YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Git for US Legislation

29 points alansaber 1 hour ago 12 comments

octoberfranklin 36 minutes ago | parent

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

doezi 18 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 14 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 10 minutes ago | parent

You could tag yes/no/abstains to it.

mushufasa 32 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 18 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 15 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 7 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 10 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 3 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 3 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.

iAMkenough 2 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. Government-run servers with public accountability.