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Comment by sushid | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure why you're being so facetious. In fact, I wonder why HN always has comments like these.

Lawmakers are purposefully vague because judges can decipher what the spirit of the law is and fine corporations or condone specific use cases when they are brought up in court. You can't go into court to challenge a law with hypothetical cases for a good reason. Do you want lawmakers to arbitrarily impose constraints like only 10% of non article words can be suggested per message composition or only 2 posts per minute are allowed?

It is a fact in life that technology changes and improves things beyond what we could have foreseen in just a few years. The degree of flexibility built into these laws is a huge plus. Not a flaw.

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>I wonder why HN always has comments like these

It's a work related disease. A coder must consider all corner cases in advance. There is no judge to decipher the spirit of a program.

slight-OT: Yes, it is. Which is frustrating in itself. In general, I've developed a strategy:

Me: "So, what should the program do when XYZ occurs?"

Marketing: "Uhm... Dunno, haven't thought about it. I'd decide by, you know, gut instinct. We haven't thought about that yet."

Me: implements a virtual coin-flip using Random.Next()

Once you've done that, it's easier.

Or, file a bug for each corner case, mark it release-blocking, and assign to whoever is responsible for the requirements.

If you're interested in actually shipping, a more helpful approach is to choose the simplest behavior to implement, notify the requirements person that you've done that, and offer to create a release-blocking bug for the issue if that is unacceptable.

Chances are, if the requirements person doesn't have an opinion on what the copy for the dialog should be if the customer is 65+ and it's a Tuesday in a month with 31 days, then it's because that choice doesn't really matter all that much.

You're not answering the question, you're just asserting someone will figure the answer out later and this is totally fine, even though it may not be fine for the person who thought they were doing things right and then suddenly discover they weren't.

Vagueness in law isn't a good thing. It leads to people randomly losing everything, even if they made a good faith attempt to follow the "spirit" of the law (whatever that actually is), for no better reason than lazy or incompetent law making. After all, lawmakers can easily update or change laws to reflect changing circumstances - they just prefer not to because regulating entirely new areas of life makes them feel better than the relatively boring work of updating existing laws.

The vagueness is how the American legal system has worked since inception. I don’t see it changing now.

Society changes faster than representatives can legislate.

The fix is to not pass the law in the first place. Regulation generally favors incumbents.

It also unfairly favors companies that aren't poisoning children with lead.

Lawmakers are purposefully vague because judges can decipher what the spirit of the law is and fine corporations or condone specific use cases when they are brought up in court.

That leads to the judicial branch actually making the law and not having a consistent set of rules depending on who the judge is.

Precedent is foundational to western law. The first judge to make a decision based on a law sets a precedent that informs how that law is interpreted in the future. This is a feature, not a bug because real world situations are messy, complicated, and dynamic. Trying to enumerate every legal interpretation and eventuality based on today's conditions and technology results in a law that won't be meaningful 5 years from now.

> Precedent is foundational to western law. The first judge to make a decision based on a law sets a precedent that informs how that law is interpreted in the future. This is a feature, not a bug because real world situations are messy, complicated, and dynamic.

The problem is then nobody actually knows what the law is until after the judge decides it, at which point they're essentially creating new rules ex post facto and applying them to past conduct. It's manifestly unreasonable to apply a rule that wasn't known until five minutes ago to actions that took place last year.

> Trying to enumerate every legal interpretation and eventuality based on today's conditions and technology results in a law that won't be meaningful 5 years from now.

Which means you may have to pass a new law in five years -- that's not a bug. For that matter, if you expect things to change significantly then you may want to make the current rules expire in five years automatically, or hold off legislating anything at all until you see how things shake out on their own.

You really have that much faith in the US justice system that you don’t believe that partisan judges make judgements all of the time based on their belief system?

Do you want to build a business based on the whims of a judge when you thought that you were following the law?

"This doing of something about disputes, this doing of it reasonably, is the business of the law. And the people who have the doing of it in charge, whether they be judges or sheriffs or clerks or jailers or lawyers, are officials of the law. What these officials do about disputes is, to my mind, the law itself. ... And rules, in all of this, are important to you so far as they help you see or predict what judges will do or so far as they help you to get judges to do something. That is their importance. That is all their importance, except as pretty playthings."

Also see: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-07/the-fe...

...in which Matt Levine juxtaposes the concepts of going by rules versus what he calls "legal realism".

> Precedent is foundational to western law.

No, precedent is foundational to common law, not western law as a whole. There are two main forms of western law.

“lawmakers are purposefully vague”. yeah that’s a bad thing not a good thing. it really means almost everything breaks the law and then they selectively and inconsistently enforce on actors they don’t like

I think you are right.

I also think it’s an issue, as this law is set up to start a cat and mouse game, where precedents are slowly established, while bad faith actors find other workarounds and run with it until new rulings are set, to then rince and repeat.

When it comes to spam or ads, iterating workarounds is faster than bringing cases to court, so the traditional approach is problematic.

> In fact, I wonder why HN always has comments like these.

Because many people here are programmers, and finding edge cases and how to deal with them is often a significant portion of the job.

I assume it's also a large part of many lawyers jobs as well.

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