Hacker News
points by p-e-w 2 days ago | 0 comments
We don’t need version control for legislative bills. We need journalists that track down who tried to insert what, summarize it, and present it to the public with context. That would satisfy the oversight purpose without getting lost in technicalities.

Our problem is that the press isn’t doing their job, not that legislation doesn’t have a commit graph. The latter, even if it existed, would not fix the former.

[–] hvb2 1 day ago
> Our problem is that the press isn’t doing their job

The general public isn't willing to pay for this, so it's very hard to do this. Especially given that most of this isn't exactly going to generate tons of views.

Let's be honest, in general, the public is very upset about all the injustice they perceive. But the public also lost all interest in the process, some can't even be bothered to vote once every other year....

It's too easy to blame others for your own inaction

[–] dotancohen 1 day ago

  > But the public also lost all interest in the process, some can't even be bothered to vote once every other year....
In the 1920s the German speaking world got a book whose first three chapters just hammer in how important it is for the average citizen to take an interest in his local politics. That book was subsequently banned by almost every European country in the decades since. I'm the only person I know who has personally read it, even though it is one of the most derided books in history.

I highly recommend the first three chapters to anybody who thinks they don't need to understand their local politics.

[–] 1718627440 1 day ago
What book are you referring to?
[–] JumpCrisscross 1 day ago
To be fair, it was a major theme of Aristotle’s, too.
[–] neutronicus 1 day ago
Are you referring to Mein Kampf?
[–] JumpCrisscross 1 day ago
> general public isn't willing to pay for this

The rough truth is you don’t need the general public to. Just the elites, broadly defined.

[–] hvb2 23 hours ago
Because the general public does not, journalism and checking politicians isn't something you can do while breaking even. The result of that is that you need to have someone with a lot of money to back your losses.

And here we are.

[–] bahmboo 2 days ago
I am confused. Someone put in place a system that would allow journalists or citizens to meaningfully engage with the law in a much better way than they can now.

However you are proposing that journalists as a homogenous group do some extra work. I think that's a great thing but I don't get why you say the press aren't doing their job when they are at an historical low of compensation and respect.

If sounds like you are outsourcing your rage at the legislature and the press and journalists are the problem?

Sticking to the FTA someone made a first step in version tracking legislative texts but you do not think they've done enough?

[–] mschuster91 2 days ago
> Our problem is that the press isn’t doing their job

The problem is, barely anyone is willing to pay the press for doing this job.

Outrage farming and clickbait make money, honest reporting does not.

[–] aspect0545 2 days ago
Why not both. I'm sure that more visibility would result in more requests for press inquiries.
[–] msdz 2 days ago
Exactly, it’d make the press’ work easier, and maybe enable more people or entities to look into this topic over all, too.
[–] teiferer 2 days ago
A revision control system is a tool the journalists could use to achieve this. Commits to the 'enacted' branch could have commit messges documenting the context (when, how, why, who). Unmerged branches could represent proposed but ultimately rejected (or still in progress) changes with the same amount of meta data.

Of course a tool itself doesn't solve the problem. You need somebody to use the tool. But the tool makes it easier to solve the problem.

[–] safety1st 2 days ago
We need that too, but the ability to git diff changes to the law is a great win for democracy and transparency in 2026 because git is an interface that agents are experts at using. If you're a journalist, activist or anybody else doing the type of research you just described this makes it faster and easier.

In the present day, mainstream journalists won't be meaningful advocates for democracy and the public interest any time soon. It's time to acknowledge that this idea is wishful thinking. The root cause is changes to the law like the Telecom Act of 1996 which allowed for the consolidation of old media under a few corporations.

For many years these mainstream journalists have been required to support corruption, cronyism, the centralization of power, and the increase of corporate power in order to retain their jobs. The law needs to be changed before they can become a net benefit to society again.

[–] crabmusket 2 days ago
> because git is an interface that agents are experts at using

I'd actually argue that this is the wrong way around. Being able to git diff legislation is very good, but mainly for humans, who need tools to make work tractable.

An agent will use whatever interface is available, including no interference, won't give up due to the task being too onerous, and can be scaled by paying for more tokens. It could simply brute force diff the raw text, writing bespoke Python and regexes, etc.

LLMs make brute forcing intellect possible. It's humans who need finely crafted tools.

[–] zoobab 1 day ago
I am sure with LLMs the time to craft those tools to fetch the data and put them back in a git repo (for example one repo per legislative project) would not be too hard to do.
[–] Gormo 1 day ago
I don't think that the problem with legislative transparency is that there aren't enough middlemen sitting between the public and the legislative process.

I'm personally not interested in being dependent on the press -- which is just other people pursuing their own interests and assumptions -- to interpret artificially opaque sources, if those sources can just be made accessible instead.

Having a dynamic and pluralistic press is a good thing, and we need more investigative journalism, to discover what isn't visible to the public, but I'm not sure there's a lot of value in the sort of interpretive journalism you're proposing.

[–] faangguyindia 2 days ago
Until journalists can be paid under the table to mislead the public, the problem will persist. Almost anyone can be bought on a Friday night for the price of a few drinks and benefits.
[–] callmeal 2 days ago
>Our problem is that the press isn’t doing their job ...

Well, it's practically impossible to get a person to do something when their paycheck depends on their not doing it.