Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47621591
In the 14 hours since that flagged post, the OP has changed _nothing_ in that repo to address the feedback people gave him, and instead decided to just resubmit his proj to HN.
United States Code (federal laws) in Git
11–16 of 16 posts
Re: United States Code (federal laws) in Git
#12There's an interesting side effect to the current state of the non-technical world. We have some new tools that increase productivity, and these same tools both lower the barrier to entry to understanding software concepts and building software. I think the result is more people who would've been traditionally considered non-technical are going to be onboarding to concepts that wouldve been traditionally ring fenced…
Yeah in the legal world they’ve had the concept of “track changes” forever but there simply isn’t something like branching and merging.
Like branching a document for a particular negotiation. Or branch it when adapting it to a new jurisdiction’s laws, etc.
It would benefit so much from that workflow or mindset.
Re: United States Code (federal laws) in Git
#13> Not all titles are positive law — some titles are "evidence of law" rather than the legal text itself (see 1 USC § 204) The vocabulary of this sentence is inconsistent with section 204 [0]. It is the positively enacted titles which are "legal evidence of the laws". The other titles merely "establish prima facie" what the law is, subordinate to a closer examination of the bills actually passed, which control. In oth…
Agreed. The over-confident quipy-ness of the description reads like an LLM. Though fwiw, I’m a lawyer and it took me a minute to parse this.
Re: United States Code (federal laws) in Git
#14Re: United States Code (federal laws) in Git
#15A few years ago I was thinking about how one might do the same for Danish laws, but those are written by idiots (lawyers). Rather than revising a law, a new one seems to be written using text like: The word "is" replaces the word "was" in line 5 and 6 in "Law on X,Y,Z, paragraf 8, section 5". Or "section 9 in Law on Q,V,W is removed, in favour of the following text". Why the hell you not just rewrite the old law and…
Isn't it just a lawmakers' version of diff? :) You just can't conveniently apply it automatically to compile the resulting text. >Why the hell you not just rewrite the old law and bump the revision? Because it's aimed at lawyers and judges who have to be up-to-date with all changes and its easier for them to remember "section 123 was amended in 2026", than to recall a whole new revision and mentally compute the diffe…
> Isn't it just a lawmakers' version of diff?
It probably is, and they are just stuck in the past not wanting to adopt new tools. You have people in tech reading chancelogs, or follow something like the openbsd-cvs mailing list. It feels like it would be easier if you did have have to look up a law, the search for amendments, which may or may not exist.
Re: United States Code (federal laws) in Git
#16This would be more interesting if the commits would list everyone who voted "yes" as authors.