The entire US Code is now online in XML • Hacker News Board

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#241

Post by smsm42 » Sun, Aug 04, 2013, 10:42 PM UTC

lobster_johnson wrote: post #240

smsm42 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies can't self-police. But other people - that care about what companies do - can find out what they do. Just as politician's affairs are found out, for example. So your claim that government coercion is necessary to either find out the information or disseminate it is obviously false - there are existing systems for doing both, and they work quire well - at least, not worse than government ones - where they ar…

First of all, in many cases this requires that such entities have interior access. If you can't inspect facilities but only the end product, you become very limited in what you can do. Secondly, even then, all you can do is disseminate information. You can't enforce anything; you can only try to convince people to vote with their feet.

A lot of people have "interior access", restaurants are not exactly highly classified CIA facilities. And any certification/review body can request - and obtain, if certification is worthy - such access, without any problem. Did you ever hear, for example, about Kosher certification? How do you think it can be done without access to everything? It can not. Whoever wants to sell on markets that need Kosher or Halal or any other such certification - provides access. Whoever does not - sells to people that don't care about this certification.

>>> Secondly, even then, all you can do is disseminate information. You can't enforce anything

You mean - you can't stop people from buying what they want even if you think it's bad for them, you can only give them information and let them decide for themselves if they're ok with it? Oh horror!!!

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#242

Post by lobster_johnson » Mon, Aug 05, 2013, 2:38 AM UTC

smsm42 wrote: post #241

lobster_johnson wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, in many cases this requires that such entities have interior access. If you can't inspect facilities but only the end product, you become very limited in what you can do. Secondly, even then, all you can do is disseminate information. You can't enforce anything; you can only try to convince people to vote with their feet.

A lot of people have "interior access", restaurants are not exactly highly classified CIA facilities. And any certification/review body can request - and obtain, if certification is worthy - such access, without any problem. Did you ever hear, for example, about Kosher certification? How do you think it can be done without access to everything? It can not. Whoever wants to sell on markets that need Kosher or Halal or…

Sure. Kosher certification works because companies cooperate; but the network and trust has taken years and money to build, and it only works because there is enough critical mass in the system for a company to lose by not participating.

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#243

Post by smsm42 » Mon, Aug 05, 2013, 9:18 PM UTC

lobster_johnson wrote: post #242

smsm42 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people have "interior access", restaurants are not exactly highly classified CIA facilities. And any certification/review body can request - and obtain, if certification is worthy - such access, without any problem. Did you ever hear, for example, about Kosher certification? How do you think it can be done without access to everything? It can not. Whoever wants to sell on markets that need Kosher or Halal or…

Sure. Kosher certification works because companies cooperate; but the network and trust has taken years and money to build, and it only works because there is enough critical mass in the system for a company to lose by not participating.

So, you're saying if nobody among the consumers needs these certifications it wouldn't work. And you say it like it is a bad thing?

Of course, this means the government loses a way to enforce arbitrary restrictions that nobody of the consumers actually need but that promote some political or special interest agenda. Tell me please again, how is it a bad thing?

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#244

Post by azernik » Sat, Aug 10, 2013, 4:24 AM UTC

DannyBee wrote: post #198

azernik wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be doing that conversion, but the conversion works. For example, committing the following text (with line breaks), then joining it all into one line, shows no differences when using 'git diff --word-diff'. Test the first. This will check if reflowing text actually produces git word-diff weirdness, or if it's actually decent. The line does get reproduced on the terminal (a line diff was seen), but no text is sh…

Sure, but this particular test tells you nothing. You need one where the "line diff" has identified the wrong set of changes (IE it has decided two sets of text look close enough that one is really a change into the other, even though that's not what historically happened).

That is never the error I see in line-based diffs; because they're taking a much larger chunk of text to be atomic and treat irrelevant characters as relevant, they tend to give false positives (seeing two lines as completely different when in fact they're slightly modified versions of each other; or seeing two blocks of text as different when one is a reflowed version of the other.)