Live data from Hacker News

All 104 amendments to the Constitution of India as Git commits

github.com

21–30 of 91 posts

Re: All 104 amendments to the Constitution of India as Git commits

#22
post #20

I look forward to the day when constitutional amendments are pull requests.

Not just constitutional amendments, legal documents of all kinds would benefit from standard formatting and version control. One difficult challenge is that text-line based diffs don't work well for free-form text documents. Line length, line breaks, paragraph breaks, list formatting, etc. are very ad-hoc in most legal documents.

If diff is not enough, you have wdiff. :)

Re: All 104 amendments to the Constitution of India as Git commits

#23
post #4

I always love these sort of things. Here's the same for the US constitution: https://github.com/JesseKPhillips/USA-Constitution As a bonus, this one attempted to backdate the commits in a cyphered way (git dates are unix timestamps so the author needed to get clever to do anything before t=0 in 1970).

> git dates are unix timestamps so the author needed to get clever to do anything before t=0 in 1970

More specifically, git dates are unsigned timestamps with an epoch in common with Unix timestamps.

The big difference is that Unix timestamps are signed and have no problem whatsoever backdating to 1776.

Re: All 104 amendments to the Constitution of India as Git commits

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially look at the restrictions on courts!

I did Ctrl+F for "speech" and "press" and did not find anything in https://github.com/prince-mishra/the-constitution-of-india/c...

oh, I meant "courts" not press. Let me correct the comment.

I was especially referring to https://github.com/prince-mishra/the-constitution-of-india/c...

This amendment to Article 368 essentially gave the legislature unrestricted power to amend the constitution without fear of a judicial review.

Re: All 104 amendments to the Constitution of India as Git commits

#25
post #21

Is the official version in English? Are there authorised translations to other languages spoken in the sub continent?

Only ''authoritative'' translation into Hindi but not for any other language from English. See 58th amendment of 1987. You may find unofficial translations though.

Re: All 104 amendments to the Constitution of India as Git commits

#26
post #21

Is the official version in English? Are there authorised translations to other languages spoken in the sub continent?

Yes, the original constitution was drafted in English and the full official text of the Constitution in English, available here: https://www.india.gov.in/my-government/constitution-india/co...

However, Amendment 58 (https://github.com/prince-mishra/the-constitution-of-india/c...) made sure Hindi translations exist Hindi version here: https://www.india.gov.in/hi/my-government/constitution-india...

I am not sure about authoritative versions in any other language.

Re: All 104 amendments to the Constitution of India as Git commits

#28
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An amendment in the Indian Constitution is an act/law/bill in itself. It does modify the core document (the constitution) but it has an independent existence. In that sense, one could argue that every "amendment" is a bugfix, feature-request of sorts. Debatable both ways. I personally like the idea of independent commits better as the "git browse" UIs handle individual commits better.

It’s a joke about git commit --amend.

lol, I took it too seriously then. I thought it to be a reference towards squashing all amendments into one commit.

Re: All 104 amendments to the Constitution of India as Git commits

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did Ctrl+F for "speech" and "press" and did not find anything in https://github.com/prince-mishra/the-constitution-of-india/c...

oh, I meant "courts" not press. Let me correct the comment. I was especially referring to https://github.com/prince-mishra/the-constitution-of-india/c... This amendment to Article 368 essentially gave the legislature unrestricted power to amend the constitution without fear of a judicial review.

There is no judicial review for amendments to the US constitution either. In the US the job of the courts are to interpret and apply the constitution. It's not their role to write it or constrain the writing of it.

Re: All 104 amendments to the Constitution of India as Git commits

#30
post #23
post #4

I always love these sort of things. Here's the same for the US constitution: https://github.com/JesseKPhillips/USA-Constitution As a bonus, this one attempted to backdate the commits in a cyphered way (git dates are unix timestamps so the author needed to get clever to do anything before t=0 in 1970).

> git dates are unix timestamps so the author needed to get clever to do anything before t=0 in 1970 More specifically, git dates are unsigned timestamps with an epoch in common with Unix timestamps. The big difference is that Unix timestamps are signed and have no problem whatsoever backdating to 1776.

I wouldn't say "no problem whatsoever." Lots of things encode Unix time as a 32 bit signed integer, which can't date back further than 1901.

Any fixed-with type is going to have a lower- and upper-bound; whether it has a sign or not doesn't change that.

If git was trying to choose a bound for a 32 bit timestamp, I think 1970 is a reasonable starting point; doubling your future space is more important than covering space in the past. If it's 64-bit, though, then it's kind of silly to not just envelop the entirety of human history with all the room you've got (as a 64 bit signed integer with 0=year 1970 does).

Post reply on HN