
| >Our problem is that the press isn't doing their job ...
|
| Well, it's practically impossible to get a person to do
| something when their paycheck depends on their not doing
| it.
| faangguyindia wrote:
| Until journalists can be paid under the table to mislead
| the public, the problem will persist. Almost anyone can be
| bought on a Friday night for the price of a few drinks and
| benefits.
| bahmboo wrote:
| I am confused. Someone put in place a system that would
| allow journalists or citizens to meaningfully engage with
| the law in a much better way than they can now.
|
| However you are proposing that journalists as a homogenous
| group do some extra work. I think that's a great thing but
| I don't get why you say the press aren't doing their job
| when they are at an historical low of compensation and
| respect.
|
| If sounds like you are outsourcing your rage at the
| legislature and the press and journalists are the problem?
|
| Sticking to the FTA someone made a first step in version
| tracking legislative texts but you do not think they've
| done enough?
| safety1st wrote:
| We need that too, but the ability to git diff changes to
| the law is a great win for democracy and transparency in
| 2026 because git is an interface that agents are experts at
| using. If you're a journalist, activist or anybody else
| doing the type of research you just described this makes it
| faster and easier.
|
| In the present day, mainstream journalists won't be
| meaningful advocates for democracy and the public interest
| any time soon. It's time to acknowledge that this idea is
| wishful thinking. The root cause is changes to the law like
| the Telecom Act of 1996 which allowed for the consolidation
| of old media under a few corporations.
|
| For many years these mainstream journalists have been
| required to support corruption, cronyism, the
| centralization of power, and the increase of corporate
| power in order to retain their jobs. The law needs to be
| changed before they can become a net benefit to society
| again.
| crabmusket wrote:
| > because git is an interface that agents are experts at
| using
|
| I'd actually argue that this is the wrong way around.
| Being able to git diff legislation is very good, but
| mainly for humans, who need tools to make work tractable.
|
| An agent will use whatever interface is available,
| including no interference, won't give up due to the task
| being too onerous, and can be scaled by paying for more
| tokens. It could simply brute force diff the raw text,
| writing bespoke Python and regexes, etc.
|
| LLMs make brute forcing intellect possible. It's humans
| who need finely crafted tools.
| zoobab wrote:
| I am sure with LLMs the time to craft those tools to
| fetch the data and put them back in a git repo (for
| example one repo per legislative project) would not be
| too hard to do.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Our problem is that the press isn't doing their job
|
| The problem is, barely anyone is willing to pay the press
| for doing this job.
|
| Outrage farming and clickbait make money, honest reporting
| does not.
| hvb2 wrote:
| > Our problem is that the press isn't doing their job
|
| The general public isn't willing to pay for this, so it's
| very hard to do this. Especially given that most of this
| isn't exactly going to generate tons of views.
|
| Let's be honest, in general, the public is very upset about
| all the injustice they perceive. But the public also lost
| all interest in the process, some can't even be bothered to
| vote once every other year....
|
| It's too easy to blame others for your own inaction
| dotancohen wrote:
| > But the public also lost all interest in the process,
| some can't even be bothered to vote once every other
| year....
|
| In the 1920s the German speaking world got a book whose
| first three chapters just hammer in how important it is
| for the average citizen to take an interest in his local
| politics. That book was subsequently banned by almost
| every European country in the decades since. I'm the only
| person I know who has personally read it, even though it
| is one of the most derided books in history.
|
| I highly recommend the first three chapters to anybody
| who thinks they don't need to understand their local
| politics.
| neutronicus wrote:
| Are you referring to Mein Kampf?
| 1718627440 wrote:
| What book are you referring to?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| To be fair, it was a major theme of Aristotle's, too.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _general public isn 't willing to pay for this_
|
| The rough truth is you don't need the general public to.
| Just the elites, broadly defined.
| hvb2 wrote:
| Because the general public does not, journalism and
| checking politicians isn't something you can do while
| breaking even. The result of that is that you need to
| have someone with a lot of money to back your losses.
|
| And here we are.
| Gormo wrote:
| I don't think that the problem with legislative
| transparency is that there aren't enough middlemen sitting
| between the public and the legislative process.
|
| I'm personally not interested in being dependent on the
| press -- which is just other people pursuing their own
| interests and assumptions -- to interpret artificially
| opaque sources, if those sources can just be made
| accessible instead.
|
| Having a dynamic and pluralistic press is a good thing, and
| we need more _investigative_ journalism, to discover what
| _isn 't_ visible to the public, but I'm not sure there's a
| lot of value in the sort of _interpretive_ journalism you
| 're proposing.
| refurb wrote:
| The system would be gamed by the politicians.
|
| Insert language you know will never get enough votes
|
| Don't strike out but add language to make it useless
|
| Plus the bill sponsor often makes changes others ask for, so
| the true author isn't noted
|
| It would be a mess and ignored by the public after a while
| lopis wrote:
| Git does allow multiple contributors on each commit. Of
| course people can lie, but it's a matter of policy in the
| end. Make it a crime to not add all contributors to a diff.
| 3form wrote:
| Every system gets gamed, and so is the current one. The
| goal is that the people can more easily stay informed. Even
| with mixed authors problem you highlight would be still an
| improvement.
| DavidSchor wrote:
| But there would be a papertrail that can be revisited. And
| journalists can access to keep people informed of systemic
| or major issues.
| xmprt wrote:
| There already is a papertrail. It's just that it's
| extremely convoluted to navigate. This isn't a technology
| problem.
| matwood wrote:
| Convoluted to navigate sounds like a problem that could
| be solved with technology...
| xmprt wrote:
| Could be? Yes. But I don't know if it's super clear that
| any existing technology would solve the problem without
| also introducing new process changes. For example, I can
| imagine a world where the laws are just a bunch of text
| files and instead of using git to make changes, we just
| add a new text file and there's a preamble that says that
| the law is superseded by any future laws. Laws also
| aren't as clear cut as code. We have tons of
| contradictory laws on the books today.
|
| What I'm getting at is that, if we need to make process
| changes anyway in order to actually make the technology
| work for us, then the real solution is in the process and
| not in the technology.
| somenameforme wrote:
| This is already regularly done. One side or the other will
| propose or amend a bill that they claim does [popular thing
| x] and then add in some clause that they know will get
| voted against, so they can then claim that [other side]
| voted against [popular thing x].
|
| This is often especially cynical because [popular thing x]
| is often something that neither party wants to pass. So a
| very recent example of this was an act against insider
| trading by politicians, that was bundled with a voter id
| law. Neither side wants to clamp down on insider trading
| from politicians, so the entire act was DOA. It was nothing
| but bread and circuses.
| blitzar wrote:
| Or just name the pile of slop "The Patriot Act" - then you
| can legally hang anyone treasonous enough to votes against
| whatever may be inside.
| sharpshadow wrote:
| The politicians wouldn't have the option to game it if
| additional data is pulled in automatically like lobbying
| disclosure filings, public watchdog databases, etc. for the
| final overview. A swift turn from limiting the total sugar
| amount in soda would look quite bad if the politician got
| lobbied by Big Soda.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _it would shame legislators from inserting language against
| the public interest and only meant to reward political
| contributors_
|
| You'd just got a system of favors for who inserts what
| language. You'd hand tough edits to your safe-seat colleagues
| and insert messaging amendments designed to get voted down for
| own comms.
|
| When a measure becomes a target yada yada.
|
| (Note: this proposal is for the U.S. _code_. Not bills. Git for
| the USC works.)
| franktankbank wrote:
| Huh, never thought of git as a "measure". Still don't.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _never thought of git as a "measure"_
|
| Git is a tool, or more accurately in this case, an
| interface. The measure is the attribution of edits.
| franktankbank wrote:
| > attribution of edits.
|
| I'm still not clear how that defines a specific metric.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Such a requirement would not do what you think it would. There
| would not be names legislator or even aids as commit authors.
| The commit authors would be members of the House Office of the
| Legislative Counsel[1].
|
| The House Office of the Legislative Counsel is non-partisan,
| impartial, and confidential. Whether transparency has merit or
| not, tracking provenance would make the office partisan. Is
| more partisanship in government not a concern?
|
| The second issue with transparency is that communication
| between legislators and legislative counsel member is subject
| to the attorney-client relationship. Breaking attorney-client
| privilege is a serious decision. Knowing how such a change
| would affect the organization and its members is not something
| to be taken lightly.
|
| A more convincing argument for transparency would address
| impartiality and confidentiality. This is pretty clearly a
| Chesterton's fence type situation where advocating to change a
| system should anticipate criticisms. Addressing opposition
| preemptively is an implicit demonstration of knowing why the
| system exists which is table stakes for changing it.
|
| 1. https://legcounsel.house.gov/
| zoobab wrote:
| The authors are lobbyists of big corporations nowadays.
| zoobab wrote:
| This is why I believe we should do something else than
| elections of politicians.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Go on?
| zoobab wrote:
| There are several alternatives, like for example a
| political party where 1000 random citizens are picked up
| for analyzing and voting on every file. Next file next
| 1000 batch of random citizens are picked.
|
| We could also let people vote directly on their own laws
| without intermediaries.
| Gormo wrote:
| Sounds like a sort of jury system added to the
| legislative process. That might actually be a workable
| idea as an additional safeguard/sanity check before bills
| can pass.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > Whether transparency has merit or not, tracking provenance
| would make the office partisan.
|
| Tracking who added what language is in no way partisan.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Agreed, that is just a factual error. One has to wonder
| about the motivation of that statement.
|
| It's like the people that complain their favoured
| politician has more scrutiny on them when actually that
| politician just commits lots of crimes.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| You don't have to wonder. You can just ask. Why leave
| motivations to speculation when a conversation is
| possible?
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| 1. The public will view it that way.
|
| 2. It will create an incentive structure that will reflect
| the goals of political parties.
|
| Transparency brings the office into the political sphere.
| Nothing in the political sphere escapes partisanship. It's
| pretty clear that no one knew this office existed before I
| brought it up and folks thought that lawmakers drafted
| their own bills. The fact that we're even now talking about
| it in terms of politics is evidence that it will devolve
| into partisan politics.
|
| I get your instinct - transparency is in general a net
| good. But the more public an office is, the more it is
| drawn into partisanship.
|
| Politics is especially prone to engineers disease and this
| is a great example of it. It assumes a technical solution
| in the spirit of transparency applies to complex human,
| social, and political domains where those frameworks do not
| neatly fit. When someone points out engineers disease, have
| some introspection before questioning their motives.
| franktankbank wrote:
| Sponsor of change should obviously be shown as at least
| partial author of the commit. Tag of "new book of laws"
| should show as authors all who voted yes.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| That's entirely fair
| kfogel wrote:
| Thank you for this informative comment, and I agree with the
| general idea in your Chesterton's Fence point.
|
| When the HOLC provides wording, they do so in response to a
| request from an elected member or that member's staff, right?
| What I'm getting at is that it doesn't matter whether
| provenance is found via the commit author or via some other
| change-associated metadata -- the key thing is making precise
| change provenance trackable and (perhaps after some
| predefined delay) public. This would mainly aid journalists.
|
| Is the HOLC currently functioning as an anonymizing service
| for changes to in-progress legislation? And if so, is that by
| design, or more by gradual and organic evolution?
|
| Fundamentally, if we can't get at that provenance information
| in a reliable way right now at all, then version-control-
| style tracking would be a pretty big qualitative change in
| how things are done: information that wasn't available,
| except through unofficial channels, would now be available
| (again, maybe with some time delay or whatever, but in the
| long run it would be available). On the other hand, if that
| information _is_ currently obtainable but is just not easy to
| obtain, then this would be more of an incremental
| improvement: since journalists and others with the requisite
| know-how could get the information right now, but maybe have
| to jump through hoops to do so, this would just reduce the
| number or height of the hoops.
|
| I don't know which of those two scenarios best describes
| reality, but maybe you do?
| citizenpaul wrote:
| 99% of the legislation changes are made by 20 something
| interns, on behalf of someone.
| Henchman21 wrote:
| Indeed, both the name of the intern and the attribution on
| behalf-of should be required in the signed commit.
| antihipocrat wrote:
| ..and the name of the lobby group that prepared it for the
| intern.
| zoobab wrote:
| That was the same for the software patent directive, we
| had leaks of amendments proposed by big companies, we
| could see that Members of Parliament were just copy
| pasting them.
| Henchman21 wrote:
| Agreed.
| paganel wrote:
| > the public would know
|
| By this point "the public" just doesn't care for this sort of
| stuff, we just want (stabler, for those still employed) jobs
| and day-to-day life that is not expensive as hell anymore. What
| the middle-class elites now call "democracy" has just become a
| _glasperlenspiel_ , i.e. nothing of real interest to us, the
| masses, just a social differentiator between said well-to-do
| middle-classes.
|
| More generally, the sooner us, the masses, spell it out that
| democracy is well and truly dead the better, that way maybe we
| can do something to alleviate our situation, but I'm afraid
| that won't happen anytime soon.
| imnotsuraboutth wrote:
| Bills are written in English but I'd view them as code. It's
| not interesting to track changes in code for outsiders. Sure,
| it's cool for programmers, but users of software do not care if
| you unrolled a for-loop and who did it. They don't even know
| what that is and the same holds for bills. We have journalists
| for that and nobody is willing to pay for that because nobody
| gives a shit about a functioning democracy. Now that's one hell
| of a problem git ain't going to solve.
| DanielHB wrote:
| The great promise of crypto-contracts was to be able to write
| rules as code and have them be deterministic (instead of
| requiring a judge to rule on it) and even have unit tests.
| Instead it seems we are moving towards a world where rules
| are written in English and judged by biased LLMs.
|
| I couldn't care less about crypto currencies, but crypto
| contracts had the potential to replace much (although not
| all) of the bureaucracy around governments and justice
| systems. I am very sad it didn't take off.
| zoobab wrote:
| "crypto contracts had the potential to replace much
| (although not all) of the bureaucracy around governments
| and justice systems"
|
| It's a matter of time.
| mcdonje wrote:
| There's a good chance it could have the opposite effect. The
| public doesn't pay as much attention to the workings of the
| government as donors do.
|
| It's essentially an extension of the Sunshine Act of 1976,
| which made congressional votes public. There were claims that
| before it was enacted, legislators were able to vote their
| consciences, but then lie to donors and tell them they voted
| for their interests instead of their constituents' interests.
|
| Since it passed, the public has been paying attention, but not
| like the donor class has been. Something needs to be not only
| bad, but have some sort of novel or salacious quality to make
| the news. If it's not near an election, people forget, if they
| paid attention to begin with. Donors pay attention.
| Representatives know this.
|
| Ultimately, the problem is the money in politics, but this sort
| of thing can exacerbate the effects.
| xxpor wrote:
| is money the problem or just that most people don't care
| about most things, but a few people REALLY care about a few
| things? There's plenty of groups without much money that
| still gum up the works because they're persistent.
| Gormo wrote:
| This is a basic concept of Public Choice Theory.
|
| People worrying about money in politics are overemphasizing
| the instrumentality of money, rather than the underlying
| structural incentives that tend toward special interests
| dominating complex issues.
|
| If money were removed from the equation, the concentrations
| of power, motivations to influence it, and asymmetries in
| those motivations will all continue to exist; political
| influence will just be exercised through other means, and
| some particular faction or class of people will still be at
| the sweet spot of having the greatest competence and the
| greatest motivation to apply those means.
|
| A lot of people are reluctant to acknowledge it, but this
| is inherent to politics itself, and there is no
| straightforward way to fix it, other than to limit the
| reach of political power.
| xxpor wrote:
| Thank you, this is a much more coherent way of saying it.
| snapplebobapple wrote:
| It's slightly more complex though isn't? Because the
| actual problem is how to limit the reach of political
| power while still having an effective government.
| WillowWithAWand wrote:
| In a vacuum I absolutely agree with you. In fact my
| PoliSci 101 prof defined politics as "who has power and
| how they use it" but in a system like ours where money
| also is a form of power (or at least a force multiplier
| of power) unto itself, money helps concentrate political
| power into fewer hands and magnify the ways they can use
| it.
|
| It certainly would be naive to think that simply "getting
| money out of politics" would "fix" things but it is still
| a desirable goal for anyone who, themselves, does not
| currently have extremely large quantities of money.
| Gormo wrote:
| How do you figure money itself as a source of power,
| independent of political influence?
| estearum wrote:
| Yeah the real answer is banning private funding from politics
| in as many ways as possible.
| tomaskafka wrote:
| As long as there are people who allocate billions with a
| sign of the pen, with zero personal responsibility and skin
| in the game, there will be whole industries dedicated to
| swaying their hand.
| estearum wrote:
| Right, and there can be laws that make their efforts more
| or less effective.
|
| For example, we could behead people convicted of
| corrupting or being corrupted. That would be a
| significant deterrent.
| kown7 wrote:
| While I like the sentiment, the law of unintended
| consequences will most likely strike back hard.
| estearum wrote:
| I don't think this is necessarily a good policy. I'm
| saying it's obviously blatantly untrue to suggest that
| just because people will always want to corrupt public
| officials, that they will be equally successful in all
| possible universes.
|
| It's also untrue to suggest that any intervention will
| necessarily create a worse outcome than the status quo.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _we could behead people convicted of corrupting or
| being corrupted_
|
| This has historically done nothing for corruption and
| everything for one-party rule.
| cael450 wrote:
| Yeah, all we really need to do is pass laws that make
| some of this corruption actually illegal instead of
| "constitutionally protected speech."
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| We need to amend the Constitution to strike pardon power
| and give the Congress the power to pass property taxes
| (aka wealth taxes) and regulate donations to campaigns,
| candidates, parties and partisan causes.
|
| We also need law establishing mandatory retirement for
| Congressmen and judges, including justices, and a system
| where each President appoints (with Senate consent) one
| and only one justice to SCOTUS. Finally, yes, pass
| McCain-Feingold, pass a SCOTUS ethics bill and make
| corruption charges easier to bring.
| rayiner wrote:
| In every country that regularly prosecutes elected
| officials, it becomes a political weapon that ultimately
| destabilizes the country.
| solid_fuel wrote:
| Wow, maybe the republicans should have considered the
| consequences before letting the Trump administration
| weaponize the DOJ.
|
| They didn't, and they own the consequences.
| rayiner wrote:
| This is an observation about the world in general, not
| U.S. politics specifically. Prosecuting elected officials
| basically means that you trust the bureaucracy more than
| voters. This has not proven to be a successful approach.
|
| We have been very lucky in the U.S. to avoid these
| problems. And it's not because nobody before Trump ever
| did anything rising to the level of paying off a porn
| star and calling it "legal expenses." It's because we
| have had a taboo against prosecuting politicians.
| solid_fuel wrote:
| > And it's not because nobody before Trump ever did
| anything rising to the level of paying off a porn star
| and calling it "legal expenses." It's because we have had
| a taboo against prosecuting politicians.
|
| Are you somehow under the impression that is the actual
| complaint about illegal behavior and weaponization of the
| government? You won't be able to contribute meaningfully
| to this discussion if you insist on pretending that the
| hush money payment is the limit of the criminality being
| discussed here.
|
| Please go do some research into the recent actions of the
| DoJ before trying to defend them like this, irrelevant
| whataboutisms will not move this conversation forward.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _every country that regularly prosecutes elected
| officials_
|
| The bar should be high. We've set it impossibly high. In
| terms of instability risk, corruption is currently
| causing runaway prosecutions.
| rayiner wrote:
| You can't police that. The only thing you can reliably do
| is allocate power. If you allocate power to prosecutors
| to prosecute elected officials, you've basically handed
| them the power to decide who people are allowed to vote
| for. This power gets abused in virtually every country
| where it's normalized.
|
| The safeguards within the justice system are appropriate
| for prosecuting individuals. They are not set up to
| handle matters of national importance that could way the
| direction of the country or deprive tens of millions of
| voters of their preferred candidate.
|
| If you don't believe that, then consider a hypothetical
| system where we allow prosecutions according to the
| standard you propose. Except only Texas courts and
| prosecutors have jurisdiction.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _If you allocate power to prosecutors to prosecute
| elected officials, you 've basically handed them the
| power to decide who people are allowed to vote for_
|
| Of course not. You've given them the power to present a
| case to a court.
|
| > _consider a hypothetical system where we allow
| prosecutions according to the standard you propose_
|
| Literally the current DoJ and FBI.
| rayiner wrote:
| > Of course not. You've given them the power to present a
| case to a court.
|
| Courts are designed to make decisions about individual
| cases, not ones that affect the trajectory of the whole
| country. It's simply the wrong tool for the job.
|
| > Literally the current DoJ and FBI
|
| Not even close. I don't think you can even find a
| prosecutor's office and jury pool that's as red as the
| DOJ and DC jury pool. AOC's district is MAGA by
| comparison at 33% Trump voters.
| solid_fuel wrote:
| The DoJ is literally run by trump's personal lawyer. You
| can play this game where you pretend it's all the same
| but the rest of us have eyes too.
| rayiner wrote:
| The DOJ has thousands of lawyers, almost all of whom are
| are the most ideological kind of democrats.[1] Law is a
| very specialized field that attracts a very narrow,
| highly unrepresentative slice of the population. Normally
| this is fine because the DOJ's work doesn't have much of
| a political valance.
|
| [1] Every DOJ person I know is a great lawyer, phenomenal
| at their job, and the most upstanding, orderly,
| conscientious type of American. But they can't be trusted
| with that much power over politics. It's like how you
| can't give the One Ring to Gandalf. You have to give it
| to the Hobbits.
| estearum wrote:
| And? Is "people [allegedly] have different political
| views than me" supposed to be equivalent to "this is the
| personal defense lawyer for POTUS?"
|
| Re your analogy: the power _is_ with Hobbits. We call
| them grand and petit juries.
| rayiner wrote:
| You can't give such an ideologically homogenous group of
| people that much power over elections and candidates.
| People can't be trusted to put aside their personal
| beliefs and value systems and act objectively.
|
| You're getting closer with juries. But the DC jury pool
| is extremely skewed. Its like Aragorn trying to get a
| fair trial in Mordor District Court.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _can't give such an ideologically homogenous group of
| people that much power over elections and candidates_
|
| Agree. We also can't tolerate the level of blatant
| corruption we have now.
|
| The solution is something more flexible than we have now,
| but still with a high bar. The check is the courts.
| America didn't fall apart when Bob Menendez went to jail.
|
| > _People can't be trusted to put aside their personal
| beliefs and value systems and act objectively_
|
| We don't need them to. Prosecutorial discretion means
| anyone can charged with anything. The test is whether it
| sticks. (The FBI already has, and has already abused, the
| powers you're concerned about.)
|
| Nobody is suggesting prosecutors be allowed to
| unilaterally jail politicians. If we trust voters to mind
| misconduct in office we should be able to trust them to
| read through charges.
| rayiner wrote:
| > Agree. We also can't tolerate the level of blatant
| corruption we have now.
|
| Your proposal would replace petty corruption with
| institutional capture of elections by the legal
| profession. That's a solution worse than the problem.
|
| > If we trust voters to mind misconduct in office we
| should be able to trust them to read through charges.
|
| You can't trust a jury of 12 people in a handpicked
| jurisdiction, where evidence is carefully screened by
| lawyers and judges, to make such consequential decisions
| for the whole country.
| estearum wrote:
| > You can't trust a jury of 12 people in a handpicked
| jurisdiction, where evidence is carefully screened by
| lawyers and judges, to make such consequential decisions
| for the whole country.
|
| Then it sounds like you need to amend the Constitution.
| Because that's how our system works. You are indicted by
| a grand jury in the jurisdiction in which you are accused
| of a crime and then you are put in front of a petit jury.
| Both sides agree on who the jury is.
|
| I'm struggling to understand the alternative system
| you're imagining.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Your proposal would replace petty corruption with
| institutional capture of elections by the legal
| profession_
|
| "Make corruption cases easier to bring" is "institutional
| capture of elections"? What?
|
| > _You can't trust a jury of 12 people in a handpicked
| jurisdiction_
|
| If your only issue is with the jury pool, don't give DC
| special jurisdiction. A Senator from Montana should be
| tried there.
|
| It also seems like you've forgotten about appeals.
|
| > _to make such consequential decisions for the whole
| country_
|
| We have an election system that's corrupted by social
| media, money and the electoral college. That means
| smaller groups of unaccountable people already make
| consequential decisions for the whole country.
|
| The folks on January 6th were idiots. But they believed
| they were saving their republic. A lot more people,
| today, believe we're at a precipice of losing it due to
| corruption.
|
| So yeah, if not a jury it could be something more
| extreme. (At a certain point, not today but not la-la
| land, it needs to be.) A state or district electing
| corrupt fuckwits endangers us all--the folks pushing for
| decertifying elections for shits and giggles set the
| precedent for this anyway.
| solid_fuel wrote:
| As expected, you ignore the actual complaint and just
| draw specious comparisons, making unsubstantiated claims
| that "most" of the people at the DoJ are totally
| democrats, trust me dude.
|
| I'll just leave this here, since this was the actual
| complaint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_Blanche
| rayiner wrote:
| The comparison was between the current "DOJ" and the
| Texas AG's Office. Not just the guy in charge, the whole
| agency. No matter who you put in charge, an agency of
| 10,000 lawyers who are overwhelmingly democrats is going
| to be very different in terms of partisan behavior than
| the Texas AG's office.
|
| As to the political makeup at DOJ, information about
| political donations at federal agencies is public.
| solid_fuel wrote:
| >> The DoJ is literally run by trump's personal lawyer.
| <<
|
| > As to the political makeup at DOJ, information about
| political donations at federal agencies is public.
|
| I'm sure many of the rank-and-file at the DOJ DO donate
| to democrats these days, after all the republican party
| has demonstrated rank criminality across the last ~ 15
| years, which is only getting worse. Anyone at the DOJ who
| still cares about criminal justice and the rule of law is
| going to likely support the only remaining party that
| isn't bending the knee to criminals and con men.
|
| It still doesn't change my original criticism - that the
| DOJ is run by Trump's personal lawyer - and it doesn't
| make your whataboutism suddenly relevant.
| estearum wrote:
| https://www.americanbar.org/advocacy/governmental_legisla
| tiv...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _It's simply the wrong tool for the job_
|
| It's all we've got. Hand waving away corruption when
| we've got destabilizing quantities of it today is
| unsustainable.
|
| > _don't think you can even find a prosecutor's office
| and jury pool that's as red as the DOJ and DC jury pool_
|
| Which is the judiciary (broadly) protecting us from rogue
| prosecutors.
| estearum wrote:
| The alternative being that a criminal can have perma-
| immunity by simply running for office or getting elected?
|
| > They are not set up to handle matters of national
| importance that could way the direction of the country or
| deprive tens of millions of voters of their preferred
| candidate.
|
| Right, they're set up to ascertain guilt of a crime. Why
| is it or should it be their concern if people want to
| vote for that person or if that person has political
| aspirations?
|
| You're advocating for criminal law to simply not apply to
| some people. That is fucking insane.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| The idea that American voters are a check on corrupt
| officials is dead on the side of the road.
| rayiner wrote:
| If American voters think the stakes are high enough to
| overlook corruption, isn't that their prerogative? Voters
| are the source of truth in a democracy.
| estearum wrote:
| No, that's why there's nowhere in any legal code in the
| US that "running for office makes you immune to criminal
| charges."
|
| These are two completely distinct systems. By design.
|
| I remember that you are a foreigner (from some corrupt
| third world county if I recall?) with a limited
| understanding of American legal history and political
| culture, but the idea that voters simply get to decide
| who is a criminal or not is flatly contrary to America's
| culture.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| > a system where each President appoints (with Senate
| consent) one and only one justice to SCOTUS.
|
| This is my only significant disagreement with you. This
| should be two justices:
|
| 1) An 18-year (9*2) term is more compatible with age
| limits than a 36-year term
|
| 2) Each Senate class gets to participate in the
| appointment of one justice.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _1) An 18-year (9*2) term is more compatible with age
| limits than a 36-year term 2) Each Senate class gets to
| participate in the appointment of one justice_
|
| I like No. 1.
|
| No. 2 seems overcomplicated compared with staggering
| retirements in the way Art. 1 SS 3 cl. 2 staggers the
| Senate. The Senate is also more diverse than the
| Presidency; limiting the latter would check against some
| dirty tricks.
| godelski wrote:
| I think everyone understands this already. But there's
| also a big difference between making it easy for
| industries to sway politicians and difficult. That's what
| actually matters.
|
| To put it another way, I still put a lock on my door even
| though lockpicks exist. I still use passwords on my
| accounts even though people could guess or brute force
| them.
|
| Don't trivialize things to uselessness
| Gormo wrote:
| It's amazing how you've managed to position "politicians were
| pursuing their own hidden agendas and then lying about it" as
| a desirable state of affairs.
|
| It sounds like they were defrauding people into giving them
| donations under false pretenses, and the transparency
| measures were effective at mitigating that.
|
| There's quite a lot of strange bias in your comment: the
| unjustified disjunction between "constituents" and "donors",
| the concept of a "donor class" as some singular bloc rather
| than an arbitrary aggregation of anyone who donates on behalf
| on all sides of all issues, the idea that donations are more
| important than the actual votes, etc.
| JoBrad wrote:
| My read was that the people who are getting fleeced aren't
| paying enough attention.
| Gormo wrote:
| That seems like an assumption, and a counterintuitive
| one: wouldn't you expect someone getting "fleeced" by the
| political system to be motivated to pay attention due to
| that very fact?
|
| If you have a system of open transparency, then everyone
| who is motivated to pay attention has the means to do so.
| If they're not paying attention, it means they're not
| sufficiently motivated, and are _choosing_ not to pay
| attention, not being constrained artificially.
|
| This seems to be converging to some sort of "false
| consciousness" argument, where someone speculatively
| projects motivations and intentions onto other parties,
| then criticizes those other parties for not acting in
| accordance with the motivations strangers have projected
| onto them.
|
| Needless to say, these sorts of arguments are utterly
| disingenuous, and in this case, somewhat ironic, because
| the people arguing that outcomes should conform to their
| speculative ideologies -- even in defiance of what the
| public themselves are manifestly choosing -- are
| themselves special interests trying to exert their own
| influence over politics.
| lirolero wrote:
| that's retarded
| klrefg wrote:
| > motivated to pay attention has the means to do so.
|
| Yes, exactly, people who profit directly from certain
| decisions can afford to spend a lot more time and
| resources on this than ordinary voters.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| > It sounds like they were defrauding people into giving
| them donations under false pretenses, and the transparency
| measures were effective at mitigating that.
|
| There are no pretenses in political giving (at least at the
| U.S. federal level), because it is illegal to tie a
| donation to a particular position, vote, or action by the
| politician. It's called a quid pro quo and is the test for
| whether a donation is a bribe.
|
| In the U.S. the political system is based on people, not
| positions or policy. Donations to a politician are to the
| person. It's not a proxy for buying an outcome.
|
| In practice, of course people are going to support
| politicians who they like and think agree with them. But
| under the law, a politician can't rip you off by taking
| your money and then voting contrary to your desires.
| Gormo wrote:
| Which makes the initial promise to vote a certain way in
| exchange for donations itself illegal. That seems fine.
| So what is the problem with transparency, again?
| snowwrestler wrote:
| What initial promise? You've fabricated something that
| was not in the comment you replied to.
| Gormo wrote:
| This subthread is a discussion about pertains to
| politicians misrepresenting their voting intentions in
| order to get donations. My comment was a response to an
| argument that allowing politicians to do this is a good
| thing because it allows them to vote their "consciences"
| while pretending otherwise to people donating to them.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| > This subthread is a discussion about pertains to
| politicians misrepresenting their voting intentions in
| order to get donations.
|
| It is not. You're not reading carefully enough.
| ninalanyon wrote:
| > the test for whether a donation is a bribe.
|
| Donations are always bribes.
|
| > Donations to a politician are to the person.
|
| Isn't that how bribery is normally done?
|
| > It's not a proxy for buying an outcome.
|
| Perhaps not precisely, but it is a proxy for attempting
| to influence an outcome.
|
| > under the law, a politician can't rip you off by taking
| your money and then voting contrary to your desires.
|
| Isn't that in conflict with:
|
| > it is illegal to tie a donation to a particular
| position, vote, or action by the politician.
|
| Are you saying that if I give a politician money and
| express my desire that they are then legally bound to
| vote according to my desire? Sounds like buying votes;
| I'm pretty sure that's not condoned by the law.
| catlifeonmars wrote:
| In practice there is a donor class and constituent class
| who are largely not the same set of people. The point
| you're missing is how the donor class is instrumental in
| influencing the actual language that goes into the laws,
| this happens peripheral to the democratic process. For
| example, a spending bill where the language favors one
| vendor over others because that vendor paid to submit their
| suggested language. This is not hypothetical btw.
| onefiftymike wrote:
| I don't know what the answer to public votes is. I see the
| benefit in them voting their conscience. But I also see how
| they can vote against my interests and then lie through their
| teeth that they are helping me if I can't see their record.
|
| But voting today is such a performative act for them. There
| are great pieces of legislation that can't pass because
| someone has labeled it as radical so one side or the other
| can't be seen with their name on it so they don't pass it
| even though they know it is good and would benefit their
| constituents.
| yeahwhatever10 wrote:
| Because donors can't just count?
| sbseitz wrote:
| The politicians don't either, the lobbying groups do it :)
| tern wrote:
| Yeah, the right mental model might be:
|
| - The donor class is really in charge, and completely
| unaccountable
|
| - Public servants are our representatives in a fight against
| them
|
| - Protecting them from exploitation by the donors is in our
| interest
| codethief wrote:
| I doubt this would work.
|
| Git commits get rebased, squashed, cherry-picked and edited
| retroactively, written during pair or mob programming sessions
| or rewritten during code review. And we also know that commit
| messages often suck. As a result, commits almost never tell you
| the full story about who _exactly_ contributed, in what order
| or why.
|
| The process is even messier when writing new bills. They get
| passed around between different departments, discussed & edited
| in various committees, etc.
|
| Sure, you could force all participating parties to use git,
| prevent them from force-pushing or rewriting history even on
| their "feature branches", get them to sign their every commit,
| etc. But what you'd then likely just end up with is most
| negotiation & editing happening out-of-band.
|
| Besides: At the end of the day it's the (majority of the)
| parliament that enacts a given law, so in my book they are all
| responsible, even if in practice laws get written by a small
| subset of people.
| franktankbank wrote:
| I'm blown away by the hand wringing of this. Someone would be
| forced to answer for the way they voted and inserted
| language. It makes it harder to do what you complain about
| because someone is going to take a hit. If its a little guy
| he might lose the next election. If its a big guy, eventually
| these things add up. Not sure what unintended consequences
| might appear. It sounds like you are resigned to the worst
| fate right now.
| mdup wrote:
| Shameless plug: I built this for French law
|
| https://juriblio.fr/pourquoi-juriblio
|
| It shows git-like diffs plus an AI summary of what changed.
| There is no author attribution though - I'm not sure there is a
| business use case for it, lawyers don't care about who wrote a
| specific law.
| deepsun wrote:
| And also unit tests for edge cases and loopholes in laws.
| duxup wrote:
| Do legislators make the changes piece by piece like code
| themselves or their staff do it?
|
| I always assumed they negotiated and then some group who made
| the deals wrote it all up.
| noja wrote:
| It's a nice idea, but isn't it a bit pointless if the law is not
| being applied?
| hk__2 wrote:
| Is git pointless for code that is not run?
| ericfrederich wrote:
| ... And the tax code written in Python
| AustinDev wrote:
| AI explainer videos are actually pretty good. Good usage.
| demibabs wrote:
| When I read AI-generated text, my eyes just start glazing over...
| it really is hard to read.
|
| The idea is cool though.
| silisili wrote:
| Same. I don't know if it's the word choices or just me
| recognizing it as AI and subconsciously feeling cheated.
|
| As an aside, my city FB group(small town, basically the local
| forum and news) has been absolutely flooded with AI 'flyers',
| and I have the same reaction. I can't put my finger on the
| exact reason, maybe the busy-ness, but they're repelling to my
| eyes.
|
| Luckily after about 6 months of this now they're starting to
| get heavy pushback.
| hathawsh wrote:
| I've found that AI-written text consistently fails to
| comprehend the context. It either assumes there's little
| context available, so it writes too much, or it assumes the
| reader has all the context, so it writes too little. Human-
| written text has those problems far less often.
|
| I hope the LLM builders are paying attention and they add
| some kind of step in the process that causes the system to
| reflect on its assumptions about context and work to refine
| its understanding of the context before generating output.
| mrinf1nity wrote:
| My brain instantly turns off from reading it too, you're not
| the only one.
| bottled_poe wrote:
| > Deepseek, refactor this repo to simplify the code. Make no
| mistakes.
| alanwreath wrote:
| I wonder if there are any public sources for any of this data at
| a federal level? And do any of them still hold the older now
| versions?
| nomilk wrote:
| Brilliant! Now do it for companies' T&Cs please!
| bad_username wrote:
| Law is programs running on humans.
| timwis wrote:
| DC did this years ago, too: https://github.com/DCCouncil/law-xml
|
| Someone set it up for Philly and Baltimore too, but I can't seem
| to find it.
| zoobab wrote:
| I proposed Git and Markdown instead of XML for EU law making in
| the European Parliament, they went with their own custom web
| editor to manupilate XML. And failed.
| scronkfinkle wrote:
| I've been working on this problem for several months now:
| https://www.wordstodata.com/
|
| A surprising amount of tracking and diffing in legal texts is
| actually very different to git. It's a trap to assume software
| version control fits the needs for legal work.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Could you give an example of the poor fit?
| scronkfinkle wrote:
| Let's say you have some case law, and to know if it's
| relevant you need to pull the primary law/codes and
| regulations .You also need to know when the correct versions
| of everything are, so the case law needs to resolve to the
| correct version of the correct piece of legislation. "What is
| an atomic unit of legislation?" is also fuzzy as amendments
| will both move and edit named blocks of legislation at once.
| It's a big messy very hard to track pile of moving targets,
| and you need to account for the temporal aspect while linking
| documents not only to the changes but also to documents at
| certain revisions. Standard git and other version control has
| trouble expressing many of these concepts, and while it could
| be hacked in, I have found it more effective to create a
| purpose-built tool for the job.
| holtwick wrote:
| German Constitution "Grundgesetz" on Github with proper time
| stamps https://github.com/c3e/grundgesetz
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Hat tip. I didn't understand what you meant by "with proper
| time stamps", until I opened the page and saw "57 years
| ago"(!).
| cco wrote:
| Given that chicken scratch in the margins gets into bills that
| are voted upon, it seems unlikely that this would be accepted by
| Congress. Love it though.
| ekns wrote:
| I'm doing this as open source for all amendment-driven law for
| the world. Finnish/Estonian law basically solved now but US/UK
| are a lot more complex to do correctly for some reason.
|
| Now major version coming within 1 month probably with many
| architectural changes. The thesis is that it's basically all
| doable as a compiler but there may be certain cases which are
| irreducibly ambiguous and need human/AI to adjudicate them. The
| rest must be deterministic.
|
| https://github.com/eliask/lawvm
| codethief wrote:
| Cool project! I take it "LawVM" as a name and "frontend" as a
| term are plays on LLVM and its different frontends?
|
| Two suggestions: 1) Handwrite the website (mainly the copy but
| also the design) instead of letting Claude do that. Right now
| it is really hard to read and comprehend. 2) Drop the
| "frontend" terminology. Even if it makes sense from a technical
| perspective, people working in the legal field (who I suppose
| you want to reach) will likely find it confusing.
| ekns wrote:
| Yeah, like LLVM. Compiler for legal text-state -> structural
| analogy to other compilers (just need to reverse-engineer the
| exact specifications at the same time).
|
| I think I'll call it "frontend" still internally but I'll
| look for better terminology.
|
| Agreed re the website. Initially had a simpler website and
| well, I guess I was trying to achieve something re getting
| actual jurisdictions interested on adopting it and gauging
| how much energy to spend on this in general.
|
| Hopefully one day soon my other projects are a lesser
| priority so I "get to" do the websites again, and maybe
| figure out what I'm even trying to communicate, exactly or
| achieve with the website. Hopefully global adoption
| eventually.
| alancm wrote:
| there's such a system that's been deployed in various
| jurisdictions in the US called the archive framework:
| https://github.com/openlawlibrary/taf
|
| it was built by academics deeply familiar with the security and
| usability of git and secure tools.
| codingdave wrote:
| I've been working with government entities for document
| management for 15 years now, writing software that does exactly
| what we are talking about - versioning, tracking, publishing
| legislative records both through the authoring and approval
| cycles and then to the public. I have not worked at the federal
| level, but with small government - school districts, small towns
| etc.
|
| Those years tell me 2 things:
|
| 1) Yes, absolutely version control for legislation is critical.
|
| 2) That doesn't mean Git is the right answer.
|
| Since I don't work at the federal level, I don't know what system
| they use, but I do know that their workflow is already based on
| specific changes - they will write up the changes to a document,
| then apply the changes and publish a new document. Those
| documents are posted on congress.gov. So they do have a
| versioning workflow and public accessibility, just not the same
| style as software devs are used to. I'm sure it could be
| improved, but I'm not sure forcing them into our working style is
| the right answer.
|
| The real goal here is not "Use Git". That is an implementation
| detail, and one that has also been presented and discussed quite
| a bit in my niche of the industry. Mostly, it is unwanted. Or was
| unwanted the last time the discussion went around. Git makes
| sense to software engineers, but not to the general public, and
| not to any of the document authors I've worked with. Maybe we can
| add a UX layer to fix that, but that isn't the bigger point...
|
| What we want is to work towards the actual goals: For the
| tracking to be more detailed, with more transparency including
| not only authorship of the change, but the source of the change.
| And presumably, some commentary as to why the change was made.
| Then all of that should be available to the public.
|
| If git works as a data structure that supports a solution that
| meets those goals, fine. I'm not anti-git. But when designing
| solutions, we need to start from the goals of the system, not the
| data layer. And we need to design solutions that the document
| authors will actually use, not force them to work like us.
| hk1337 wrote:
| git seems like it sounds good in theory or on the surface but
| not once you go to start to try and implement it.
|
| It might be interesting to have a git mirror as a means of
| searching bills and changes but not as the source of truth.
| amai wrote:
| See also for german law: https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze
|
| Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be maintained anymore.
| amai wrote:
| Also see https://github.com/c3e/grundgesetz-dev
|
| It is also unmaintained since many years.
|
| But is using infrastructure from an American company to store
| German laws really a good approach?
| ShadowOfThePit wrote:
| You don't strictly need git for it.
|
| In Switzerland, at least at the federal level, and since 2020,
| laws are created in HTML too. You can compare between versions as
| well as languages.
|
| Swiss Constitution, under "Tools" click on "Version comparison" -
| https://www.fedlex.admin.ch/eli/cc/1999/404/en
|
| I tired to do something similar, it's somewhat okay (In german)
|
| https://shadowofthepit.github.io/Projekt-Gesetzvergleich/Bun...
| jbrun wrote:
| Cool project, good thread. Tracking activity in the US is a big
| challenge. A company we built helps hundreds of non-profits try
| to keep track of the happenings at the Federal and State level.
| States are actually where most of the game is played out these
| days. Let us know what you think of https://billtrack50.com
| Avijit_Thawani wrote:
| Need this but in GitHub UI, with merged/unmerged PRs and comments
| (debates) and diffs.
| jimmydoe wrote:
| nice visual, but kinda pointless.
|
| These code run on meat. Meat is not silicon, and it executes same
| code very differently. President can be king, etc.
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| Love this!!!
| katelynsills wrote:
| Very cool! I did something similar for the Stanford Hackathon in
| April:
| https://bsky.app/profile/katelynsills.com/post/3mjdtm27jvc2j
| hereme888 wrote:
| Logical and useful product. Good job.
|
| Hope you get a good govt contract if that's an aim.
| delusional wrote:
| I can't help but feel like this is the wrong way to interpret
| legislation. The Code isn't some sort of program you run to get
| your outcome. There's people and "intent" and societal vibes
| involved. Amendments end up bearing on each other, and changes to
| one law might change the relative weighing of it related to some
| other law.
|
| It's all messy human stuff that I don't think "diff" handles all
| that well.
| westurner wrote:
| nickvido/us-code: "United States Code as a Git repository --
| check the commit history, view diffs. Data starts in 2013."
| https://github.com/nickvido/us-code
|
| us-code/uscode/title-18-crimes-and-criminal-procedure
| /chapter-033-emblems-insignia-and-names.md :
| https://github.com/nickvido/us-code/blob/c8080f872443ce8ff54...
| SwamyM wrote:
| I can't seem to find this but I remember Code for America or
| another organization like that was working on something similar,
| back in the Obama era. I want to say it had Madison in the name.
| Anyone know what I am referring to?
| giovannibonetti wrote:
| Related to the topic of US law in Git, in another HN discussion
| on the front page someone posted a Git repository with the US tax
| model as code, including some Lean code for verifying the
| consistency of everything. It seems very useful to automate tax
| filing:
|
| https://github.com/emmilco/us-tax-model
| tacone wrote:
| Awesome.
|
| I've dreamed of having or making something like that for Italy.
| Laws should be kept in Git. In Italy changes are published as
| amendments (patches), and for what I know _there 's no official
| consolidated version_ of the law corpus.
|
| Consolidated laws (first draft with all the amendments applied)
| are sold in books by private companies, who manually update their
| corpus with every new amendment.
|
| Git sounds such a natural choice for laws. Citizen have the right
| to read their laws and inspect changes without paying a dime, and
| now it's possible and perfectly achievable.
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