Comment by bombcar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bombcar | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

This is the natural end result of committee-style work - because if you work on a "diff" you can force the discussion to only touch some small parts of the whole, but if you work on an "updated document", even if everyone kind of agrees the only change necessary is to Section 7, the fact that the whole document is "up for discussion" causes the whole thing to be up for discussion.

In both cases they can still produce the "final document" which the government is often better at than standards bodies.

A possible counter model to this kind of organization is how the Nicolas Bourbaki collective organized their work:

"Subcommittees are assigned to write drafts on specific material, and the drafts are later presented, vigorously debated, and re-drafted at the conferences. Unanimous agreement is required before any material is deemed acceptable for publication. A given piece of material may require six or more drafts over a period of several years, and some drafts are never developed into completed work. Bourbaki's writing process has therefore been described as "Sisyphean". Although the method is slow, it yields a final product which satisfies the group's standards for mathematical rigour, one of Bourbaki's main priorities in the treatise."

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nicolas_Bourbaki&... (emphasis by me)

See also

* https://www.ams.org/notices/199803/borel.pdf (cf. page 375)

* https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~lekheng/interviews/ClaudeCheva... (cf. pages 18 and 20)

This can work when you have a defined mathematical result you're trying to get to - in most standard bodies this would result in never releasing a standard, ever.

But what if the changes were proposed as an actual diff to the original document, similar to a pull request, so that once it is approved, it can be combined into a new version that fully replaces the old?

They often are, but the standards groups don't seem to actually produce that changed new version (likely because they wouldn't have a way to reference it?) - governments just implement the diffs in the law.

> likely because they wouldn't have a way to reference it?

Just add a version onto it, like RFC 1234-2022 for the version of RFC 1234 released in 2022 (or use incementing integers it doesn't really matter).

That's basically how language standards like ISO c and c++ and ecmascript are done isn't it?

They often do have version and revision numbers. As well as final release numbers. I find the biggest issue is the lack of ability to trace the document forwards in the repositories.

Usually an update will list which documents it updates but often it's much harder to find if there have been any new updates that have further obsoleted this update.

That's one of the functions of the Federal Register. It applies the diffs so to speak to produce the actual code (by code here I mean law code). But yes in theory you can challenge that in court by showing they applied the changes incorrectly or something.

And FWIW every once in a great while the government does tend to reset the baseline, declaring a specific version of the merged code as the single truth. So even if there are errors or whatever from previous applications of various bills it doesn't matter and courts can't examine that. This prevents every bit of law from potentially being subject to reconstruction from the first congress forward. I believe the current base revision is from 1986.

Not just that, there's also the fact that the result of the committee work will then be put up for vote. That's basically an enormous code review, if not enough representatives press "accept" nothing happens.

Imagine having to review code changes without a diff, e.g. with only the before and after states, on separate computers. Bad idea.

> In both cases they can still produce the "final document" which the government is often better at than standards bodies.

Not sure I agree that the government is very good at this at all, or maybe I'm just looking in the wrong place?

Example: https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/3967...

> (1) EXPANSION.—Subsection (e) of section 1710, as amended by section 102(c), is further amended— > (A) in paragraph (1), by adding at the end the following new subparagraphs:

You might try the Federal Register¹, which mostly documents the diffs, but links to the full documents at the Code of Federal Regulations²

¹ https://www.federalregister.gov/

² https://www.ecfr.gov/

Your example is a bill that hasn't become law yet; so it has not been integrated into the US code (the "final document"). When the president signs it and it becomes law, the change specified there will be made. You can find the US code, as it is in effect today, among other places, on the site of the House: http://uscode.house.gov/

Thank you for clarifying that.

What I'd love to see is a place where I could view a bill and also the code it impacts, with inline diffs for the relevant bits (but not the dumb formatting / bullet numbering stuff).

Is that too much to ask for?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com