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

The entire US Code is now online in XML

uscodebeta.house.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 244 posts

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#201

Post by anigbrowl »

genwin wrote: post #195
jacques_chester wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With respect, only someone who hasn't studied law could say this. Law is complicated and filled with ambiguity because the world is complicated and filled with ambiguity. Unlike lawyers, we can simply will some of that away. We can make an enum which smooshes together disparate phenomena, that feeds a dropdown list and require the customers to use it. We can ignore very rare corner cases and include a comments field.…

> Law is complicated and filled with ambiguity because the world is complicated and filled with ambiguity. True, yet I'm convinced by obvious ambiguity that it's on purpose, to feed the legal industry. That conviction is bolstered by all the "work" Congress does on reviving sunset clauses on laws that had no good reason to sunset.

True, yet I'm convinced by obvious ambiguity that it's on purpose, to feed the legal industry.

Yes yes, and all crime is caused by the police, doctors make people sick, and weather forecasters hold people hostage to the elements.

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#202

Post by rkda »

jacques_chester wrote: post #170
OldSchool wrote: post #53

Caveat for for many of us overly rational thinkers: the powers that be deliberately are allowed to 'interpret' this code nondeterministically by many different means including its 'spirit,' admissibility of relevant information, manipulation of venue and participants, apparently even extrajudicial proceedings lately. In short, that allows a lawyer to answer almost any question with "it depends," and start billing.

With respect, only someone who hasn't studied law could say this. Law is complicated and filled with ambiguity because the world is complicated and filled with ambiguity. Unlike lawyers, we can simply will some of that away. We can make an enum which smooshes together disparate phenomena, that feeds a dropdown list and require the customers to use it. We can ignore very rare corner cases and include a comments field.…

So law is a machine learning problem?

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#204

Post by skriticos2 »

nathan_long wrote: post #148
jamieb wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we should have black and white laws, and unit tests for them. So someone could write a unit test for "Will this allow the NSA to create a secret court that is outside the rule of law?" or "Does accessing a university computer that has an open access policy allow for a sentence of 130 years?" I believe we'd see a lot simpler laws.

Depends how you define "simpler." There would be a LOT of incredibly specific definitions, since there would be no room for interpretation by a judge. Consider a law that says "you can't drive a vehicle without a license." Is a bicycle a vehicle? What if it has a motor and weighs a lot? A velomobile? What about a hovercar? There might be 2,000 laws referencing "vehicle [definition #4,849, version 5]". (Actually, I gu…

.. it depends. What if the point in the given situation is to avoid traffic congestion? You normally don't want (a small) buggy drive down a high speed highway. In that case it the point would be: "should match the traffic flow requirements".

So, I agree with your argument. It's all very situation dependent. For some reason I find it oddly comforting that human society and life in general can't be crammed into a small set of fixed rules. That would be kind of boring I think.

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#205

Post by skriticos2 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #150
jamieb wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we should have black and white laws, and unit tests for them. So someone could write a unit test for "Will this allow the NSA to create a secret court that is outside the rule of law?" or "Does accessing a university computer that has an open access policy allow for a sentence of 130 years?" I believe we'd see a lot simpler laws.

> Yes, we should have black and white laws, and unit tests for them. First problem: I don't think that can be done. I'd be a lot more convinced to consider arguments like this accompanied by completed samples in some real area of human endeavor of the "black and white laws" with accompanying "unit tests" (and, anyway, wouldn't we want automated user acceptance tests, not unit tests.)

Thinking about it, it probably can be done.. just not in a free society (which I think is all about doing what you want as long as you don't hurt others in the process). You probably can create black and white laws in a despotic rule. "The Ruler has all right, you have none. He decides." There, drafted an entire legislature with very black and white rules..

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#206

Post by ckozlowski »

lobotryas wrote: post #60
ChuckMcM wrote: post #36

This is pretty awesome, and if it were in git/hg would have the ability to write a 'blame' tool to figure out who voted on the part of the law that is pissing you off :-)

You can already do this - Congressional voting records are publicly available. However, even if you correlated these records with specific legislation, you would be making a dangerous mistake by missing the big picture. Many laws are passed jn bundles and require compromise. Just because your Senator voted to support farm subsidies, doesn't mean he likes them - it just means he wanted a minimum wage increase to pass…

Opencongress.org is a great site for following this sort of info.

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#208

Post by smsm42 »

jacques_chester wrote: post #170
OldSchool wrote: post #53

Caveat for for many of us overly rational thinkers: the powers that be deliberately are allowed to 'interpret' this code nondeterministically by many different means including its 'spirit,' admissibility of relevant information, manipulation of venue and participants, apparently even extrajudicial proceedings lately. In short, that allows a lawyer to answer almost any question with "it depends," and start billing.

With respect, only someone who hasn't studied law could say this. Law is complicated and filled with ambiguity because the world is complicated and filled with ambiguity. Unlike lawyers, we can simply will some of that away. We can make an enum which smooshes together disparate phenomena, that feeds a dropdown list and require the customers to use it. We can ignore very rare corner cases and include a comments field.…

That's one of the reasons I am a libertarian. Less government means less complex law means less bugs and abuses of the law. If your government tries to say what you can or can not eat, for example, you need complex law to figure out what is cheese and how big the holes in it must be. If you can eat whatever you like and the government couldn't care less, you do not need any of that. So tell me - do we really need a law specifying which size holes in the cheese must be?

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#209

Post by joesb »

jacques_chester wrote: post #170
OldSchool wrote: post #53

Caveat for for many of us overly rational thinkers: the powers that be deliberately are allowed to 'interpret' this code nondeterministically by many different means including its 'spirit,' admissibility of relevant information, manipulation of venue and participants, apparently even extrajudicial proceedings lately. In short, that allows a lawyer to answer almost any question with "it depends," and start billing.

With respect, only someone who hasn't studied law could say this. Law is complicated and filled with ambiguity because the world is complicated and filled with ambiguity. Unlike lawyers, we can simply will some of that away. We can make an enum which smooshes together disparate phenomena, that feeds a dropdown list and require the customers to use it. We can ignore very rare corner cases and include a comments field.…

Also, if something use case comes up that your software didn't handle, you can write new code to handle it and rerun the old data. You cannot do that with law, you can't write new law and use it to punish past action.

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#210

Post by jacques_chester »

saraid216 wrote: post #200
jacques_chester wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US system of legislative development is quite flawed. There are a lot of places where changes can be made without attribution, emerging from committees without saying who added what. In most Parliamentary democracies you can only propose amendments from one of the two chambers, so any amendment can always be traced to the Parliamentarian who moved it.

I'd support having a nice and loud discussion on doing this. Being able to trace the authorship of line items doesn't seem to have stopped pork in other countries, but it might mitigate it. And we'd be able to yell at people better.

There are other amendments that cut back on some of the worst pork.

The Australian Constitution in section 55 forbids tax and spending legislation to deal with any other subject. If an Act includes other material, it's void, it has no effect.

This prevents the American situation of omnibus bills, rider amendments and the like.

We still get pork barrelling here; but between S 55, fused executive and legislative and strict party discipline, the political incentives are differently structured for individual politicians. It creates a stronger check on profligacy.

Post reply on HN