Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph

abstimmung.eu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 179 posts

Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph

#91

Post by dopa42365 »

mrweasel wrote: post #84
nikeee wrote: post #16

There are also a repository containing some laws in markdown format on GitHub. They even used PRs for actual changes proposed by the parties in the parliament. Also, the commits have their proper date, so you can `git blame` on the laws and even see which president signed-off that change. Sadly, it is unmaintained. https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze

German laws might work different, but I'm not really under the impression that software version control is really that compatible with law making. In source code we replace or modify the parts that doesn't work in place. Many laws does not work like that, they are a labyrinth of add ons. A new law is introduced with wordings like "This replaces the words "small businesses" with "nuclear rockets" in the law on "Workpl…

>German laws might work different

Ja, there must be order.

Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph

#92

Post by masklinn »

harvey9 wrote: post #90
amai wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These wordings are basically a manual description of a diff. They wouldn't be necessary if version control would be used for laws. I actually think version control is an absolute necessity for laws.

Might work in some systems but England has Case Law stacked on top of statutes. That's tricky to turn back into code.

Case law is basically monkey-patching (or wrapping / decorating). It’s part of the running law but does not modify the law itself in—source.

Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph

#94

Post by tapia »

jandinter wrote: post #74
nikeee wrote: post #16

There are also a repository containing some laws in markdown format on GitHub. They even used PRs for actual changes proposed by the parties in the parliament. Also, the commits have their proper date, so you can `git blame` on the laws and even see which president signed-off that change. Sadly, it is unmaintained. https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze

I maintain a repository with all German legal acts which is up to date: https://github.com/jandinter/gesetze-im-internet I scrape the official website ( https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de ) once a week. The repository contains the "official" XML files with a formatting that is more focussed on presentation than on the logical structure of the legal acts, unfortunately ( https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/dtd/1.01/gii…

Nice work. Maybe you could do some preprocessing of the XML data, so that you actually have a diff of the content and not the whole XML block.

Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph

#95

Post by yard2010 »

ekianjo wrote: post #37
slt2021 wrote: post #29

I would love to see more governments operate on a Git-first basis, so that each and every decision/contribution can be tracked online for transparency. For example in USA we would have budget ceiling crisis, and both parties try to ram through a law to bump up the debt ceiling "to prevent government shutdown". It is being sold as a measure to keep government afloat and running, and is usually ran through pre-holiday…

> can be tracked online for transparency Government and officials will fight to the teeth to avoid accountability and transparency because that's where the money and power is.

Some people are motivated by ideology rather than greed, which makes stuff a lot more interesting.

Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph

#96

Post by sc11 »

amai wrote: post #89
kuschku wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the primary difference between common law and civil law countries. In Germany for example, there are regular laws (if you need to know what's legal and what not, these are the ones you read) and change laws (Änderungsgesetze), which usually read like "Law XYZ, Paragraph 5a, Sentence 3 is changed to read as follows: '...', Sentence 7 is appended with '...', Sentence 8 is removed" So at any time, you've got a cl…

> "Law XYZ, Paragraph 5a, Sentence 3 is changed to read as follows: '...', Sentence 7 is appended with '...', Sentence 8 is removed" That is basically a manual description of a git diff.

With the main difference being that you don't get an actually usable visual diff for free but instead have to buy those from third party vendors to make any use out of the manual diffs.

Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph

#97

Post by rob74 »

sam_lowry_ wrote: post #83

Let us not confuse git and Github, the later belonging to a reviled US monopoly.

I used to revile (can you use this verb this way?) M$ in the 1980s/1990s as well, but at the moment I could think of several tech companies that I like even less. And yes, technically they can still be considered a monopolist because of Windows, but it has lost a lot of its significance...

Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph

#98

Post by hnben »

codedokode wrote: post #35

I remember reading about someone simply adding legal texts to git. This is pretty much useless. I think that people who do this never saw a commercial legal database (or how it is called). What one usually need, is for example, to have cross-references, i.e. when a law contains phrase like "the certification is issued by a relevant authority", you want to have the "relevant authority" wrapped in a hyperlink pointing…

iirc some european countries are currently exploring the idea of "law as code", i.e. law in a machine-readable format that can be parsed algorithmically. iirc austria already made some progress by converting some of their lawbooks to such a format. (I remember being in a presentation about that topic, and I explicitly asked about some actual laws being converted, and they actually showed some of these laws, but I can not find publicly available sources I could link, except some general corporate statements like this https://wwwdev.unisys.com/our-clients/advancing-public-servi... ). EU seems to work on something similar, e.g. https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/endorse...

Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph

#99

Post by pbmonster »

rob74 wrote: post #97
sam_lowry_ wrote: post #83

Let us not confuse git and Github, the later belonging to a reviled US monopoly.

I used to revile (can you use this verb this way?) M$ in the 1980s/1990s as well, but at the moment I could think of several tech companies that I like even less. And yes, technically they can still be considered a monopolist because of Windows, but it has lost a lot of its significance...

Windows 11 hardware requirements alone top most things the other corps have done over the last decade.

Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph

#100

Post by ZuLuuuuuu »

nikeee wrote: post #16

There are also a repository containing some laws in markdown format on GitHub. They even used PRs for actual changes proposed by the parties in the parliament. Also, the commits have their proper date, so you can `git blame` on the laws and even see which president signed-off that change. Sadly, it is unmaintained. https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze

This kind of digitization is great.

I don't know if they are doing it, but I always thought that it should be easy for regular citizens to see the historical reasons why a law or regulation exists. Because there is sometimes a good reason why a regulation exists, but nobody knows it.

Post reply on HN