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Posted by alansaber 8 hours ago

Git for the US Code(lexifina.com)
250 points | 121 commentspage 4
yieldcrv 6 hours ago|
I put a lot of thought into this last decade, I find that some bills are big blocks of new text, and other bills are convoluted instructions to modify other blocks of existing law, sometimes saying "strike this word and that word" other times referencing just a subsection of another law. hyperlinks to that other law or a model of what the legal code would look like is necessary

Agentically this could be done now, but it would still just be the tip of the iceberg

You're looking at quantum states of law and regulations, and that's just for one jurisdiction

NoMoreNicksLeft 5 hours ago||
Without 64-bit time though, can't use it historically. Since current legislation is always changes built upon legislation from long before unix epoch, it kind of falls flat.
nomilk 3 hours ago||
Brilliant! Now do it for companies' T&Cs please!
bottled_poe 4 hours ago||
> Deepseek, refactor this repo to simplify the code. Make no mistakes.
ericfrederich 5 hours ago||
... And the tax code written in Python
octoberfranklin 7 hours ago||
Fraudulent title, you can't git-clone this.
edflsafoiewq 6 hours ago||
There's actually two kinds of changes here: changes to the law, and changes to your description of the-law-and-its-changes (metachanges). For example, if you make a mistake in recording a change to the law, you need to fix that (unlike eg a source repo where mistakes in a commit message are forever).

So to make this a git repo, I guess you'd make the snapshots be the law plus markup for all the changes, and the diffs are the metachanges. For each snapshot S, you could generate a git repo whose snapshots are the law and the whose diffs are the changes in the law (as described by S). However, this probably isn't the best way to query S.

doezi 7 hours ago||
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 7 hours ago||
> 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.

dathanb82 6 hours ago|||
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.
JumpCrisscross 6 hours ago||
> so it doesn’t make sense to track its provenance back to its original authors

The legislative process is inherently collaborative in a way that's ordinarily undocumented. Who introduced an amendment and who supported it are entirely separate. Someone who introduced language can wind up not supporting it because of where the mix of trade-offs winds up.

At the level of a bill, knowing who wrote language matters. At the level of law, you should only care who voted for it. (I'm not even tackling the inherent subjectivity in tracing e.g. language in the CFR to specific language in a bill.)

blitzar 2 hours ago||
> you should only care who voted for it

even then you have three-line whips and numerous reasons to vote for / against things that are wrapped up in party politics and other stupid games

once something is passed; the intent of the writer, the intent of those that voted for it and the meaning of the words in the final legislation can all be wildly different.

rileymat2 7 hours ago|||
You could tag yes/no/abstains to it.
iAMkenough 7 hours ago||
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.

sundayexport 6 hours ago||
[flagged]
miltonlaxer 3 hours ago||
[dead]
orliesaurus 5 hours ago|
[flagged]
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