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  • Hacker News
  • Great! Now I just have to mechanically convert it to TLA+ and the verification results are hopefully exploitable business ideas.
    by kelseyfrog
  • It's so simple. Only a fool would pick the cup given to him. Now with stderr.
    by effnorwood
  • Interesting but there are many laws worldwide that are ambiguous or subjective, hence the reason why lawyers exist.
    by alightsoul
  • Very convenient for selective law enforcement.
    by codedokode
  • A big reason that political discussions here get so silly is because so many people here believe that the world can/should work like code, and that the right algorithm/data structures could solve everything. The ambiguity and subjectivity only there because we haven't put programmers in charge of law!

    The fact that everyone is jumping through so many silly hoops now that they're writing code non-deterministically should serve as a hint, but it doesn't seem to be.

    by gdulli
  • Also see the german parliament’s laws repository on Github: https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze
    by solarkraft
  • This is just a dump of plain text files which are nearly useless without markup and adaptation. For example, when a law refers to some article of another law, there should be a hyperlink, but there are no hyperlinks in the repository. Or when a law contains a term, defined elsewhere, you need a hyperlink to the definition of that term. Or when a law says things like "the rules for operating X are set by an Y Ministry", the word "rules" must have a hyperlink to the latest document defining those rules.

    Some paragraphs or articles might be temporary amended/repelled by a Constitutional court, or have some related case law, so there must be links or notes.

    Just to give you an idea, here is an example of a "proper" commercial law search system with notes and hyperlinks (in Russian, but Firefox translates it without issues): [1]. I noticed that the German system has no markup, so the German site feels like working with code in a notepad, without coloring and "go to definition" after using an IDE. Or like trying to read law from a gazette/journal of legislative acts.

    [1] https://www.consultant.ru/document/cons_doc_LAW_37119/823a1b...

    by codedokode
  • > Encoded > One source of truth

    Oh dear. The one source of truth is the statute.

    by chrisjj
  • The act, really; the codified statutory law is an artifact built on top of the various acts passed into law.
    by singleshot_
  • People might not know that, since it’s mostly in French, but France has somthing similar as open source for their tax system:

    https://github.com/openfisca/openfisca-france/

    by niemandhier
  • This is not a "source" for a tax system, but a model written after a law, which is the actual source of truth, and not this model.
    by codedokode
  • Nice, the french also are at the frontier of law-computing i'd say see Catala Lang [1]

    1. https://catala-lang.org/

    by tough
  • It is going to be a difficult task. I looked through examples, and it seems that what they do is represent conditions set out in the law as a boolean expression that answers the question whether something is allowed or not (X is allowed if Y, Z and not W), and display it as a graph/AST. The problem though that the inputs to this expression are answers to non-trivial questions, like "Excudable Educational Assistance" or "Has Felony Drug Conviction" without specifying what exactly is considered a "drug conviction".
    by codedokode