YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Git for US Legislation

38 points alansaber 1 hour ago 20 comments

octoberfranklin 45 minutes ago | parent

Fraudulent title, you can't git-clone this.

doezi 27 minutes ago | parent

Not really. It is arguing for version controlled legislation. So who’s responsible for what portions of literal laws and policy. I hope your "not clone-able" is in jest

JumpCrisscross 24 minutes ago | parent

> who’s responsible for what portions of literal laws and policy

This makes sense for bills. It doesn't for laws. Once a bill is a law, it's the will of the Congress.

rileymat2 19 minutes ago | parent

You could tag yes/no/abstains to it.

dathanb82 8 minutes ago | parent

That’s like saying that the code in a repo belongs to the whole team once a PR is merged, so it doesn’t make sense to track its provenance back to its original authors.

mushufasa 41 minutes ago | parent

I'm not an expert in this domain but I'm aware there has been prior work to attempt this. I'd appreciate if someone knowledgeable could post some of that context.

7kago_yomi 27 minutes ago | parent

Unlike code, natural language laws have many exceptions and context dependencies, so trying to manage them cleanly with Git seems like it would be tough as data structuring costs and exception handling (hardcode-style responses) increase.

JumpCrisscross 24 minutes ago | parent

> natural language laws have many exceptions and context dependencies

The complexity is in common law, not natural-language laws.

The U.S. Code and Code of Federal Regulations can be completely presented through a Git-like system. The complexity comes in when attaching court cases.

7kago_yomi 16 minutes ago | parent

I see. The laws are completely different from my country, so this is very educational. My country uses civil law, but I see that is how it is under common law. Thank you very much.

TomAbel 19 minutes ago | parent

Reminds me of a similar project for french law

French bills evolution versioned in git and visualized The Law Factory: french bills as git, opendata and dataviz https://www.lafabriquedelaloi.fr/

"Law is Code" on The Law Factory: french bills as git, opendata and dataviz - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7817357 May 2014 (0 comments)

xlayn 12 minutes ago | parent

YES PLEASE, but I suspect it will degenerate into another paid service with 1000 tiers... I think you cannot access the US law without paying for it? odd... I will wait for claude law to appear and hope they share the torrent...

burnJS 12 minutes ago | parent

I had this idea over 10 years ago but never finished it. I hope this takes off. I do fear it's not very practical for many big pieces of legislation which are often written in secret.

Ericson2314 5 minutes ago | parent

Don't worry about that. Even if we only saw voted-upon revisions in the Git history, it will still be a huge improvement.

Version control for the public parts will make both public and secretive law-drafting better.

iAMkenough 11 minutes ago | parent

Sounds neat, but not something a private company should be responsible for.

If transparency is the goal, the entire codebase for this should be public domain and not profitable. Otherwise there's a profit motive to rewrite history.