Spanish legislation as a Git repo • Hacker News Board

Re: Spanish legislation as a Git repo

#151

Post by 0x3f » Sat, Mar 28, 2026, 4:13 PM UTC

Esophagus4 wrote: post #26

j-bos wrote: post #4

This is brilliant. I wish this were available for all legislations. There's so many inefficiencies that are trivially solved with existing tech frameworks.

> so many inefficiencies that are trivially solved with existing tech frameworks. Out of curiosity, like what specifically? Didn’t DOGE’s failure highlight that it actually wasn’t trivial? I’m skeptical at first glance but open to being proven wrong.

> Out of curiosity, like what specifically?

For example, there are thousands of divisions of government out there provisioning largely the same systems in duplicate. E.g. the very local government here has a web portal for the sports venue bookings like pools and tennis courts. They have a waste collection portal. Local tax portal.

Only recently has this been slightly standardized but even those efforts are purely regional. You might get 5 local councils in the city using one SaaS platform, another 5 using another SaaS platform, and another 5 rolling their own. For each function of local government.

Nevermind the fact that a local government in France like this probably has very similar needs to one in Belgium or even the US.

And the worst part is they are terrible at procurement so even when they do consolidate, they're basically getting scammed.

I often think about starting a cost-plus-priced open core project to deal with these issues. Like we build common government functions, and sell it for cost plus 20% markup, with a licence that lets the gov run it themselves if we ever go bust. But then I think procurement is largely a grift game and it might not do well for that reason.

Re: Spanish legislation as a Git repo

#152

Post by wavemode » Sat, Mar 28, 2026, 4:15 PM UTC

boredatoms wrote: post #146

Is there something like this for the US?

Even if there were, it wouldn't be very useful. In a "common law" system like the US, legal questions are rarely answered purely by the plain text of a law. You also need case law - that is, how the law is typically applied in practice by the courts.

Re: Spanish legislation as a Git repo

#153

Post by reality_inspctr » Sat, Mar 28, 2026, 4:15 PM UTC

love this. I did something similar w the US Constitution. https://usconstitutionapi.com/

Re: Spanish legislation as a Git repo

#154

Post by PhilipV » Sat, Mar 28, 2026, 4:16 PM UTC

Well done. I believe that Governments should have a Open Licence for copyright purposes like exists in the UK that allows Govt docs to be used for commercial purposes without issue. I would want to propose a step forward there so that the next generation of this open licence actually has a data set approach to making data sets available - possibly at cost. Governments are losing the ability to charge for nominal items in paper as digital is so openly available - they can make a revenue on providing data at large to public so that others can build or simply if not for free.

Well done and great to see items like this and great to see the comments.

Re: Spanish legislation as a Git repo

#155

Post by worksonmine » Sat, Mar 28, 2026, 4:24 PM UTC

coopykins wrote: post #5

Hey, very nice! Seems like a great way to have LLMs answer questions about the laws more reliably.

Hey! How can I make this about LLMs?

(Many countries' laws are already available online and included in the dataset they're trained on. The project is very cool for humans though.)

Re: Spanish legislation as a Git repo

#156

Post by 0x3f » Sat, Mar 28, 2026, 4:24 PM UTC

PhilipV wrote: post #154

Well done. I believe that Governments should have a Open Licence for copyright purposes like exists in the UK that allows Govt docs to be used for commercial purposes without issue. I would want to propose a step forward there so that the next generation of this open licence actually has a data set approach to making data sets available - possibly at cost. Governments are losing the ability to charge for nominal item…

The UK is IMO quite terrible in this regard. Yes, a lot is OGL, but very key items are sequestered away and very costly to obtain. OGL is a total bodge; just get rid of Crown Copyright.

When it comes to the law specifically, there's a whole silly setup with transcription companies as well.

Re: Spanish legislation as a Git repo

#157

Post by wrxd » Sat, Mar 28, 2026, 4:25 PM UTC

It would have been cool if the commit authors reflected the actual politicians responsible for the reforms. Find a law, run `git blame` and immediately know who’s responsible for it

Re: Spanish legislation as a Git repo

#158

Post by FuckButtons » Sat, Mar 28, 2026, 4:27 PM UTC

DennisP wrote: post #90

Schmerika wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's so many inefficiencies that are trivially solved with existing tech frameworks. There really, really are. The legal industry is well aware of that fact - and how many billable hours they stand to lose by making their work more efficient and understandable. You know how tax prep companies spent over $90m 'lobbying' Congress to ensure that filing your taxes remains difficult and complicated [0]? Well, lawyers…

It's not just the legal industry, it's the legislators. I used to be friends with a former state senator, who had a background in forensic accounting. She said they purposely made the bills harder to parse than necessary so it was hard to figure out what they were actually doing. Given enough time, people could do it but in practice there wasn't time before voting on the bill, and that was on purpose too. Of course s…

Presumably, there must be some point in time where the bill is made public in some form before going to a vote. If you could get the right tool in the hands of a journalist to turn whatever obscure format it’s in into something legible by an ordinary person there’s probably value there.

Re: Spanish legislation as a Git repo

#159

Post by embedding-shape » Sat, Mar 28, 2026, 4:28 PM UTC

OrangePilled wrote: post #141

embedding-shape wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ultimately got told that the lady unequivocally wants it and qualifies, and he can't override that. Not just once, but five times by different courts, finalized by the European Court of Human Rights! > Her request had been approved on July 18, 2024, by the Catalonia Guarantee and Evaluation Commission. The commission found that she met all legal requirements, as she had a “nonrecoverable clinical situation,” causin…

Your enthusiasm is remarkable.

I come from a society that doesn't value compassion that much, so now when I live in Spain which has a lot of it, it's hard not to feel good about it. Wish it was the same in more places in the world, we're all human after all.

Re: Spanish legislation as a Git repo

#160

Post by eep_social » Sat, Mar 28, 2026, 4:32 PM UTC

embedding-shape wrote: post #73

donalhunt wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No by(e)-laws in Spain? Certainly a thing in the UK, Ireland and I believe US and Canada. Is that a common law thing?

"By-laws" is typically the name of the rules/"laws" inside of a company or organization, I'm not familiar with that word in the context of "nation-wide criminal/civil laws". Regardless, cities do not have their own "local laws" in the way your comment made it seem. We have national laws, and minor differences in various autonomous communities, since they have some legislative power to control their own industry, comm…

as an american I might call those “local ordinance” when they come from a smaller rulemaker like a town