US Constitution – A Git repo with history of edits - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/JesseKPhillips/USA-Constitution <comment><USER2> This is probably common knowledge to Americans, but I noticed that the latest amendment on the commit log was written by James Madison. I was confused as to how that came about so recently and found on the wikipedia page:

>It was submitted by the 1st Congress to the states for ratification on September 25, 1789, along with eleven other proposed amendments. While ten of these twelve proposals were ratified in 1791 to become the Bill of Rights, what would become the Twenty-seventh Amendment and the proposed Congressional Apportionment Amendment did not get ratified by enough states for them to also come into force with the first ten amendments.

> The proposed congressional pay amendment was largely forgotten until 1982, > when Gregory Watson, a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of Texas at > Austin, wrote a paper for a government class in which he claimed that the > amendment could still be ratified. A teaching assistant graded the paper a > "C" and an appeal to the professor, Sharon Waite, failed, motivating Watson > to launch a nationwide campaign to complete its ratification.[1] The > amendment eventually became part of the United States Constitution, > effective May 5, 1992,[2] completing a record-setting ratification period of > 202 years, 7 months, and 10 days

<comment><USER3> >When Watson began his campaign in early 1982, he was aware of ratification by only six states and he erroneously believed that Virginia's 1791 approval was the last action taken by the states. He discovered in 1983 that Ohio had approved it in 1873 as a means of protest against the Salary Grab Act and learned in 1984 that Wyoming had done the same 6 years earlier in 1978, as a protest against a 1977 congressional pay raise. Further, Watson did not know, until 1997, well after the amendment's adoption, that Kentucky had ratified the amendment in 1792. Neither did Kentucky lawmakers themselves — in Watson's desire for a 50-state sweep, the Kentucky General Assembly post-ratified the amendment in 1996 (Senate Joint Resolution No. 50), at Watson's request, likewise unaware that the task had already been attended to some 204 years earlier.

>In 2016, Zach Elkins, a professor in the UT Department of Government, became interested in Watson's story and began to document its origins. He tracked down Sharon Waite, who had left academia in the 1980s to work on her family's citrus farm. Elkins suggested to Waite that they change Watson's grade. In 2017, Elkins submitted a grade change form with Waite's signature and a grade change to "A+". In an interview with NPR, Waite stated, "Goodness, he certainly proved he knew how to work the Constitution and what it meant and how to be politically active, [...] So, yes, I think he deserves an A after that effort — A-plus!" The registrar approved a grade change to "A", because the university does not give grades higher than "A".

How has this not yet been made into a comedy?

<comment><USER4> >The registrar approved a grade change to "A", because the university does not give grades higher than "A".

It's hilarious to me that the bureaucracy of this university couldn't allow even a single grade above an A in this exceptional circumstance - I wonder if it actually came down to some hard limit in their grade keeping system, or if some grumpy recordskeeper just said, "Nope, this is how we've always done things, so this is how we will always do things."

<comment><USER5> Maybe its my European mindset but I find it impossible to believe that any school can just start inventing extra grades.

<comment><USER6> Maybe it's my southern European mindset, but I find it totally possible.

The world is not as rigid as northern Europe thinks it is...

<comment><USER5> I'm from the Balkans.

<comment><USER6> Well, if you're from the Balkans you should surely see it as totally possible!

Far more rule and law-bending is happening than that, for the possibility of "inventing a new grade" to be really impossible/surprising.

<comment><USER6> Case in point, I know a university case where the professor body wanted to appoint their "own" candidate for a professorship position. The dean and several (majority) professors had already agreed under the table, and the few others didn't matter.

The only problem was they legally had to go through a open contest for the position.

So when someone came up with 5x the qualifications (citations, papers, conferences, better universities attended, etc, globally too) than their ho- hum friend (some relative of the dean), the professor body suddenly folded the position.

A few months later, they announced a new opening, with some specially crafted qualifications, so that only their friend could pass.

<comment><USER7> I can really see this happening, unfortunately, and I actually did many times. However, Southern bureaucracies are flexible only when they shouldn't be and insurmountably rigid when it's actually good, reasonable, or funny to make an exception. So, no, no extra grade for Watson here. But we might as well create a whole new professional category for the friend of my friend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why legal professionals are not using version control goddamit?! It's exactly the tool they need. Just recently worked with a lawyer who was negotiating settlement agreement on my behalf. The agreement in MS Word, edits highlighted with a color background, change requests in the body of the email - after 2-3 rounds of corrections reaching the other party nobody is able to keep a track of anything anymore. Seriously? Years of studies, prestigious profession, peoples' careers and lives at the stake, and this is how you work?!

<comment><USER9> Git is awesome.

But it's terminology is really confusing.

But yeah some layer of abstraction would be handy.

I always think of introducing it to my wife when she looses a document or something but god damn the terminology.

<comment><USER10> And if there's one thing that will deter lawyers, it's confusing terminology.

<comment><USER9> There are luddites and then there is the legal community.

<comment><USER10> I think we can get them on board. Need to rebrand some things with latin terminology, that's all. Let them file a _petitio tracto_ instead of making a pull request.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is super cool. I wonder if it could be taken a step further?

Because to me, the interesting parts are not the _final_ versions, but would be in seeing the version history of the constituion _as it was drafted_ and language was changed and rechanged, even with commit notes taken from records of the constitutional convention.

For example, the currently topical impeachment language went through revisions on "be removable on impeachment and conviction of": [1]

> " _malpractice or neglect of duty._ " \-- two North Carolina members

> " _treason, bribery, or corruption._ " \-- five-member drafting committee

> " _treason, bribery, or maladministration._ " \-- George Mason

> " _high crimes and misdemeanors against the United States._ " \-- delegates

> " _high crimes and misdemeanors._ " \-- final version

It really would be fascinating to watch the constitution evolve in "real time" across all edits. I don't know if anyone's done something like that before. Obviously it would be a tremendous amount of scholarly work to put together.

[1] [https://www.latimes.com/archives/la- xpm-1998-dec-19-mn-55593...](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la- xpm-1998-dec-19-mn-55593-story.html)

<comment><USER12> This is actually something I've played around with before. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find the free time to finish the project.

[https://bitbucket.org/nsg- usa/constitution/commits/all](https://bitbucket.org/nsg- usa/constitution/commits/all)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The fact that GitHub marks the initial commits as 2016, and says 48 years ago when you click on one, even though it clearly says 1787 in the commit message makes me sad.

All these 6 figure salaries and we still can't write code that handles dates.

How does someone look at a date and think it should only have two digits? How's it possible that someone could look at a system that only stores enough time for 68 years in future and think that's fine? Why is so much code written with the assumption that a year is a four digit number?

The passage of time is guaranteed and yet programmers are somehow constantly surprised that it happens. The world is 14 billion years old and will exist for much much longer. Someone might need to write code dealing with any of those time periods, why do we make them expend mental effort on (what should be) such a reasonable, trivial task?

We have the bits to spare. It's a strange form of collective procrastination.

<comment><USER14> Something about your comment rubs me the wrong way, and I think it's a kind of toxic idealism that doesn't acknowledge how software isn't a mathematical object but situated in the real world.

You realize 48 years ago is the Unix epoch? Circumventing this problem to admit commits that were made before 1970, which clearly has no real world use case, is over engineering at its worst. Similarly, with designing a system to last longer than 68 years. The number of tech companies that have lasted more than 68 years can be counted on one hand.

<comment><USER15> It would be overkill to move from 32 bits of Unix timestamps to 64 bit signed ints just for this application.

But it might be a good idea in general, and then it would solve this issue as a side effect.

<comment><USER14> Sure, but that's a problem way down the stack, a problem for language designers, not application developers.

<comment><USER15> Well, they are also getting six figure salaries.

But in any case, eg Python supports dates before 1970 just fine. It was a conscious decision by the application developers of git to restrict themselves to whatever C has to offer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The best part of this repository is that the authors and the commit dates reflect the true date of the event:

      James Ashley authored and JesseKPhillips committed on Dec 6, 1986

      8th Congress authored and JesseKPhillips committed on Jun 15, 1980

<comment><USER17> Honestly it seems like one of the worst parts, that the dates are limited by UNIX timestamps and aren't flexible enough to store the dates from centuries ago.

<comment><USER18> they do when you use signed 64bit timestamps (or 128bit ones if you need the nanos)

<comment><USER19> Unfortunately git rejects dates before 1970, at least when I set them using GIT_AUTHOR_DATE

<comment><USER20> This is especially troublesome when you need to cover up those 50 years of procrastination on a project.

<comment><USER21> You say 'procrastination' I say 'The means _IS_ the end, yo!'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If you're curious of the origin of each word, a word-by-word "git blame", I just made a visualization of that [1]. For example, "We the people" comes from the draft by Morris.

Also, somebody else did the work a few years ago [2], would be interesting to compare them.

[1]: [https://dam.io/word-blame-US-constitution/word-blame-by- comm...](https://dam.io/word-blame-US-constitution/word-blame-by-commit.html)

[2]: [https://github.com/anthonygarvan/theconstitution](https://github.com/anthonygarvan/theconstitution)

</comment><comment><USER23> So much legislation consists of "add the following text to USC 1.23: 'blah blah blah'" that I'm surprised there isn't something like this for pending bills.

<comment><USER24> I had this realization like four years ago, and bought `gitvernment.org` precisely to do this...one day.

<comment><USER25> I also had a similar idea for a project that tracked changes so citizens could see exactly which representative changed a bill. The OpenGovFoundation built Madison[0] to enable the public to comment on bills, but that project has been shuttered.

I still think there is some merit to the idea. The challenge, however, is to convince legislative bodies to use such a system.

[0] [https://mymadison.io](https://mymadison.io)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> JesseKPhillips was my favourite founding father. He was a genius for adding whitespace and readme.

<comment><USER27> I kinda wish they'd rebase the repository to put that stuff in so git blame would still give you the original authors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Always amazes me that so many people think the constitution grants people the rights.

The constitution grants the govt rights.

The people have all the rights not expressly forbidden by law.

Law enforcement seriously lags in this as well

<comment><USER29> What really matters is what rights the people with the guns are willing to give you...

<comment><USER28> Which is the reason the 2nd amendment was written. The founders knew politics 101. Violence is required.

<comment><USER29> Well, it was. Now, not so much.

<comment><USER30> I assume you're responding to the GP's "Violence is required." Perhaps actual violence is not required now, but the threat of violence is still just as real and necessary.

<comment><USER29> Nope and nope. The threat of violence from the people is not real in the US any longer, nor is it necessary.

<comment><USER28> Interesting, if you think this is true, speed 5mph over the limit and refuse to follow directions from the officer. eg dont pull over

Let me know how the violence thing doesn't happen in a victimless crime.

<comment><USER29> ? I'm not going to shoot a cop so I can go 5mph over the speed limit if that's what you're saying...

I'm trying to say that the threat of violence from the people isn't there anymore, for many reasons, one of which is the huge disparity between the military and consumer availability.

<comment><USER28> Sorry, I misread.

I disagree, recently one event has shown the violence is just under the surface.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundy_standoff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundy_standoff)

Large groups of people went to that mans ranch just to threaten the govt.

<comment><USER29> The government was not threatened in any meaningful way.

You're just going to disagree regardless though, aren't you?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Are the amendments really meant to be inserted at unspecified points in the main text? I never thought of them like this, and it doesn't always work well here.

Most glaringly, there is the part in [https://github.com/JesseKPhillips/USA- Constitution/commit/7f...](https://github.com/JesseKPhillips/USA- Constitution/commit/7f340829cfc2ea844de1adfa4d9618d2adb6f932) in the article talking about the President's powers, saying "The President shall have Power to [...] He shall from time to time [...]" and the diff inserts "No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law." between these sentences.

This doesn't work at all, not only because this amendment has nothing to do with the President's powers, but especially because the "He" starting the next sentence has nothing more to refer to.

Of course this would be a lot more boring if the amendments were just tucked on at the end, but I'm afraid reality is just boring here.

<comment><USER32> > Are the amendments really meant to be inserted at unspecified points in the > main text?

The US constitution is unusual in leaving the main text unchanged and appending amendments at the end. Most countries don't do that.

For example, Australia's constitution [1] has been amended several times since it was first adopted in 1900. But, it is amended by changing the text of existing sections, inserting new sections or subsections (examples: section 105A, subsection 51(xxiiiA)), and deleting entire sections (example: section 127).

[1] [https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Senate/Powers_practi...](https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Senate/Powers_practice_n_procedures/Constitution.aspx)

<comment><USER33> Most notably the 21st Amendment repealed the 18th, but both texts are still present in the amendments section of the US Constitution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Now do all pending legislation in a publicly visible, anonymous, read-only repo.

Branches and commits are done under accounts tied to elected officials (though clearly their staffs mash the keys).

We could have AI doing actual work of monitoring WHAT THE WHAT is going on.

Hence the unlikelihood of this ever happening.

Plus the reality that legislation is mostly a requirements document anymore, with the real work occurring in the Executive in the form of regulation concocted by unelected bureaucrats.

</comment><comment><USER34> Most of the constitution is missing here. To properly compile the constitution, the dependencies, such as supreme court rulings defining terms, must be included. I don't see those deps modeled in this repo.

<comment><USER35> Case law interpreting the Constitution is part of constitutional law, but is not part of the Constitution itself.

You can thank the British for that.

<comment><USER36> You should thank them everyday. Common law is the secret power of a good legal system (Speaking as an American lawyer, of course).

In non-common law systems, extra-judicial experts (e.g., law professors) have too much weight in interpreting laws.

If a legal hair is to be split, a common law court should do it. And, the court's holding should have precedence until a democratic legislature with jurisdiction over the issue says otherwise.

<comment><USER15> In practice, Common Law jurisdictions and Civil Law Jurisdictions are not so different these days. (Democratic) legislation is an intruder to Common Law. And on the other hand, Civil Law systems give some at least informal weight to precedence.

I don't quibble with your description of the idealized versions.

See also [http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Legal%20Systems/LegalSystemsCo...](http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Legal%20Systems/LegalSystemsContents.htm) for some alternative systems of law.

<comment><USER37> Fully Codified Common Law would be the best of both.

<comment><USER15> What do you mean by that?

Do you mean [https://en.wikipedia.org/wik/Codification_(law)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wik/Codification_\(law\)) or writing law in computer code, or something else?

If the former: Codification of Common Law is an ongoing process, and I guess will always be a bit behind the latest court rulings. (And that's by design.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> >Keep in mind this is not a formal platform to establish Constitutional changes.

<comment><USER39> Yes, I loved that comment!

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Someone submit a pull request to abolish the Senate, reform the House into a mixed-member proportional parliamentary system, mandate all state legislatures do the same, and replace the Electoral College with a ranked choice popular vote.

One of the worst things about growing up in America is being inundated with propaganda about how we should revere the founding fathers only to grow up and realize that much-revered Constitution is riddled with bugs and badly needs refactoring to accord with modern best practices.

<comment><USER41> The Senate was a negotiated compromise to get sovereign states to agree to join a federation. Obviously it gives some states more power — that's the entire reason they agreed to it.

How do you expect to get them to agree to change it? I doubt people in Alaska or Montana think the Senate is a "bug".

If you don't think the structure of the federation works for your state, you can try to get your state to secede. That's more logical, and more likely to succeed, than convincing others to vote against their own interest out of a sense of "fairness".

<comment><USER42> >How do you expect to get them to agree to change it?

Believe me, I ask myself this question weekly. I don't know how it will happen, but the federation will not thrive without that change. In fact I would argue it is unstable currently.

>I doubt people in Alaska or Montana think the Senate is a "bug".

I doubt people in Wyoming or Vermont consider the Senate to be fairly represent the federation. But you will rarely catch a politician admitting that. Oppressors will always opress, and that isn't my problem. It's theirs. The oppressed will always resist. Everything evens out in the end.

<comment><USER41> You cannot claim that people in NY State and California are oppressed, since their revealed preferences show them wanting to remain part of the federation. If people were unhappy with the current structure, you would see large and vibrant independence movements, whereas in actual fact those movements are a tiny fringe.

Despite its many problems, the US is one of the most prosperous, peaceful, and stable regions in the history of the world.

Without the Senate, the US simply wouldn't exist (the smaller states wouldn't have agreed to it), and North America would by now be a few dozen independent, competing, conflicting countries. It's hard to imagine how that would be more stable than the current situation.

By the way, larger groups agreeing to give disproportionate power to smaller groups, in order to keep their union or federation together, happens all the time. Examples off the top of my head include Canada (where Quebec is massively overrepresented in the federal parliament), the UK (where England is the only constituent entity without its own legislature), Bosnia (whose three main ethnic groups split the Presidency equally despite having 50%/30%/15% of the population), and I'm sure there are many other examples...

The Bosnian example is particularly forceful, as this superficially "unfair" deal ended the bloodiest war in European history since WW2, in which more than 100,000 people died.

<comment><USER42> >their revealed preferences show them wanting to remain part of the federation

All of them? 20% of California is still 4.5 million people.

>America would by now be a few dozen independent, competing, conflicting countries

1\. that is not proven. alternatives could have been chosen. 2\. just because the Senate made sense among several mostly equal population states does not mean it makes sense today.

>Canada (where Quebec is massively overrepresented in the federal parliament)

And they have their own party. You cannot honestly believe that is an ideal situation.

>UK (where England is the only constituent entity without its own legislature)

The Scottish National Party exists, as do unionist and separatist terrorists in Northern Ireland.

>Bosnia (whose three main ethnic groups split the Presidency equally despite having 50%/30%/15% of the population)

Just because that makes sense for a young democracy does not mean it makes sense in California, a state with high cultural value given to equal voice and representation.

>this superficially "unfair" deal ended the bloodiest war in European history since WW2

Are you threatening war if California asserts its natural rights to self- governance? Unionization under threat of violence is not unionization. It is slavery.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I would love love love to see this effort individually applied to the French and EU constitutions.

I've heard the EU constitution is very bloated and gets into all sorts of minutiae. I've heard the French constitution has undergone a great deal of modifications across a span of many republics.

These two examples I've heard about in the context of being ridiculed in some comedic comments by some pundits and I always wanted to substantiate whether the substance of those jests was fair and accurate or exaggerated. Converting these two constitutional histories to Git would be incredibility insightful, probably even worthy of crowd funding.

<comment><USER41> The current French constitution was written entirely from scratch in 1958.

Saying it's been modified a lot is a bit muddled. What actually happened is that the old constitutions are no longer in force and entirely new ones came into effect.

The 1958 constitution is France's fifth (not counting constitutional monarchies), which is why the current French regime is called the "fifth Republic".

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Reminds me of this PR of the Declaration of Independence, with comments from the founding fathers: [https://github.com/usgov/forget-the- king/pull/1](https://github.com/usgov/forget-the-king/pull/1)

</comment><comment><USER45> Man I wish ever bill and law was under version control so you could do a git blame

<comment><USER46> There is rarely a single person behind changes though. You would have to show a list showing the person who proposed it, the people who requested changes to it and the people who voted for it.

<comment><USER15> The actual writing of the words is usually outsourced.

Quite a few people are involved in that. Clerks, lobbyists, lawyers, etc.

Even the reading of the laws that lawmakers vote on is outsourced. (Ie lawmakers often don't read what they vote on.)

<comment><USER47> That is why you have merge request approvers and the merger. The work can be authored by many because each makes small contributions.

You can even have multiple protected branches where "policy makers" merge the work from their lawyer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Love this! I just wish the Bill of Rights had been a pull request that was merged once the 11 ratifying states approved it.

</comment><comment><USER49> I wish all legislation would be stored in modern version control.

</comment><comment><USER50> Is there a way to automate this:

[https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house- bill/1569...](https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house- bill/1569/text/pl?overview=closed)

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----

        To amend title 28, United States Code, to add Flagstaff and Yuma to the list of locations in which court shall be held in the judicial district
        for the State of Arizona. <<NOTE: Aug. 9, 2019 -  [H.R. 1569]>>

        Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the
        United States of America in Congress assembled,
        SECTION 1. DISTRICT COURTS IN THE JUDICIAL DISTRICT FOR THE STATE
                                  OF ARIZONA.

        Section 82 of title 28, United States Code, is amended by striking
        ``Globe, Phoenix, Prescott, and Tucson'' and
        inserting ``Flagstaff, Globe, Phoenix, Prescott, Tucson, and Yuma''.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--

Note the use of "striking" and "inserting" which is basically a diff.

The reference doc is here [https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC- prelim...](https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim- title28-section84&num=0&edition=prelim)

One possible low hanging fruit would be to automatically at least create diffs for these type of situations? Thoughts?

Perhaps create a script just for this:

[https://www.congress.gov/search?q=%7B%22congress%22%3A%22116...](https://www.congress.gov/search?q=%7B%22congress%22%3A%22116%22%2C%22source%22%3A%22legislation%22%2C%22search%22%3A%22amend%20united%20states%20code%22%7D&searchResultViewType=expanded)

</comment><comment><USER51> _ccc Essen_ did a quite sophisticated project in 2013 regarding the German _Grundgesetz_ ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5756354](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5756354))

[https://github.com/c3e/DocPatch](https://github.com/c3e/DocPatch)

 _docpatch_ genereates neat versioned markdown like this:

[https://github.com/c3e/grundgesetz](https://github.com/c3e/grundgesetz)

now also here with the rest of german law text:

[https://github.com/bundestag/grundgesetz](https://github.com/bundestag/grundgesetz)

</comment><comment><USER52> This is very cool. It would be nice to add commits for all the drafts of each amendment. For example, here are various drafts of the 2nd: [https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Second_Amendment_to_the_United...](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Second_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution#Earlier_proposals_and_drafts_of_the_Amendment) It used to contain the phrase "but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person" but this phrase was dropped in the final version.

</comment><comment><USER53> > ...where does the government get the power to ban drugs.

It likes to pretend that the interstate commerce clause gives them that power. _ie_ they're "regulating commerce" by waging the drug war.

<comment> crooked-v See Wickard v. Filburn, whereby the Supreme Court decided that growing crops entirely for your own consumption while staying within the border of one state is still 'interstate commerce'. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn)

<comment><USER38> Straddle two states with my farm ftw?

<comment><USER54> I think that will make your situation worse rather than better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> As I've said before, the Constitution and our current legislative models were devised in a time of very slow travel and communications, when it made sense to hold periodic elections and have legislators travel to a central location for terms.

There are no _technical_ barriers to putting our entire legislative code online, dispensing with most legislative organs, and allowing people to edit it directly - a Wikiocracy, so to speak.

<comment><USER35> Based on our experience with Wikipedia, that would be the worst idea imaginable from a social and political perspective.

The wiki would just become a series of editing wars with multiple parties attempting to be the _last_ to edit the wiki. For any sort of sanity, you'd need to lock down most of the wiki, putting the power in the hands of a few editors. And then you'd have the problem of selecting the editors....which would bring you right back to where we are today.

<comment><USER55> Not at all. You'd just have to get buy-in for commit changes. There is no editorial selection, the whole point of wikipedia is that anyone can edit it. I am _not_ arguing that Wikipedia as-is is ready for deployment as a legislative corpus, but that no _technical_ barrier exists to the creation of something built along similar lines.

<comment><USER35> There are significant technical barriers to what you're describing.

For starters, how do you limit edits to citizens? How do you verify citizenship? How do you handle racing commits? How do you determine "buy-in"? How do you store the data securely? How do you secure the authoritative single repository of all law for your jurisdiction? If distributed, how do you determine the authoritative source? How do you trust change commits coming from external sources such as the other distributed stores of the liki?

<comment><USER55> Not really. First, I don't, only to residents. With brakes, much as W handles edit wars. Buy-in is most likely a function of affective scope, and itself is up for debate. On LOC.gov, eventually or using some sort of blockchain.

I don't think most of these objections are technical so much as social. Nor am I offering it as a complete recipe ready to go; it's a proposal with very manageable problems, certainly no worse than those Wikipedia faced when first instantiated. You have to start somewhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> This is great. Is there a tool to do this?

I mean, can I edit the times and the authors and create a history that I need with some software? Or did the author painstakingly go in and manually look up all the dates and make the commits? And then roll back for an error and just keep going?

The issue is how would you change a single commit from 8 commits ago if there was an error there?

And then how would you visualize the whole thing just to keep it straight in your head?

<comment><USER57> > The issue is how would you change a single commit from 8 commits ago if > there was an error there?

Rebase would be my first hunch. There's plenty of GUI based git editors, as long as it's all historically in order it's all fine and dandy.

<comment><USER58> Rebase and then force-push to reset the remote

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> This is pretty funny. I had something vaguely similar happen to me, although not nearly as major.

In my matric year (grade 12) I took three first languages (although I already had two first languages by grade 10). The department of education did not like it, but I did it anyway, with some encouragement from my language teachers.

Fast forward to the final exams, I did well enough to make the provincial top 40, but was excluded due to what I still think was a bug in their system. Funnily enough, I walked to the provincial minister for education (later the national Minister of Health) and told him what happened. For a short while I was a radio celebrity due to the minister personally telling people "Look, this white boy got a B in Sepedi so you guys really should stop complaining and do better." [1]

The error was not corrected and I was actually at the ceremony by chance for having gotten best in English in the province. I also randomly got a call from some trust and got about $100 for my creative writing essay.

In any case I guess the whole radio thing was more amusing to me and actually was a better prize in the end.

[1] In South Africa, a B is 70%—79%; I had gotten 76%.

<comment> za-correct Edit: This is meant to be a comment on the latest commit—the 200 year old ammendment that got ratified in 1992, essentially due to a C being awarded for an essay about how the 200 year old ammendment could be ratified.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> How do _The Federalist Papers_ fit into it? [0]

Given that most states and the US Federal system use the Common Law method of judicial determination, _The Federalist Papers_ act as an important method of interpretation of the intent of the original lawmakers.

Are they 'comments' on the law then?

What about the _The Anti-Federalist Papers_? [1] Though less well known, they are still very important to determination of the Constitution in our current government.

Also, pull requests? Though not every tiny little court case and high school essay that relies on the 1st Amendment needs to be recorded, it would be great to see what the various supreme court justices have pulled and when.

To be clear: I love this project and this idea! Super great job to the creators! You all rock!

[0] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Federalist_Papers](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Federalist_Papers)

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti- Federalist_Papers](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Federalist_Papers)

</comment><comment><USER61> I'd love to see this with US Code. Imagine getting to see a change made by a member of Congress, then a pull request to a committee branch, then a pull request to one branch of Congress, then a pull request to the other branch, and then a pull request to the US Code.

</comment><comment><USER62> It's unfortunate that the issues are being used to make non-serious amendment proposals.

<comment><USER47> It is fine, this isn't a legal platform, the issues are being labeled and later closed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> What I find incredible is that the LEGAL industry has yet to adopt any 'git' style repo to manage all the multi-touch contract edits.

My gut tells me the simple reason is because that would effectively make them lose most of their arcane billing hourly fees.

<comment><USER17> Word documents have extensive markup and revision tracking features, and then they're passed around within emails that function similarly to commits. Git is only really useful when you're doing simultaneous changes to a large number of files.

<comment><USER64> In my experience Word's revision tracking is entirely inadequate to the task. I might take that back if everyone was editing a shared Word doc on Office365, but the typical scenario of emailing versions back and forth makes it very difficult to keep track of the current state of the document and ensure everyone is looking at the same thing.

I don't think standard git with MS Word blobs would be better though.

What I would like would be the conceptual structure of a git version history but with a commit viewer that could represent the commits in Word's revision control style as well as pull requests to track incremental agreements to change the document.

<comment><USER65> But would version control solve the email issue? I guess I would still rather get an email with a git repo or patch than I would a word document with a revision set.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> I really hope force push is disabled on the repo :)

<comment><USER47> Nope, a rewrite branch is in the works (to many glaring issues to start with.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> I love that the commits are attributed to the original authors:

      Amendment XXVII
      Author:    James Madison
      Date:      May 7 15:00:00 1999 -0400

[https://github.com/JesseKPhillips/USA- Constitution/commit/3c...](https://github.com/JesseKPhillips/USA- Constitution/commit/3cdfe67a179375d54e33b76122a70532c7915d0c)

I wish the commits were dated with the changes' original dates. Perhaps they and GitHub's UI is just confused by pre-1970 epoch dates.

<comment><USER68> It looks like this is a limitation because Git stores dates as seconds after the Unix epoch (1970-01-01). The underlying file format allows storing negative numbers, which would represent dates before the epoch, but most toolchains don't handle them correctly. Here's a pretty good summary:

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21787872/is-it- possible-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21787872/is-it-possible-to- set-a-git-commit-to-have-a-timestamp-prior-to-1970)

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> I did something like this a few weeks ago when I put the Irish constitution on a public Google document and invited people to make suggestions and edits that may have to be made in the event of a reunification of Ireland situation.

[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lJDjikCo4IHtEOcrEyNVIZeV...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lJDjikCo4IHtEOcrEyNVIZeVcTr8oelYeZFWqNavdfA/edit?usp=sharing)

</comment><comment> java-man Disclaimer: not supported within 100 miles of the U.S. border [0], [1].

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception)

[1] [https://www.aclu.org/other/constitution-100-mile-border- zone](https://www.aclu.org/other/constitution-100-mile-border-zone)

<comment><USER70> Did you file an issue?

<comment><USER71> Like that would do any good. You have to have a friend high up in the U.S. government to escalate your case if you want things fixed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> This is precisely what Clay Shirky was talking about back in 2012 in his talk "How the Internet Will One Day Transform Government":

[https://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_the_internet_will_...](https://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_the_internet_will_one_day_transform_government)

Now if we could only move our legislators' legislative processes into git...

<comment><USER73> First we have to remove tech troglodytes from government by voting for sane replacements. Only then can we discuss rational advances to tech in government.

I see this as a distinct possibility if there is a wave election in 2020 with new voices who are open to actual non-lobbyist reform.

<comment><USER74> > First we have to remove tech troglodytes from government by voting for sane > replacements. Only then can we discuss rational advances to tech in > government.

No, first "we" have to learn to talk about things that matter to most citizens, which tech in government, as such, is not. You need to talk to the things that can be delivered, tech is just a means to deliver them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> > With the exception of the commits made in 1971, the year was actually 1791, > I follow the simple path of ignoring the least significant digit. So 1996 > means 196?as I chop off the 19, the year 1000 is implied and then tack on > the next two significant digits of the year which is 96 and leaves off the > specific year.

What? I have no idea what you mean by this.

<comment><USER76> It means:

      fakeyear = Math.floor((realyear - 1000) / 10) + 1900

or equivalently

      approxrealyear = (fakeyear - 1900) * 10 + 1000

except that 1791 is represented as 1971 as a special case because it's a nice anagram (it should have been 1979).

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> The git metadata should be updated with the approximate time stamps of when the changes were made.

I've long wanted to try to do this type of thing with the US code of law. Beyond just being cool to look through, I think it'd make a lot of accountability of lawmakers more clear, since tooling to parse and gain insights from git repos are plentiful.

</comment><comment><USER78> An interesting backstory on the 27th: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salary_Grab_Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salary_Grab_Act)

Politicians never change! They've gotten better at this trick by making the bills 1000 pages long, while adding last minute changes.

</comment><comment><USER79> Seem like a perfect use case for Git History : [https://github.githistory.xyz/JesseKPhillips/USA- Constitutio...](https://github.githistory.xyz/JesseKPhillips/USA- Constitution/blob/master/Constitution.md)

</comment><comment><USER80> Irish Constitution as a git repo with the commits as amendments.

[https://github.com/adrian/irish- constitution/commits/master](https://github.com/adrian/irish- constitution/commits/master)

<comment><USER22> Also french Constitution here: [https://github.com/Assemblee- Citoyenne/constitution-francais...](https://github.com/Assemblee- Citoyenne/constitution-francaise-4-octobre-1958)

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> I've got an issue with this one about muskets.

[https://github.com/JesseKPhillips/USA- Constitution/issues/5](https://github.com/JesseKPhillips/USA- Constitution/issues/5)

<comment><USER82> Among other problems with the sentiment you expressed, it should be clear to anyone that the 2A has always been intended to cover far more than _just_ muskets. At the time the 2nd Amendment was created, rifles were already in popular use and were vastly superior to muskets since they could be shot far more accurately and were able to be reloaded faster than muskets. Saying it only covers primitive rifles (compared to modern tech) would still be inaccurate, but slightly less so.

Under a reasonable interpretation, whether one supports the 2nd Amendment or not, "Arms" covers (at least) anything an individual U.S. soldier might use in war; this includes full-auto weapons, suppressors, night-vision goggles, body armor, grenades.[1]

[1]: If we were shipping items to a foreign country to help them in war, would a news editor be comfortable using the term "Arms" in the headline? If so, the 2A probably protects its ownership by American citizens.

<comment><USER83> Not even close.

What we would call modern rifles were not invented until 1890's, with semi- auto and fully auto rifles not invented until about 1910 and not widely available until the 1930's.

The minie ball was not invented until 1830's and did not see wide use until the American Civil war and after in the 1860's. The Founding Fathers were working with muskets and only muskets, they never imagined that the average person could own a AR15 (M4).

<comment><USER82> > semi-auto and fully auto rifles not invented until about 1910

Not true; see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_gun#Early_rapid- firing...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_gun#Early_rapid- firing_weapons)

> In 1777, Philadelphia gunsmith Joseph Belton offered the Continental > Congress a "new improved gun", which was capable of firing up to twenty > shots in five seconds [...] Congress requested that Belton modify 100 > flintlock muskets to fire eight shots in this manner

1777 was 14 years before our Bill of Rights was ratified, and 4 shots/second is faster than an average person can fire any semi-auto weapon, including an AR-15.

Also, do you really think the Founding Fathers didn't envision technological advancement? Of course they couldn't have predicted exactly what our current technology looks like, but I'm sure they saw the progression from clubs to swords to guns and expected weapons to continue getting more effective. How could anybody _not_ expect technology to advance over time? It's literally been doing that since the beginning of the world.

<comment><USER83> > Not true; see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_gun#Early_rapid- > firing...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_gun#Early_rapid-firing..).

I should have been more clear. I meant Machine Guns that a regular person could carry and fire without setting up a stand. Maxim and Browning had demonstrated Machine Guns around 1880 to 1900, but they were big and heavy and not something a single individual would carry and they clearly were not for the civilian market.

> 1777 was 14 years before our Bill of Rights was ratified, and 4 shots/second > is faster than an average person can fire any semi-auto weapon, including an > AR-15.

The evidence that these guns existed is scant; [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belton_flintlock](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belton_flintlock) The 4 bullets pistols are the only example they have and that idea is an old and well known one.

> Also, do you really think the Founding Fathers didn't envision technological > advancement? Of course they couldn't have predicted exactly what our current > technology looks like, but I'm sure they saw the progression from clubs to > swords to guns and expected weapons to continue getting more effective. How > could anybody not expect technology to advance over time? It's literally > been doing that since the beginning of the world.

You are looking at this with 21st century eyes where every 10 years the world changes so much. The world of the Founding Fathers in 1788 was a world very similar to the world of 1688 and 1588. The food and clothes were different and not much else. To say that the Founding Fathers could have imagined a AR15 or AK47 is real stretch of the imagination. I am pretty sure that if you walked into the Constitution Convention of 1787 and laid out an AR15 and said, "One day a young man with this weapon will walk into a school and kill 20 children and 6 staff members with one of these and mass shootings happen with regularity." I am pretty sure the 2nd Amendment would be a lot different and a lot more clear.

<comment><USER82> I'm sorry this got so long, but I don't want to rewrite the entire thing now...

> The evidence that these guns existed is scant

Yes, but the idea of them existing was enough to interest Congress, who tried to order 100 of them. They backed out of their order due to the cost. If they had existed at a reasonable price, one can assume Congress would have gone through with their order.

> The world of the Founding Fathers in 1788 was a world very similar to the > world of 1688 and 1588

You're discounting the technological advancement of that era just because we've had more inventions in recent history. Innovation happened slower back then, but there were still large improvements in technology during the Founding Fathers' lives. Ben Franklin, who was one of the Founding Fathers himself, invented a lot of stuff during his life.

> You are looking at this with 21st century eyes

So are you. One of the reasons American citizens haven't had to bear their arms (some exceptions[1][2][3][4]) is because we have them and are able to use them if necessary. Few people are willing to die for a cause, and far fewer are willing if they have reason to expect their death will be in vain, and for their side to lose.

People are only willing to give up the rights they have now because they don't know what it was like without them.

> I am pretty sure that if you walked into the Constitution Convention of 1787 > and laid out an AR15 and said, "One day a young man with this weapon will > walk into a school and kill 20 children and 6 staff members with one of > these and mass shootings happen with regularity." I am pretty sure the 2nd > Amendment would be a lot different and a lot more clear.

We definitely agree that the Founding Fathers would be horrified by modern society. However, I don't think their reaction would be to limit firearm ownership. (Probably, they would probably want to know why tax dollars are going to the federal gov't to create public schools and why adults failed the kid) Would they have also changed the First Amendment to limit religion to Christian/Puritan variants? Probably not; they created the Bill of Rights to acknowledge rights that no human can morally take from another person, since the rights come from God*.

Ultimately, we can't prevent others from causing harm. Making black powder is easy and cheap, and tossing some fireworks in a pressure cooker or a pipe is something anyone can do. If we could hypothetically remove all guns from the entire world, badguys would cause harm through other methods, such as bombings or vehicle attacks[5]. We need to fix the root causes of these evils, not ban the weapon(s) they currently use so we can feel good about doing something.

-

Lastly, I'm assuming you made this mistake in good faith but implying that our priority for minimizing mass murders should be banning AR-15 style rifles is misleading. Most mass shootings are committed with handguns[6]. So why not ban handguns then? Because in America, guns are used in a defensive manner far more often than they're used to murder people[7][8].

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Athens_%281946%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Athens_%281946%29)

[2]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Ridge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Ridge)

[3]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundy_standoff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundy_standoff) (not an endorsement, but it's relevant)

[4]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Los_Angeles_riots#Korean_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Los_Angeles_riots#Korean_Americans_during_the_riots)

[5]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Nice_truck_attack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Nice_truck_attack)

[6]: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2016/06/16/why-...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2016/06/16/why- banning-ar-15s-and-other-assault-weapons-wont-stop-mass-shootings/)

[7]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_gun_use](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_gun_use)

[8]: [https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in- the-u.s.-...](https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in- the-u.s.-2018/tables/table-16)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> This is cool, but I was a little disappointed to see the amendments as just commits. Should have been pull requests, with all the proposed amendments in there, with arguments about them, most of the PRs closed, only a few getting merged :)

</comment><comment><USER85> Too bad the "amendments" to the constitution are all really just "appendments" tacked on to the end rather than actual amends to the main body of the text, which would make the Git repo more interesting.

<comment><USER47> The repo does edit the original document. The original amendment text is included in a separate file, but is not the purpose of the commit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> This may be of interest. It was formerly only available to Senators and their staff as a 3000-page hardcover.

[https://constitution.congress.gov/](https://constitution.congress.gov/)

</comment><comment><USER87> Diff with its most notorious fork, the constitution of the Confederacy:

[https://jjmccullough.com/CSA.htm](https://jjmccullough.com/CSA.htm)

</comment><comment><USER88> Love this!

And this is the future of legislation that we all need, all bills having detailed attribution to each word and line, linked back to lawmakers and lobbyists who created them!

</comment><comment><USER89> What I like about this so far is you can see that organic moment when the phrase 'United States of America' is born.

</comment><comment><USER90> Can I submit a pull request to get rid of the phony bits? Perhaps I'd better make that a series of pull requests.

<comment><USER91> I'll bite...what are examples of phony bits?

<comment><USER90> This was a reference to news stories of the past few days characterizing parts of the constitution as "phony".

The people who downvoted my comment were probably doing the right thing: I think the comment is funny and germane in the sense that git is a revision control system, but the comment can be inflammatory and really only marginally adds to the discussion.

For the record I can't characterize any ratified part of the US constitution (even parts no longer applicable and/or deleted, such as the prohibition amendment #18) as "phony" (whether I think they are a good idea or not) as they are, by definition, authentic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER92> As a staunch Constitutionalist, I love this.

</comment><comment><USER50> This needs to be done for congress and law in general. Merges done with presidential and congressional :shipit:

</comment><comment><USER93> This is just awesome, i mean why not. Git -> history. This is great idea for other historical writings!

</comment><comment><USER94> So are pull requests to this repo going to have to be implemented with rebases and force pushes?

<comment><USER47> At this point yes. But that is for historical in accuracy, like the 12 amendment being added twice.

Restructuring and formatting can come in as post edits.

There is currently a rewrite in the works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER95> pretty much what we use at zcash foundation [https://github.com/ZcashFoundation/zfnd/tree/master/about](https://github.com/ZcashFoundation/zfnd/tree/master/about)

</comment><comment><USER96> Nitpick. On a local Git they could've reproduced it with actual dates and names.

</comment><comment><USER97> Legit obsessed with idea, merge This into master please

</comment><comment><USER98> I was kinda surprised to see only one pull request

</comment><comment><USER99> For a constitution, it's pretty readable.

</comment><comment><USER100> arguably this would be even more useful for the patchwork of laws and conventions that make up the british constitution

</comment><comment><USER101> Can I fork it to make my own country?

<comment><USER47> I tried to make libre contribution, but I prefer the concept of granted power and that was not their direction.

[https://github.com/liberland/constitution](https://github.com/liberland/constitution)

</comment></comment><comment><USER102> George says that every American should have a vacuum cleaner in their basement!

</comment><comment><USER103> The Constitution is just a piece of paper.

</comment><comment><USER104> Is there a Patriot Act PR?

<comment><USER105> It was force pushed before code review.

</comment></comment><comment><USER106> Thanks you

</comment><comment><USER107> I love HN

</comment><comment><USER108> —We The People [..] +The President [..]

 _commit by _Trump__ November 2nd, 11:59pm 2020

</comment><comment><USER109> Revolution == Rewrite. Ammendment == Patch. New Gov == Refactor.

This kinda makes it easy to see how a simple system turns to shit over the long run.

</comment><comment><USER110> Time to amend it to counter Globalization</comment>


Half of Western European men descended from one Bronze Age 'king' - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/04/25/half-of-british-men-descended-from-one-bronze-age-king <comment><USER2> This is such a weird article. Literally anybody from 4000 years ago that has any living descendants is going to be a common ancestor of most of the planet. That's just math. Whoever this person was probably wasn't special and probably wasn't a king.

<comment><USER3> Came here to say the same. It's the same fallacy when people go "did you know there was once only one woman? Mitochondrial dna proves it!".

If anything, the prevalence of one family of haplogroups just underscores a lack of genetic drift, which is what you'd expect from a rapidly growing population due to improvements in technology. The bigger the breeding population the more likely that mutations are drowned out by the prevalent alleles. Isolated populations drift, and mutations propagate more rapidly within them to become universal. If anything, it points to a potential bottleneck 4000 years ago, but not necessarily.

If anyone's got a link to the paper it might shed some light on what was actually described...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Eventually you are either the ancestor of everyone on earth or the ancestor of no-one.

<comment><USER5> I'm confused too. You only need to go back 30 generations until you have 1.07 billion ancestors: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_recent_common_ancestor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_recent_common_ancestor). That means any old bones we dig up that are over about 4,000 years old will almost certainly be one of our relatives. Can anyone the article's significance in this context?

<comment><USER6> If only half the population in Europe shared a most common ancestor 4000 years back, that would be absolutely shocking. But this article is misleading, and that's not what the research says.

It's actually not about ancestry in general, but purely about patrilinear ancestry [0], which doesn't have the same kind of fan-out. If you go 30 generations back, you might have a billion ancestors, but only 30 patrilinear ones.

[0] That's the measurement they have to make. We have technology to measure patrilinear ancestry through the Y chromosome, and matrilinear ancestry through the mitochondrial DNA. But there is no way of doing the same for ancestry in general.

<comment><USER7> > But there is no way of doing the same for ancestry in general.

Uh, sure there is- apply the same techniques to non-Y, non-mitochondrial chromosomes.

<comment><USER6> I don't think you can apply the same techniques, since they depend on a special property of the Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA: they are not affected by sexual reproduction, only by mutations.

<comment><USER7> Huh, you're right- studies on the altogether most recent human common ancestor are all based on pure statistics. I'd thought that genetic recombination could be accounted for, since its not as though genetic information (and the mutations therein) are being _lost_ in the process, but apparently no one's found a way to do this yet. Interesting... ! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> There was similar news a few years ago relating how a large percentage of the world is descended from Genghis Khan:

* [http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/08/1-in-200-men-...](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/08/1-in-200-men-direct-descendants-of-genghis-khan)

</comment><comment><USER8> Coincidentally, I was just reading about how Genghis Khan was supposed to have directly lineage to 1 in 200 of world's male population. That study was in 2010.

[http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/08/1-in-200-men-...](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/08/1-in-200-men- direct-descendants-of-genghis-khan)

</comment><comment><USER9> The Indo-European expansions?</comment>


Show HN: Curious where your time goes every week? - <AUTHOR>

Gijit gives you a free infographic based on the information trapped inside your Google Calendar.
Check it out, tell us what you think.
Link: http://gijit.co/ <comment><USER2> Very cool, I'd love to see the locations plotted on a map!

<comment><USER3> We're planning on releasing a Chrome extension this week that'll have exactly that—stay tuned!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I love the weekly summary report. "The Week That Was" and "The Week to Come". Really useful!</comment>


Show HN: My new site/blog. Let me know what you think - <AUTHOR> http://hamiltonkib.be

<comment><USER2> If one of your objectives is to increase readership/viewership, have an email sign up field on the side bar and at the bottom of each post.

</comment><comment><USER3> A nice clean presentation. You might consider a different shade of green on the header bar? Feels a little harsh to look at to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I should probably turn F.lux off every once in a while...

<comment><USER3> Also, cheers for plainly linking to your public key!</comment></comment></comment>


Is social network analysis a good product idea for a startup? - <AUTHOR> I've just moved to Berlin with the intention of starting a startup, hopefully in the field of Social Network Analysis (this is what I wrote my Computer Science thesis on, and I loved it).
However, I do not seem to be able to come up with any half-decent ideas. Everything seems to be out there already.
How do you guys come up with ideas? Do you recognise the feeling of eagerly wanting to work on something but yet not being able to truly love anything enough to put effort into it?
So, my question. How did you guys come up with your ideas that you are working on now? Was it sudden or did you have this idea growing in your mind for a while?
Best, Andrew <comment><USER2> Well, I wouldn't say that "social network analysis is a good product idea", no. But I would say "social network analysis is an amazingly useful technology, and some novel application of it could be a great product". The hard part, as you've probably noticed, is figuring out how to apply the technology to solving an interesting problem, or enabling something cool and new that people will pay for (or focus enough eyeballs on, so you can make money on advertising).

I think one thing to do is just keep the tech itself in a sort of mental queue, and as you walk around, see stuff, read, encounter people, etc., just constantly ask yourself "how could SNA be useful to somebody in this situation?" And probably, eventually, you'll have an "aha" moment and realize "Shit, I could build this cool thing to do X!"

I would say, watch a lot, listen a lot, read a lot and think a lot. Ask questions, be curious and don't be afraid to daydream ridiculous ideas that you wind up discarding. But do carry around a notepad, or a smartphone/tablet with a notetaking app, or _something_ so you can record your ideas when they come to you. Not much would be worse than having that great idea and then forgetting it before you write it down. Also, sometimes, a "not so great" idea that you go back and revisit, may turn into the seed for a better idea. So go back and re-read your old notes occasionally.

FWIW, we're working on using SNA as part of one of our products. Our idea (which is not completely novel anyway) is to apply SNA to enterprise search and use the network links to help rank results. There's more to our product than just that, but it is one element (to be fair, one we haven't really started implementing yet).

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Mindcrime, thanks for your insight. That's exactly what I think about the situation too. An SNA product on its own serves no purpose unless it is applied to some sort of specific (pre-defined) problem. Similar to data analytics I guess, one needs to know why and what they are analysing before building the solution.

Yeah I use the notebook idea! Very useful.

Out of curiousity, how are you finding working with SNA? I expect that your market/customers are primarily large companies with lots fo data.

<comment><USER2> _Out of curiousity, how are you finding working with SNA? I expect that your market /customers are primarily large companies with lots fo data._

Exactly, yeah. We've had that on the back-burner for a while actually. I got as far as doing some prototyping a while back, but we haven't truly implemented SNA the way we plan yet. Hopefully very soon I'll be able to start putting more time into that.

FWIW, my interest in using SNA in the organizational setting was heavily inspired by reading _The Hidden Power of Social Networks_. [http://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Power-Social-Networks- Understan...](http://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Power-Social-Networks- Understanding/dp/1591392705) If you haven't seen that yet, it might be worth a look.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks mindcrime, I'll have a look at that book!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why the God particle is an accurate term - <AUTHOR> http://motls.blogspot.com/2011/12/why-god-particle-is-accurate-term.html

<comment><USER2> Having worked at the LHC, please let me be the first to point out that there is no such thing (thank God) as the Large HARDON Collider.

The author makes this mistake multiple times, and even suggests it as fitting given that it makes "soft/light/placid (not flaccid?) particles hard/heavy".

I shall refrain from further comment...

<comment><USER3> fwiw,

New York Times, Large Hardon Collider: <http://largehardoncollider.com/nyt_lhc_new.html>

Telegraph, Large Hardon Collider: <http://www.flickr.com/photos/skepchick/4445007033/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Off-topic, but such backgrounds should be forbidden. I could hardly focus on the content.

<comment><USER5> Something to make it a bit more 'readable'<http://rdd.me/89wgxjpt></comment></comment>


Did Apple just approve an App that exposes their supply chain practices? - <AUTHOR> http://thebln.com/2011/09/did-apple-find-a-sick-sense-of-humour-or-did-they-just-lose-control-of-itunes/

<comment><AUTHOR> Phone Story is an educational game about the hidden social costs of smartphone manufacturing. Follow your phone's journey from the Coltan mines of the Congo to the electronic waste dumps in Pakistan through four colorful mini-games. Compete with market forces in an endless spiral of technological obsolescence.

You can keep Phone Story in your favorite device as a reminder of your impact on this world.

All revenues from the sale of this app will be donated to organizations working to solve the issues mentioned in this game.

</comment><comment><USER2> And the yanked it just hours later: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2992774>

Hooray for corporate censorship!</comment>


AirPlay running on Raspberry Pi - <AUTHOR> http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/564 <comment><USER2> <http://code.google.com/p/airplay-nmt/>

</comment><comment><USER3> It's great to see such projects being created even while so few have access to the beta boards. I'm very interested to see what the community produces once the first batch are sold and in the hands of users.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm really disappointed there wasn't more information on what he was running, this is something I'd love to set up on my own, with or without the Rasperry Pi.

<comment><USER5> It was on HN last year: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2431318>

This is the related code: <https://github.com/albertz/shairport/>

<comment><USER6> Not quite. From Shairport's README.md: "ShairPort does not support AirPlay v2 (video and photo streaming)."

snos has the correct link above, from the beginning of the video, it looks like he's running airplay-nmt: <http://code.google.com/p/airplay-nmt/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Playing around developing for a Rasberry Pi (or 4) is going to be one of the coolest/most satisfying things I do coding wise in 2012 I think.

<comment><USER8> On the theme of a very rewarding change of perspective and exciting new possibilities, I'd heartily recommend everyone try their hand at developing for a small, embedded microcontroller platform. I don't know why sequencing and flashing LEDs is so satisfying.

That being said, I am excited about the possibilities of Raspberry Pi's, and hope they can meet their ambitious price point and stay well stocked. The design is impressive, and I hope they find equal success with the logistics and supply chain management side of the equation.

<comment><USER9> I'm slowly working on my first electronics project. I decided to go big though and I now have 200 RGB LED modules (from 5 strings of GE15 Christmas lights) hot glued into a 20x10 matrix. I'm still nervous about blowing something out though, so I'm hesitant to wire up the power. Eventually it will be a connected to a Arduino Uno with an Ethernet shield. :-) Fun hands-on project for this software guy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For anyone wondering, the video being played is by Cyriak. <http://cyriak.co.uk>

<comment><USER11> Cyriak is starting to get some serious play.

This is one of my favorite videos: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9iIgQN5uZE>

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> In other words, software is successfully running on a CPU, this is news?

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't understand why the rpi is so special. Any half-decent hardware engineer could have built this. They just optimized the BOM to get it to $25 bucks? Someone explain this to me.

<comment><USER14> If anyone could have built it, why didn't anyone build it until now?

<comment><USER13> You have projects like <http://beagleboard.org/> (beagle xm $150 and $89 beagle bone), and <http://leaflabs.com/devices/> ($45 maple), which are all ARM based devices, that have been around for a while. I just don't understand how these guys got it so cheap, which is why it seems like they just optimized the bom to get it to where it is. I'll hand it to them though, that is an impressive feat.

<comment><USER15> The big thing going for them price-wise is that due to them being a charity, Broadcom is selling them the SoC at prices you would normally only get when buying millions of them, rather than the thousands that they will actually end up buying. Plus I think a lot of the engineers etc donated their time, again because it is an educational charity, thus their R&D was probably very cheap.

Thus we end up getting a device that is smaller and more capable than the Beagleboard XM (CPU- and graphics-wise) at one sixth of the price.

<comment><USER13> See I didn't know this. Now it makes sense why they were able to get it so cheap. Getting a deal like that w/ Broadcom is pretty difficult to do imagine.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>