Hacker News Viewer

United States Code (federal laws) in Git

by nickvido on 4/3/2026, 11:18:10 AM

https://github.com/nickvido/us-code

Comments

by: cvoss

&gt; Not all titles are positive law — some titles are &quot;evidence of law&quot; rather than the legal text itself (see 1 USC § 204)<p>The vocabulary of this sentence is inconsistent with section 204 [0]. It is the positively enacted titles which are &quot;legal evidence of the laws&quot;. The other titles merely &quot;establish prima facie&quot; what the law is, subordinate to a closer examination of the bills actually passed, which control. In other words, &quot;evidence of law&quot; is the stronger of the two, not the weaker, as the readme suggests.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.law.cornell.edu&#x2F;uscode&#x2F;text&#x2F;1&#x2F;204" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.law.cornell.edu&#x2F;uscode&#x2F;text&#x2F;1&#x2F;204</a>

4/3/2026, 2:01:25 PM


by: cap11235

Dupe: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=47621591">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=47621591</a>

4/3/2026, 2:02:50 PM


by: mrweasel

A few years ago I was thinking about how one might do the same for Danish laws, but those are written by idiots (lawyers).<p>Rather than revising a law, a new one seems to be written using text like: The word &quot;is&quot; replaces the word &quot;was&quot; in line 5 and 6 in &quot;Law on X,Y,Z, paragraf 8, section 5&quot;. Or &quot;section 9 in Law on Q,V,W is removed, in favour of the following text&quot;.<p>Why the hell you not just rewrite the old law and bump the revision? After just two revision it&#x27;s basically impossible to read the actual law. I think that&#x27;s on purpose.

4/3/2026, 2:02:31 PM


by: bnchrch

There&#x27;s an interesting side effect to the current state of the non-technical world.<p>We have some new tools that increase productivity, and these same tools both lower the barrier to entry to understanding software concepts and building software.<p>I think the result is more people who would&#x27;ve been traditionally considered non-technical are going to be onboarding to concepts that wouldve been traditionally ring fenced in the developer world.<p>Granular version control and diffs being one of them.<p>If this trend is real, and relatively large, I think it will be a good thing.

4/3/2026, 2:11:55 PM


by: dataflow

Is there one for the Statutes at Large?

4/3/2026, 1:33:40 PM


by: brodouevencode

hot take: this is how legislation should work<p>open comments, accepting pull requests, use AI tooling to weed out the ragebait and trolling for things that might actually be useful

4/3/2026, 1:19:43 PM