GitLaw: GitHub For Laws And Legal Documents - A Tourniquet For American Liberty - <AUTHOR> http://blog.abevoelker.com/gitlaw-github-for-laws-and-legal-documents-a-tourniquet-for-american-liberty/ <comment><USER2> This is one of those ideas that gets suggested on a frequent basis. Those who suggest it often think that the problem is one of complexity management, like managing source code changes.

The actual problem is one of power and intention. Yes, version control would make earmarks obvious. Yes, it would make tracking contributors (lobbies) easier. Yes, it would make tailoring tried and trusted legal documents easy.

All of these are reasons why version control will never be applied to the law. We want these things, but we are not the customer. The real customer is actively trying to prevent these things from ever happening.

The reality is that these tools are probably already being used for these exact purposes - in private, and for personal gain.

<comment><USER3> I agree 100%, but I think that's only the short view-- the extant governments aren't going to be around forever, and in the long run we need smart people to spend time thinking about how to structure a government that's learned from our mistakes.

Of course we won't see Congress outlaw lobbying, but there's definitely an opportunity today to try some of these concepts in an organization, community, or even willing local government.

<comment><USER4> Congress can't outlaw lobbying, it is a core Constitutional right (free speech, right to assemble, right to petition govt).

The problem is that the government is too big and has too much power, so the rewards for lobbying are so great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Law is a very, very, very hard task to tackle properly.

You may not know but there have been three big "generations" of law systems. Many parliaments are starting to use fourth generation systems. Third and fourth generation systems look a lot like a complex git, but there are many things that should and do work differently.

When I started dealing with these things I thought that it was a solved problem, just use SVN (the cool kid at the time) and everything will be solved. Well, none of the existing versioning models work well with law documents, especially acts. The general ideas do apply, but many of the details do not. For example, just think of a merge conflict: who are you so solve a merge a conflict? What you have to do is to just record the conflict and create two parallel universes, one in which the conflict has been resolved using branch A and another one in which the conflict is resolved using branch B. You then keep these two universes alive and apply all the later changes twice. You have to do this until a judge or a legal body declares one of the "branches" the correct one; this may take years and the decision reverted (even partially) many times.

A few links to relevant standards and systems:

* Legal XML: <http://www.legalxml.org/> An OASIS working group that is merging all the relevant national standards into a worldwide standard. * Akoma Ntoso: <http://www.akomantoso.org/> A UN/DESA-sponsored format for legal documents. * CEN Metalex: <http://www.leibnizcenter.org/> a meta-format that acts as an exchange format between legacy formats and new systems. * LexML: <http://projeto.lexml.gov.br/documentacao/resumo-em-ingles> A huge Akoma Ntoso-based repository of Brazilian laws. * ICA/SPP: [http://www.ica.org/792/about-section-for-archives-of-parliam...](http://www.ica.org/792/about-section-for-archives-of-parliaments-and-political-parties-spp/about-parliamentary-and-political-party-archives-spp.html) The groups of archivists that deals with all the fine points you have to deal with when archiving laws and dealing with legal documents in general.

The main international conference on Law and IT is Jurix, it started in 1988. Check out their proceedings to see how things evolved over time.

If you are interested in hacking something related to laws or legal documents (judgements, parliamentary debate records, historical versions of laws) just get in contact with me.

Disclaimer: I work in this field and I am related to some of these systems.

<comment><USER6> What do you do about bills which refer to existing laws, with instructions to "strike blah" and "insert foo before x in section xxx of this chapter"?

Maybe it's possible to parse that and apply that sort of bill most of the time, but I'd be surprised if it were possible to do so reliably (unless natural language processing becomes a solved problem) (or perhaps I'm overestimating the complexity of legislative language and converting legislation into a patch against existing law is not a hard problem).

The first step, however, could be to do revision control of bills, blind to references to existing law.

Representing bills as patches to current body of law is the endgame, but I think simple revision control of bills as they wind through the legislative process would add a lot of value and would be relatively straightforward.

<comment><USER7> Go the opposite direction. Make changes to existing law, run a diff, convert the diff into "strike blah, insert foo" format, and that's your bill.

<comment><USER5> The EU parliament has an amendments systems that does exactly that: [https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/news/european-parliament- share-a...](https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/news/european-parliament-share- amendment-web-tool-open-source) .

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've dreamed up something like this as well and realistically there isn't anything preventing us from using git to manage our laws. As a strawman to beat up, here is an example of how it could work:

        git clone legislature/generalstatutes
        s/marijuana/sugar/g
        git commit -am "Turn sugar into a controlled substance."
        git request-pull

        Legislators
        If interested, # git branch bill_12345
        git pull nathanhammond/generalstatutes
        // Continue editing the "Sugar as a controlled substance" bill.

        Spin off to committee (read/write to committee members)
        git clone legislature/generalstatutes
        git checkout bill_12345
        // Continue editing the "Sugar as a controlled substance" bill.
        git commit -am "Committee updates."

        Take a vote for leaving committee.
        If successful, # git request-pull

        General legislature takes a vote.
        If successful, # git merge bill_12345 master --signoff (Legislators that voted for it.)

Benefits:

\- Encourages broader participation in democracy.

\- Cryptographically signed. We'll know if you voted for or wrote it.

\- Tracks history of all changes (at least at the commit level). If something comes out of committee very different from how it went in you can easily find every change.

\- Makes it easier for newspeople to identify how the law is changing.

\- An interface like GitHub over top of the repository could hide all of the complexity, allow for line-by-line comments, and general comments.

\- Registering to the interface with your voter ID could allow for representatives to identify or poll constituents.

Problems:

\- Requires behavioral change for legislators who I would not necessarily classify as "early adopters."

\- Still possible to "launder" the creator by having somebody else make the changes for you.

\- In place modification of the law. To this point when something is repealed it typically looks something like this: [http://www.ncleg.net/EnactedLegislation/Statutes/HTML/BySect...](http://www.ncleg.net/EnactedLegislation/Statutes/HTML/BySection/Chapter_153/GS_153-1_through_153-382.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> Won't change anything. It's proposing a technical solution to a people problem.

Right now laws are openly available, but people don't care enough to get look into them. Also, just because you have "git blame" doesn't mean you'll now magically be able to see what corporate lobbyist wrote the law, because they'd just ask the legislator to commit it instead. Wouldn't change anything.

<comment><USER10> but at the same time it is kind of a technical problem.

one big reason why people don't look at the laws is because they get changed all the time without a transparant way to see what ends up getting changed right before a vote. something like gitlaw would allow people, and lawyers, to track changes to laws much easier.

adoption is definitely the problem, but this can help lawyers make proposals and counterproposals with the speed of software developers, which may give lawyers a reason to sign on.

<comment><USER11> So it's still a people problem, a 'gitlaw' would keep track of who changed what. You would still have to find out who did what.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is a laudable idea.

Unfortunately, the key challenge with the problem isn't architecting a DVCS- like service for legal documents (for an MVP, you could easily get by simply designing a novel frontend to git), it's an adoption problem. The current system is flawed, yes, but merely offering a superior product for less money isn't enough to make a dent in the bureaucratic nightmare of modern-day Washington.

I'm reminded of an article I saw here on HN a few months back: [http://www.informationdiet.com/blog/read/dear-internet- its-n...](http://www.informationdiet.com/blog/read/dear-internet-its-no- longer-ok-to-not-know-how-congress-works-)

<comment><USER13> Adoption isn't the problem. We don't need Congress to use such a system initially; we need bills, the US Code, etc. mirrored on Github. When it's there, people will get it. The information is out there, it just needs to be processed into a usable form so that it works with Git. And it'd take millions of dollars, and have no conventional ROI, so no one's going to do it.

<comment><USER14> >And it'd take millions of dollars, and have no conventional ROI, so no one's going to do it.

Your pessimism is unwarranted. There is already one user on GitHub that scrapes the US Code and mirrors it. He even tags the changes so you can diff them quite easily.

<https://github.com/divegeek/uscode>

<comment><USER15> It also wouldn't have $0 ROI because there are people who will pay for advanced services built around the law-making process.

Here's an example of a service built on Ontario laws (disclosure: I made it): www.ontariomonitor.ca. It emails people when a bill passes a committee or when new laws are introduced (+ lots of other stuff).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> In addition to this being first and foremost a political/people problem as many have pointed out, the technical challenges of applying standard CMS and document management solutions to legislation environments are pretty much unknown or underestimated by most of us. For those interested, Sean McGrath has posted a series of posts addressing some of these challenges: [http://seanmcgrath.blogspot.com/2010/05/xml-in- legislaturepa...](http://seanmcgrath.blogspot.com/2010/05/xml-in- legislatureparliament.html)

</comment><comment><USER17> May I suggest that code wins arguments? _If_ this is a better way to do things, than starting with a small town that's about to incorporate could demonstrate that this could work.

Not the best list of such towns, but a starting point: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_planned_cities#Unbuilt_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_planned_cities#Unbuilt_or_under_construction_planned_cities)

</comment><comment><USER18> I basically agree with everyone pouring cold water on this as far as reforming the statute law system is concerned. That is a much more entrenched problem than any computer system is going to solve overnight.

However, I do see a niche for DIY contract law. Sort of like Nolo Press on steroids. Where you can browse standard contracts and then modify them to suit your needs in a visible and traceable way. Or possibly for contract negotiations, where each party makes changes. This would keep track of history in a neutral and verifiable way. (Could save time and errors for individuals and small law firms....)

</comment><comment><USER19> You can use GitHub for legal documents already. Just convert your documents to markdown. We put our TOS and Privacy Policy on Github from launch: <https://github.com/everyme/everyme-legal>

We haven't had any issues or pull requests recently but we would welcome them for sure.

</comment><comment><USER20> This is a fine goal, however, beyond what other have said here, it's important to realize that a lot of "laws" or "rules" that impact individuals on a day to day basis are not created by Congress at all--in fact, they're created via administrative agencies through rulemaking processes (see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rulemaking>). This is where the "rubber meets the road" of actually implementing broadly worded language that Congress has passed, and how these rules are promulgated can be vastly different from how Congress operates. For one, administrative agency rulemaking is almost always open to public comment and, by law, these agencies are obligated to take into considerations comments left by the public.

In a number of ways the process is more open and participatory than legislative law making, and, as mentioned, the regulations passed often have more of a direct impact on day to day life. There are a number of solutions out there that are attempting to make this process more transparent and participatory: for example, <http://regulationroom.org/> (operated by a clinic at Cornell law school). In my opinion, informing the public of the importance and participatory nature of rulemaking (and getting more people involved) is probably a more realistically achievable goal than the proposed solution, and would likely have more tangible effect.

</comment><comment><USER21> It makes a lot of sense for there to be a standardized, open framework for document management in general outside of source code. So many industries could improve their processes and transparency through tools like Git and services like GitHub, but they would need to be made a lot simpler than GitHub's UI. Their site has some great stuff going for developers, but scares away a few designers I know. I'd love to see a site/app like that get made.

</comment><comment><USER22> Neat idea, but is it currently really a problem to tell who has written what part of a law? Isn't this public information already? If not, then this isn't a technology problem, and it will not be easy to convince our congresscritters to keep track of who writes precisely what. And what about sections of law with shared credit, or law that comes from a committee that didn't unanimously agree, etc.

I know very little about how law is written, but my impression is that most people who pay attention to it are more concerned about the large ideas than the exact wordings - that's how you have politicians voting on bills when they haven't read every word. How can they when it's thousands of pages long?

So this might be more useful to a small number of politicians and lawyers who are examining law closely, looking for loopholes, or concerned about the exact details of a particular statement's pedigree, but I don't really see the general appeal.

I would rather have a tool which provides similar information, but on a higher level. An independent overview in layman language, general information about how it came about, how it's significant historically or with respect to existing law, and with the option to drill down to the actual language and gritty details. Of course, this would take much more work to build and maintain. I've been a fan of opencongress.org but I've found that switching between opencongress and wikipedia is the most effective way to understand the context and significance of a bill.

Reading the actual text of a law is usually about as useful to me for determining its implications as reading the source code of a printer driver would be to my dad for figuring out how to install a printer.

<comment><USER23> Bills used to not be 1000 page tomes. Special interests usually cause that bloat by lobbying for exemptions or credits in special circumstances. There's no real reason it has to be 2000 pages, it's not going to be three pages either though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> GitLaw, if implemented, would be a significant improvement over law by gits -- which is what we have now.

Unfortunately, I don't think the problem (with Congress) is technological. If GitLaw were implemented, a lobbyist wouldn't be making a pull request directly, they'd influence someone to do it for them so it wouldn't be traceable -- which is pretty much the way it works now.

<comment><USER25> > hey'd influence someone to do it for them so

Because now there are hundreds of people to check. We don't known exactly who did what.

With GitLow there will be one direct person responsible.

SCM helps a lot with source code. Imagine 400 people software project without SCM.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Great idea. Wasn't Docracy pitched as exactly this, "GitHub for legal docs"? Looks like it's morphed into something entirely different. Shame.

<http://docracy.com>

<comment><USER27> It hasn't morphed, we just don't market it on the homepage as "GitHub for Legal Docs" since lawyers and the general public have no idea what that is. But it is open-sourced legal docs, with versioning, diffs and a Github-style ownership/branching model.

John (Co-Founder of Docracy)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Hypothes.is is great for this -- see <http://hypothes.is>.

"A distributed, open-source platform for the collaborative evaluation of information. It will enable sentence-level critique of written words combined with a sophisticated yet easy-to-use model of community peer-review. It will work as an overlay on top of any stable content, including news, blogs, scientific articles, books, terms of service, ballot initiatives, legislation and regulations, software code and more-without requiring participation of the underlying site.

"It is based on a new draft standard for annotating digital documents currently being developed by the Open Annotation Collaboration, a consortium that includes the Internet Archive, NISO (National Information Standards Organization), O'Reilly Books, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and a number of academic institutions.

<comment><USER29> I don't see how hypothes.is has anything to do with this... that project seems to be about annotating any content. (And incidentally, universal annotation systems are paradigmatic chicken and egg problem; people keep trying to do this and it never reaches broad adoption).

Github for law is a much more modest and realizable idea, by comparison.

<comment><USER28> > how hypothes.is has anything to do with this

Hypothes.is annotations are great for legal content, and are similar to the stated goal of the GitLaw project -- namely to see how the laws are created, modified, debated, and by whom.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Abe, interesting idea and one I would like to run with. @nicholascloud, you make a good point about the "baby-sitting" of documents but I believe it can be resolved by crowd-sourcing the project with a "vested" membership interested in seeing the project succeed. This would also allow for controlling the abuse of the site by spammers. One part of the project would be converting the bloated material into something readable for the average participant. Because the material editor will be working on something he, or she is interested in then it would be a labor that they would happily engage in.

@michael, you make a valid point but I believe a crowd-sourced vested individuals like Wikimedia would work in keeping the problems at bay.

@tobi, I would suggest that the concept be kept private and not government controlled as any government initiative would only create a bureaucracy that would stifle innovation and open discourse.

My country, Mexico is going through a national referendum right now with the drug war as a backdrop and part of the drama. Although it is a national election I call it a referendum because the results will give an insight into what our country wants in terms of dealing with the narco-types. Will we continue with the strategy, increase the engagement or back-off and let them do as they please?

My original idea was to crowd-source political commentary/analysis but your post is making me expand the concept to include your idea.

The initial countries I would like to include are the United States and Mexico as I have a basic understanding of their political processes but I would love for it to include as many countries as possible.

I noticed that there is a lot of interest in this concept/idea and therefore I want to officially put out a call for those interested in forming such a site. I am willing to put up server space, domain name (polit.co) and initial programming. With Abe's permission and hopefully, his participation I have a created a Twitter handle @polit_co to start the organizing. I look forward to everyone's participation. Let's get this going.

</comment><comment><USER31> Democracy Is for Amateurs: Why We Need More Citizen Citizens - [http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/05/democrac...](http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/05/democracy- is-for-amateurs-why-we-need-more-citizen-citizens/256818/)

</comment><comment><USER32> Great idea, and seems to be a relatively wide-spread one, at that. But, as others have mentioned, it faces steep adoption challenges.

I recommend taking a look at Rogers' 5 Factors of Adoption [1] as a starting point. It would be extremely challenging to get this approach adopted from the top down, especially in an entrenched democratic system. Instead, a less risky approach may be to first get it successfully applied at the small scale. For instance, can you get a small township/incorporation to adopt this method?

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations>

</comment><comment><USER33> Hi everyone!

I'm working on a project called <http://makeyourlaws.org>. It's open source and non profit. Simply put, it's a practical project that aims to completely replace existing legislatures with online liquid democracies, through incremental steps within the existing legal system that have real teeth all the way. No waiting for a revolution and no begging. Read the site & its G+ page for details.

In particular having a git for laws is going to be a necessary backend system — along with e.g. pretty diff, blame, mass import, in-browser editor, simple markup language for laws, etc.

MYL is not git-based as it were — the policy authoring process is discussion- and voting-based, as it's a fundamentally different process than code authoring — but once it _does_ get to being about laws, git is a good model.

There are of course also a number of other subprojects within MYL, like legal identity verification, empathy-creating discussion systems, factchecking, privacy-preserving voter-verifiable auditable-in-aggregate cryptographic vote proofs, etc etc.

If you're interested in working on git-law, or online liquid democracy in general, please contact me either by email to firstname.lastname@example.com or posting a comment at [https://plus.google.com/100183759660923071401/posts/NQVuM65j...](https://plus.google.com/100183759660923071401/posts/NQVuM65jZqp)

We're making it happen.

</comment><comment><USER34> I've been doing version management of law for 10 years. As Gioele said, (Hi Gioele!) it is a very very hard task to tackle. The problem is the 200+ years of tradition that you must drag along. In a prior life I've done version management for CAD data and software data. Those are both much simpler problems, largely because changes in procedures are so much easier when you don't have such a large legacy. As someone said, legislation is all about patching the law - although the more polite term is "amending" the law. While I have built and deployed a system to automate the generation of amendments and the compilation of law, building such a system to the more general case is mind boggling. For this to be accomplished, there is going to have to be a lot of buy-in from the legislatures themselves for they are going to have to be willing to change. That is the challenge - change at that level is a bit glacial. In the meantime, I am writing an HTML5 based legislative editor to at least get some substance behind the idea - it's at <http://legalhacks.org>. I'll post a video on how it works tomorrow. It's still a bit fragile too - this stuff is hard.

</comment><comment><USER35> IANAL, but...

Why don't we instead build a "Startup Law Standard" kind of thing that can get network effects in the startup scene. Get all the big firms law firm / VCs / angels / etc. signed on to these standards.

How would this look? I've read a lot of contracts, and you see some similar stuff. In many ways, it's kind of like programming:

VARIABLE DEFINITIONS: at the top - like: "'Company' shall be XYZ, Inc., a Delaware Corporation located in 100 Main St.", and so on.

TESTS: These are normally "Warranties and Representations" - these are often quite boiler-plate like: "Assignor is owner of all Intellectual Property", etc.

AUTHENTICATION: Signatures, etc.

I bet that 80-90% documents could be generated by a set of 500 boiler-plate sections with fill-in-the-blank type of stuff. There could be built into these something that'd figure out the incompatibility (i.e. "exclusive" in one section wouldn't work with "non-exclusive" in another).

Term Sheets are pretty standardized now with a couple made forms that are considered modern. Why can't we do the rest?

Call me crazy, but couldn't this at the very least reduce law costs, and at best be the first step down a road of nearly full-auto law?

Then again - IANAL...

<comment><USER36> I hate to break it to you, but most of the legal documents you pay for _are already standardized_. They have been for years (or decades, depending on the area of law). You're paying for the customizations that are specific to your situation.

Obviously, standardized language has done nothing to reduce costs. The problem is supply-side: despite the glut of (new) lawyers, there are still not enough lawyers that people are willing to trust with their business.

<comment><USER35> Well I know that - I'm asking why can't it be codified more so it's more consistent and able to be interacted with. The issue with lack of "trustable" lawyers could perhaps be improved by such a tool?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This can be done, and in fact there is a business in it too: an open source competitor to Lexis and Westlaw. Data entry is bound to be a problem, as no- one is going to want to give up electronic data, but I for one would be willing to spend a few hours a week transcribing documents at the local courthouse.

<comment><USER15> You might enjoy the free legal data service offered in Canada that has most of the cases that you can find on Westlaw/Lexis: canlii.org. It could be more open, but it's free and works well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Anyone interested in this should check out:

<http://www.plainsite.org/>

</comment><comment><USER39> I like the idea. I've been wanting to do something similar for the laws here in Denmark, but getting good data is tricky.... Strangely enough.

My reasoning is that I feel that politicians are constantly filling with existing laws and the changes are conveyed via strang legal terms, e.g. "This changes "they to us in paragraph five, section 2, line 3". This is a complete bullshit way of informing the public about the changes to our laws. If laws where tracked the same way we as developers track our code, hiding even minor changes would be impossible. Just imagine getting a daily / weekly change log for the laws passed by your government. Even our lazy journalists should be able to dig up something in appropriate every now and then if they knew what changed.

Wonderful idea.

<comment><USER40> Most country with a codification system also publish consolidated codes, so you don't have to apply the diff yourself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Relevant discussion from 3 years ago on Slashdot: [http://developers.slashdot.org/story/09/03/06/1451216/congre...](http://developers.slashdot.org/story/09/03/06/1451216/congress- mulls-api-for-congressional-data)

</comment><comment><USER42> It's disappointing that this is only an idea, as opposed to a semi-working prototype.

<comment><USER40> There are already lots of people working on that kind of things, e.g.: <http://www.opencongress.org/>

There was a barcamp not long ago: <http://transparencycamp.org/> with many people from all over the world.

<comment><USER42> Yes but this post wasn't primarily about either one of those projects right?

<comment><USER40> No, it is about a hypothetical project, while there are already lots of people actually building stuff (and yes they do know about github and VCS).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> For anyone interested in this idea, check out legalhacks.org and join us for a hackathon at UC Hastings on May 19, to mark up legislation and discuss metadata standards for legislation. internationallegislation.eventbrite.com

Having legislative markup is necessary for any git-like system, because of the complex ways that amendments are currently made.

We'll be joined at the hackathon by Grant Vergottini, a member of the LegalXML OASIS committee, and the person who built the legislative editor that California uses.

As many people here have commented, adoption by legislatures of

[seems my earlier comment does not appear]

</comment><comment><USER44> How do we start doing this? Is anyone willing to put some time to build this? Of course this would be non-profit. Maybe if we get enough people interested, we can start pressuring different organization to help us (Wikimedia comes to mind).

There would be a need for people writing the laws into text and coders for implementing different aspects. Maybe crowdfunded. I don't know, just throwing ideas to see if anyone is interested.

We don't need the government to do this. We have the data (or most of it). We need to start changing it from the outside.

</comment><comment><USER45> We're missing the point I think. A site like this wouldn't be a way to combat lobbyist. It would be a way for citizens to become the lobbyists. If a site like this did pop up, it would eventually be dominated by a voice leaning a certain way. So, this is not a one-site-fixes-all type deal. This format could be a way for citizens to collaborate with other like-minded citizens and write legislation of their own.

</comment><comment><USER46> In 2007, New Zealand experimented with a public wiki to collect input for a revision to the Policing Act laws. In 2008, the wiki would be reviewed by a parliamentary committee. I'm not sure what the outcome was, but the wiki itself is now offline.

<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7015024.stm>

</comment><comment><USER47> > It looks like there is an existing project > called Legal-RDF that was > created to add > semantic data to digital legal documents, > but it's XML > and therefore not very readable.

RDF has several other formats besides XML (turtle being one of the more human readable formats).

</comment><comment><USER48> I volunteer at the Public Knowledge Foundation (an Israeli version of The Sunlight Foundation), we develop and maintain oknesset.org (like opencongress.org). For the past couple months we've been researching the possibility of representing Israeli law as a git repository, so that oknesset.org can visualize the diff to a law a bill proposal represents, and track it as a branch until it is merged into law. Since Israel is a relatively young and small country the number of laws and changes is orders of magnitude smaller than most western/democratic countries which publicize the legislative process. Israel's legislative branch is unicameral so the process itself is relatively straightforward; supposedly we'd be a good test case. We already have quite a lot of insight but in general it seems that git (and generally, any VCS) has significant impedance mismatch with the legislative process, specifically regarding the ability to compile/link all the different laws into one comprehensive database representing the law. One prominent example is the existence of multiple timelines of ratification. There are at least three dates relevant to the ratification of bills:

1\. Date of third (and final) vote = the date the parliament has voted a bill as law

2\. Date of publication (for technical reasons this might not coincide with the vote date)

3\. Date of validity - a bill is usually passed with a date of validity, between the date of publication and validity the bill is not formally law yet. Sometimes there are separate dates of validity for separate parts of the bill. To make matters more complicated, dates of validity can be changed when the bill designates government ministers with the authority to change them (the dates).

Also, in Israel many laws never "make it" to their date of validity since the yearly Law of Arrangements (<http://www.knesset.gov.il/lexicon/eng/hesderim_eng.htm>) decides which laws passed in the previous year have proper funding, such that officially some laws get "punted" into the future, possibly indefinitely. It gets quite confusing because from a legal point of view, the dates that are relevant to the justice system (as in, when a bill is relevant or not to the court) are usually the date of voting, whereas when it comes to government the third date is the important one.

We are still moving forward with our initiative, but it seems that for now there are no version control systems which are a good solution to the law management problem.

(edited for formatting)

</comment><comment><USER49> This is actually on my to-do list for "Things I need to do if I ever get on a state bar.".

</comment><comment><USER50> Having worked on actual legislative and regulatory amendments, this would be useful simply for collating input of stakeholders. One example would be regulatory comment periods.

</comment><comment><USER25> Let's build a prototype. Kickstarter? I'm not from US but I'll donate. This is so important for all democratic countries.

Then I'll vote for _any party_ which will deploy the git law system.

</comment><comment><USER51> For the UK, it makes me wonder how close you could get with the data here: <http://www.legislation.gov.uk/>

<comment><USER52> Not very (I maintain a nice iPhone app that front-ends the data on legislation.gov.uk): the data on legislation.gov.uk is useful for Joe Public, but when it comes to the actual practice of the law is woefully incomplete. This is purely down to a lack of interest and funding on the Government's part, as well as vested interests by people who publish law and charge for it.

There is _no free source_ of up-to-date UK law: many of the statute on legislation.gov.uk is not guaranteed to be up to date, and if you're looking to practice this is obviously no good at all. This is in itself very sad. The people who run legislation.gov.uk do a fantastic job, and hopefully access will get much better in the future.

<comment><USER53> > _many of the statute on legislation.gov.uk is not guaranteed to be up to > date_ //

They say it's updated within 24h of publication. Which seems to be as up to date as you'll get.

There are <http://services.parliament.uk/bills/> and <http://bills.ais.co.uk/AC.asp> for tracking bills before publication (the later one isn't working at the moment though).

So for example the 1st reading in the Lords of the Online Safety Bill was on 14th May and the text can be read at [http://services.parliament.uk/bills/2012-13/onlinesafety.htm...](http://services.parliament.uk/bills/2012-13/onlinesafety.html).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Please don't actually call this GitLaw. A better name conversion would be LawHub since most lawyers have no idea what Git is.

<comment><USER55> LawHub could be anything while GitLaw is exactly what it says: laws versioned in git.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Is this a recent trend in peoples mind ? Distributed versionning brings out the need to understand laws I guess.

</comment><comment><USER57> Why git? Why not a Wiki?

<comment><USER58> Git advantages are things better version management, branches, pulls etc

Having said that you can (and do) have Wikis that are backed by git.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> so this is designed to cut the flow of blood to american liberty? i guess i don't understand the imagery in the name?

</comment><comment><USER60> the documents themselves arent the problem, the real deception lies in the use of language and words of art

<comment><USER61> Exactly. My semi serious view is that laws should be written in Prolog.

<comment><USER62> I, for one, would prefer not to be imprisoned due to a bug.

<comment><USER60> many people already are, though the bugs are lexical in nature

<comment><USER62> The difference is that you can often get a judge to say "hey, that's a bug!" and then you're released.

<comment><USER60> unfortunately many judges have "bugs" in them too!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> It's going to be extremely difficult to refactor.

</comment><comment><USER64> We need github for music.</comment>


Qutebrowser, a web browser written in Python - <AUTHOR> https://qutebrowser.org/ <comment><USER2> Is this completely from-scratch, or just a Python interface around existing render and JS engines? In the former case, it's really impressive and exciting.

Edit: Never mind, "qutebrowser uses Qt and QtWebEngine by default (and supports QtWebKit optionally). QtWebEngine is based on Google's Chromium."

<comment><USER3> It also shipped as default browser in Sailfish OS.

<comment> The-Compiler Huh, qutebrowser did? I doubt that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's an alternative in Luakit[1] built with Luajit on Webkit and scriptable with Lua. Also has customizable Vim like key bindings.

1 - [https://luakit.github.io/](https://luakit.github.io/)

</comment><comment><USER5> More importantly, it is a keyboard-driven and somewhat Vim-like browser.</comment>


The World Might Run Out of People - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/the-world-might-actually-run-out-of-people/ <comment><USER2> I stopped reading after...

"In roughly three decades, the global population will begin to decline," they write. "Once that decline begins, it will never end."

..obviously this is hyperbole to sell a book which has to be dramatic to get attention. Nobody knows for sure what the population will peak at and how far it might fall again. The world has never been in this situation before and so everything is currently a guess.

</comment><comment><USER3> Or, through selection, a type of people or culture will arise that remains fertile even in the modern world. I think there's some precedent to this in nature...</comment>


Possible Major Google Announcement Tomorrow - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/02/21/possible-major-google-announcement-tomorrow/ <comment><USER2> i think this is sort of a goofy post, but i like comment #2 quite a bit.

<comment><USER3> rumors != useful</comment></comment>


Warren Buffett: Success in investing doesn't correlate with IQ - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/wb.warrenbuffett/posts/659616364053545

<comment><USER2> Actual text: Success in investing doesn't correlate with IQ once you're above the level of 125. Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing.

Warren Buffett

<comment> mc-lovin It should be the other way around: below a certain IQ all you need is the efficient market hypothesis and you will be an adequate investor.

<comment><USER3> Buffett's entire investment philosophy is rooted in the idea that the market is not always efficient.

<comment><USER4> I don't think that's true. Buffett's investment philosophy involves active intervention in the companies he owns, not just blind stock picking.

<comment><USER3> He acts on what he perceives as mispricings in the market. That these mispricings may be caused or magnified by his own actions in the companies he is involved with isn't really the point.

<comment> mc-lovin You don't seem to understand what is meant by the term "efficient market".

The efficient market hypothesis does not preclude the possibility that share prices could be improved by a buyout or activist shareholder.

<comment><USER3> Yes but most of what Buffett does is not activist shareholder action or buyouts, it's security/company analysis. Then once he finds an underpriced company (as was the most recent case by Heinz) he _then_ takes an action to get the best price for the shares for Berkshire. The market won't digest the information of these private negotiations of course but up until that point Buffett's idea generation is largely driven by the public price of securities, at least according to what he tells us.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > _Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to > control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing._

Temperament really is everything, and investing and/or gambling brings out the worst in people.

I used to play a lot of poker (which I consider a pretty good proxy for investing) in college and it was amazing to me how some of my smartest friends could be so horrendously bad at it.

For example, one of my Math major friends just couldn't control himself. He'd start with e.g. $1,000 playing online, get up to $10,000 in a few hours, and then blow it all soon after. He repeated this cycle too many times for me to count.

One of my pre-med friends was so smart and so confident both academically and socially, but he'd be the most timid and passive person at the poker table, never being able to raise or bluff anyone and usually losing all his money to more aggressive players.

I'd also venture (no pun intended) to say that most VCs are terrible investors as well - Following the herd, short-sighted, and little to no appetite for big ambitious long-term investments of time and money.

</comment><comment><USER6> I find it quite unbelievable that this is an actual quote from buffet... With any basic knowledge of statistics you know that 125 isn't ordinary intelligence ...

<comment><USER7> It's about 5% of the population, so not normal in the sense that most people have an iq of 125, but normal in the sense that meeting someone with an iq of 125 is not terribly uncommon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'd go further and say the ability to switch off the logical parts of your brain is essential when dealing with the financial markets. Trying to understand why the markets are doing what they are doing is not only a waste of time when trading, but can lead you badly astray. That's when you think you know what the market is going to do next, based on your research and rationality. In practice, it can and will ignore your rational conclusions and do whatever it likes.

</comment><comment><USER9> This makes sense for investing where you actually make decisions about what to invest in. I'm completely guessing, but it is probably different for quantitative finance where rather than investing yourself, you come up with a strategy and follow or even automate it.

Of course, that also requires more than just intelligence--you won't get far without the discipline to test everything thoroughly and to follow the strategy even if it loses money in the short term.

Also, I imagine the two styles of investing require vastly different _sorts_ of intelligence and are best suited to people of different temperaments. Making decisions about investments is very different from making decisions about how to make decisions about investments :P.

</comment><comment><USER10> The research conclusion is actually more general than what Buffett reports. An IQ level of about 120 is sufficient for eminence in any field, enough IQ to be a "genius" by making a path-breaking contribution to some field of creative work.

AFTER EDIT: Dean Keith Simonton's several writings on "genius" in a wide variety of domains provides the citations to other authors for that IQ figure.

<comment><USER11> Some fields have a cognitive threshold. I seriously doubt if an IQ of 120 is sufficient to become an eminent mathematician.

<comment><USER10> _I seriously doubt if an IQ of 120 is sufficient to become an eminent mathematician._

That is an empirical question, and the historical answer is that that IQ level suffices.

<comment><USER12> Not true - there are tons of studies that show otherwise, so I have no idea how this myth still exists.

An IQ of 120 is the top ~10%. Here's a 25 year longitudinal study [1] of over 1,500 students that were _all_ in the top 1% and it shows significant differences between the lowest and the highest quartile (who were in the top .01%):

> _Ability Differences Among People Who Have Commensurate Degrees Matter for > Scientific Creativity_ > ABSTRACT: A sample of 1,586 intellectually talented > adolescents (top 1%) were assessed on the math portion of the SAT by age 13 > and tracked for more than 25 years. Patents and scientific publications were > used as criteria for scientific and technological accomplishment. > Participants were categorized according to whether their terminal degree was > a bachelor's, master's, or doctorate degree, and within these degree > groupings, the proportion of participants with at least one patent or > scientific publication in adulthood increased as a function of this early SAT > assessment. Information about individual differences in cognitive ability > (even when measured in early adolescence) can predict differential creative > potential in science and technology within populations that have advanced > educational degrees.

This is just one example, but the results seem to be pretty consistent.

[1] [https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/files/2013/02/ParkPsychScienc...](https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/files/2013/02/ParkPsychScience2008.pdf)

<comment><USER10> I know David Lubinski, one of the investigators in that correlational study, reasonably well. (He and I are alumni of the same school district and same undergraduate university, and have many mutual friends besides meeting each other in conferences from time to time.) It's important to distinguish the claim about the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (of whom my son is one participant) and my claim about mathematical "genius" in general. The claim you cite is that frequency of eminent accomplishment in that study population increases as SAT scores at age twelve increase. That may be. My claim is that the threshold IQ score for eminent accomplishment in mathematics and other domains that recognize "genius" is no higher than 120, and I have Arthur Jensen and Hans Eysenck and the Terman longitudinal study on my side as I make that claim.

<comment><USER12> My understanding was that many of the claims of threshold effects at least partially stemmed from the imprecision of many tests, even at the 1.5-2 sigma levels.

Would you be able to send me some more info? Email's in my profile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I agree with what he's getting at, but I'm not sure why he phrased it this way. It's not like he did a study and this was the result (that I know of). He has no way of knowing if IQs of 125+ _actually_ correlate with success in investing or not -- he's just guessing.

It's an educated guess, sure. And it might be entirely correct. But I'm sure Buffett has lots of useful advice that people will take at face value, so there's no need for him to dress wisdom up with unsubstantiated scientific language.

It's almost as if he's trying to channel Malcolm Gladwell's claim in "Outliers" that any IQ points above 120 don't provide any advantages.

I'll let Steven Pinker to set the record straight [1]:

> It is simply not true that a quarterback's rank in the draft is > uncorrelated with his success in the pros, that cognitive skills don't > predict a teacher's effectiveness, that intelligence scores are poorly > related to job performance _or (the major claim in "Outliers") that above a > minimum I.Q. of 120, higher intelligence does not bring greater intellectual > achievements._

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/books/review/Pinker-t.html...](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/books/review/Pinker-t.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all)

<comment><USER13> No need to dress up wisdom with unsubstantiated scientific language? Where do you get that? He sounds plainly spoken to me.

He's not saying high I.Q. doesn't have its advantages at all. He says overly high I.Q. doesn't give you an advantage when it comes to _investing_ and there are plenty of examples.

Probably the biggest one from your M.I.T. alumnus, a partner in Long-Term Capital Management[1], creators of the Black Scholes Formula for options pricing. Their firm lost billions of dollars because said "perfect" hedging formula failed to account for shit going south in Russia one day.

It doesn't take a genius to observe a few really smart guys drawing some conclusions based on Brownian Motion, and the thing works most of the time, until someone tosses a boulder into the particle system and fucks everything up.

Don't forget about the fellow who whined: "I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men" when he lost today's equivalent of 2.5M in the South Sea Bubble[2]. That'd be Sir Isaac Newton.

[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management> [2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Sea_Company>

<comment><USER12> I don't disagree -- I think of markets as generally anti-inductive, so over- thinking things is a definite risk. And some quants have the habit of developing models so complex that when conditions change, they can't figure out how to adjust them.

I'm just saying that Buffett's quote sounds like the abstract from some scientific paper. I'm surprised he didn't include a p-value.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Emotions + inactivity > intelligence with investing.

It's fairly easy to find things that are undervalued and then sit on them. The problem comes when you enter the trade and real, serious amounts of money are on the line. You know like the "thousands of hours you put into your life savings" kind of money.

I distinctly remember the first time I put on a significant trade (significant fraction of my total net worth). My heart was beating, adrenaline was pumping, and my hands were shaking.

I had the same response as people who jump out of an airplane, or experience some other type of stressful situation. I would watch that trade like a hawk for hours at a time (it was fairly concentrated), and my emotions pretty much followed the ticker. As the stock bubbled up I was elated; as it fell, I quickly became depressed. I couldn't take it, and after one day I exited my position at a loss of $250. Probably one of the most stressful periods of my life. This is even after I had paper traded for years beforehand, and had a strong conviction for both my valuation and the stock at hand.

I got myself together and told myself that the next time the stock was at valuation minus 40% I would go all in, and I wouldn't touch, look at, think about, or check on the stock, and my holdings for at least 3 months; a total news blackout.

That situation soon arose and I did just that. The second time around my response was similar, but more muted, and my resolve stronger. Once in, I kept my promise and didn't do anything for 3 months and by the end of that period I was up 30%.

I then reviewed the history of the trade and noticed that had I been watching the market day in and day out, I would've experienced periods over that time where I would've lost 20-30% in one day. After noticing that, I knew that I could steel myself against these kind of movements by simply looking at the prices once a day and basically telling myself that "This too shall pass". Over a period of one year I basically trained myself to stop caring what the market thought, and successfully experienced draw downs of 20-30% without reacting one bit. Market movements no longer effect me emotionally (at least on the same level). Losses don't hurt any more (I have full faith in my own valuation and the stock) and gains no longer made me happy. Just by experiencing the pain and elation so many times, over such a long period of time, trained me to basically become numb to any changes, and in turn my response to market movements essentially flatlined.

Since then I've been up over 700% over the last year and a half, and I know that wrestling with my emotions has been, by far and away, the greatest battle I've had to fight when investing. Not finding good companies (easy), not valuing them (excel spreadsheets), not executing the trade (although my hands still shake whenever I try a new derivatives strategy, which is good), but taking the day-to-day fluctuations of 10-20% in my total net worth day-in and day-out without giving one single shit.

And that, I can tell you, is hard to do. Very hard. Most people won't be able to take it, with the global financial crisis being the prime example. When things go to shit, they freak out (just like I did at the start), and do the most idiotic things you could possibly imagine (not their fault). They go to cash when everything is cheap. The go to stocks when everything is expensive.

All because of emotions.

Emotions rule. And I practice emotional arbitrage.

<comment><USER15> 10-20% a day? Are you trading options? My portfolio never fluctuated 5% in one day, and it only fluctuated that much due to recent run up of Tesla and solar city... But I agree the more you are in the more numb you are to the market.

<comment><USER14> I don't have a portfolio is probably the reason why.

I usually concentrate most of my money in the one investment that I believe would provide me with the highest probability of high returns.

And yes - I do trade options, and no I don't need a lecture on diversification, I know what I'm doing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I once talked to someone that worked for one of the brokerage houses, and they ran a report to measure the investment performance of the aggregate portfolio of people with M.D. in their title (doctors). It turns out that they were systematically terrible investors with low returns and high volatility for every period and any measure.

I think the problem physicians face is that they spend everyday all day as the smartest person in the room, and are paid to make snap decisions that are rarely scrutinized. That is a recipe for disaster when it comes to investment.

<comment><USER17> Well they also probably have less time than even the average person to read, learn, and do research.

<comment><USER16> I think the real problem is that they are never explained the EMH during their lunch hour. Instead they hear about other doctor's winning investments, and it creates a stupidity cycle. I am pretty sure if I asked about investing at any tech company during lunch, someone would explain EMH to me. I could be wrong.

I personally don't believe markets are always efficient, but I _always_ think from the perspective of why I think the market is right or wrong.

<comment><USER18> As any engineer knows, nothing is 100% efficient.

I think a better way of describing the market is as a competitive game. Roger Federer may not play tennis "perfectly" -- what would that even mean? -- but you know what's going to happen if you or I step out onto the court with him.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This seems clearly false. What about David Shaw and Jim Simons? We know at least two out of n were huge successes, and n here (hard science professors at top schools who went into finance) is very small.

<comment><USER14> Ostensibly they use computers to automatically execute their strategies and hence their own human emotions do not factor into their trades.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> ...because task to be solved to score higher IQ differ from task to be solved to succeed in investment.

</comment><comment><USER21> This title, "Success in investing doesn't correlate with IQ " is horribly misconstruing Warren Buffett.

The title conveniently left out "once you're above the level of 125.", which yields a completely different statement from the title.

What Warren Buffett said actually allows room for IQ to correlate to success in investing. From the way he said it, it actually seems as though he believes that IQ might correlate with investing under 125.</comment>


Acai Berry company allegedly pulled in $40 mil last year - <AUTHOR> http://www.denverpost.com/ci_14709723

<comment><USER2> I put promotions like this under the infomercial category. Surprisingly, that's what a good one can pull in.

<comment><USER3> Sometimes they don't even bother having you sign up. I had a bottle of this crap show up in my mailbox about a year ago indicating that I had two weeks to cancel my subscription before they started charging me. However, I had never even heard of them before, and I certainly didn't order them.

I changed my credit card numbers, just in case they had somehow hijacked the numbers from an online store. (I know I could have disputed any charges, but it's easier to avoid them in the first place, as far as I'm concerned.) Just for kicks, I went to a public phone to call them and see what kind of scam they were running. When I called them, the automated system said to enter your 16-digit credit card number to reference your order. /facepalm At this point, I figured it was time to get the authorities involved.

I contacted the California Attorney General's office, and they have apparently seen a spike in this sort of scam. I wrote a letter back to the company telling them to fsck off with a copy of the letters and responses from the Attorney General's office. Thankfully, I've had no further contact.</comment></comment>


Public failure as a motivation - <AUTHOR> http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/27/credible-commitments-and-embarrassment-or-why-im-telling-you-im-running-the-stockholm-marathon/ <comment><USER2> The key to good public failure motivation is to make it opt-in. Blog post committing yourself to run a marathon: good. _But:_

 _Past students of mine have repeatedly told me to be a bit of a bastard in the classroom, as they find the persistent threat of embarrassment (if they are unprepared) to be a useful motivator._

That's a recipe for disaster. People's learning styles vary greatly, and helpful motivation to one student might be traumatic humiliation to another. Since students are a captive audience, the people who hate that style will just stop coming to class.

People will embarrass themselves enough as it is; no need to do it for them.

<comment><USER3> I think the point was that the motivation was of _avoiding_ the "traumatic humiliation." Obviously, though, you have to figure out "who can take it" to set a few examples for the rest, perhaps even briefing those people in advance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't think he is going to fail. A marathon is an achievable goal if you have a training program and apply it. If the NYTimes is smart, they'll get the a good coach to help him. It's a lot harder to fail if you have a good coach.

</comment><comment><USER5> Great idea, it's just potentially very embarrasing.</comment>


AI Podcast #101 with Lex Fridman – Joscha Bach - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-2P3MSZrBM <comment><AUTHOR> I found this interview very interesting. It is rather long but Joscha Bach had something to say to plenty of vastly different topics with some pretty unorthodox ideas. I was wandering whether there is someone here with an interesting impression or critique to share.

<comment><USER2> Jim Keller interview in same podcast is great too. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb2tebYAaOA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb2tebYAaOA)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Can ever a Toaster be considered having a life? - <AUTHOR> > Life is a characteristic that distinguishes physical entities that have biological processes, such as signaling and self-sustaining processes, from those that do not, either because such functions have ceased, or because they never had such functions and are classified as inanimate. [Wikipedia]
Even biological processes are a set of instructions that a body/vessel perform for a desired outcome.
So does that mean if we attach other equipment handling process' like signaling and self-sustaining, we can come close to call a Toaster possessing a "Life"? <comment><USER2> It depends on your definition of "Life".

One can modify one's definition of Life so that a sufficiently sophisticated toaster is alive, or one can try to build a sufficiently sophisticated toaster, until our currently accepted definition of Life applies to it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it does depend highly on the context. There were no talks of artificial intelligence some decades ago but now that they are appearing it seems a highly possible way to keep Humans superior by modifying the context. Being a "living" or a "non-living" generates a different response in our daily life. This thought was based on the line that would ever "it" be considered different than what it is now!

Thanks for your thought.</comment></comment>


AWS Facial Recognition Platform Misidentified over 100 Politicians as Criminals - <AUTHOR> https://threatpost.com/aws-facial-recognition-platform-misidentified-over-100-politicians-as-criminals/156984/ <comment><USER2> Doesn't seem like mis-identification to me - am I right? Totally worth the downvotes. ;)

But seriously facial recognition is not magical and should never have been used in the criminal justice system.

</comment><comment><USER3> In India it would be true, 40% of MLAs in India have serious criminal charges filed against them.

These are charges which courts found real enough to have herring.

</comment><comment><USER4> Seems like it is working to me!

</comment><comment> 1-6 It's got to be higher than 100s.

</comment><comment><USER5> That's not misidentification.</comment>


Django adopts a Code of Conduct - <AUTHOR> https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2013/jul/31/django-adopts-code-of-conduct/ <comment><USER2> Historically, is there any good example for a community that had issues and was improved by a CoC?

I'm really interested because - All I've seen over the years is that a community has toxic people in them and it's either because of their actions or (funnily enough) because of their initiative that a CoC gets drafted and put in place. Afterwards, these toxic people now see themselves in charge of upholding the CoC and you get a neat little mall cop situation.

It depends on the CoC, of course, but in my experience the actual details only change the rate of decline in community quality. If it does end up getting better, it's often in spite of the CoC, not because of it.

Inevitably, people who aren't as anal about the rules find themselves pushed out of the community by sheer frustration over being policed by the mall cops. More often than not, the people who are pushed out happen to be the more productive members of the community (in other areas than policing).

I had an experience where I was policed for using the "highly offensive dictionary ``complete cock´´". Not towards a person, just as a general expression. I was so astonished, I had to make a screenshot. It marked the beginning of the end of my participation in that particular forum.

A year later, another developer was pushed out of the community for using the word "pussy". As in: "I decided I will finish this code tonight instead of being a pussy." Fun times.

<comment><USER3> I have anecdotes about how CoCs have improved communities, but I don't really want to play dueling anecdotes with you. It sucks that you've seen Coc's used as a bludgeon; I haven't.

However, it's sorta irrelevant here: we're not expecting this to really change much of anything, and we don't think the community needs improving. Like the FAQ says, "we know that the Django community is open, friendly, and welcoming. We want to make sure everyone else knows it too." The goal here is to articulate and write down the standards that we already basically follow but have been (until now) unwritten.

In fact, if you're worried about having the book thrown at you, you should be _happy_ about this change. Before today, if I thought you were being a jerk, I could throw you off IRC or the mailing list or whatever and that was that. I was, until a few hours ago, essentially sole arbiter of standards in the Django community, and those standards were ones that basically lived in my head until earlier this year.

Now, those standards are written down, and there's a process and some oversight to make sure I don't unilaterally decide someone's worth hitting with the ban-hammer.

So really, if you're honestly concerned about being people ousted for violated community policies, this sort of documentation and process should make you feel _more_ comfortable, not less. We're replacing a BDFL-ship with open documentation, a committee, and organizational oversight.

<comment><USER2> I appreciate and agree with the points you are making. I really was talking general, it seems like my points were taken a little too much in a python or django related vein.

I do think there _are_ inherent problems with a CoC. You state that the rules probably won't change anything and I agree with that. I think that shows the power of an _implicit_ agreement of conduct. Because even if a CoC tries to inform that, I remain unconvinced that it can.

I suppose mostly what I have a problem with is the concept of expectation itself. A CoC is a lightning rod that is cited when people feel wronged. You sort of turn that around by saying that I might feel safer with explicit rules, but I could just as well argue that the more explicit the rules are, the more suspect they are to being misused or misinterpreted. Because what they do is create the explicit _expectation_ that they will be upheld. What part of them and in what manner is subject to interpretation and those "toxic" people are usually quite inventive when it comes to finding such transgressions. Managing expectations like that can be a very tricky thing.

I might be biased by my experience here, but I've just seen a little too often how making conduct a high ranking concern can create a vacuum that attracts politics.

In the end, I'm quite certain that you are right with the beginning of your second paragraph. Although I would still say - If it's not needed and it won't change anything, then why have it? (And yes, I read your FAQ, so feel free to ignore this question ;-) )

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> These codes of conduct make the community look like a band of savages. I've been following the django user groups for years and haven't seen anything regarding the issues presented there. What's the reason behind it (other than the #donglegate), if I may ask?

<comment><USER5> Considering they've explicitly thanked notoriously destructive concern-troll Valerie Aurora and her organization The Ada Initiative for assistance, my guess would be direct pressure to support her divisive and unproductive agenda.

<comment><USER3> For the record: we reached out to Valerie, not the other way around. We did that because we value her opinion.

It's interesting to me that you seem so angry about a group that's trying to bring more people into tech. What are you worried about, exactly?

<comment><USER5> Her agenda masquerades as something genuinely good and productive, yet pushes something orthogonal and unrelated. She's on a crusade.

Most of the women I know in tech loathe these sorts of concern-trolls for giving feminists erroneous reputations of being hard to work with.

Also, who's angry? I just think it's stupid to engage with such destructive people, but then again I don't participate in the Django community in any way so it doesn't affect me one way or the other.

Also, giving them credence and strengthening their brand serves to help them undermine actual equality in our industry, but, again, I'm male, so it doesn't directly affect me. It's still stupid, though.

<comment><USER6> Please don't think of diversity as an issue that doesn't affect you, because you are a man. A lack of diversity affects all of us. More diverse groups perform better. If a lack of diversity is a result of artificial barriers being put into place (such as a community not welcoming new members), then that less the effect an individuals right to self-determiniation, and I believe that's an issue that effects all of us.

<comment><USER5> That's precisely why I qualified it with "doesn't _directly_ affect me".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> These rules are blatantly patronizing, and come off a bit like a large organization's standard CYA boilerplate. Something along the lines of HN's commenting guidelines or Hacker School's social rules would be more appropriate.

<comment><USER3> Can you identify specifically what you find patronizing and CYA-ish? Neither were our intentions; help me understand how we've failed there?

<comment><USER7> Sorry, I realize I am being harsh, and am grateful for all the work of the Django community organizers. Let me clarify my previous remarks.

The items under the "Be careful in the words that you choose" heading (which make up a significant part of the document), except for maybe the doxing clause, addresses an apparently antisocial audience, which is patronizing.

And what I mean by CYA-ish, is that the intent of the code seems to be to prevent worst-case scenarios. Whereas the HN and Hacker School guidelines aim to boost the level of discourse and friendliness, the Django code offers suggestions on how to avoid getting arrested.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think this is in response to that female evangilist from SendGrid getting those two guys fired a couple of months ago at a Python conference.

<comment><USER6> It's not. Jacob and I started working on a code of conduct for the Django community months before PyCon.

<comment><USER9> It's great that we have this from the source!

btw - I like the intent of "When we disagree, try to understand why." This does seem to run against the internet grain of, "When in doubt, repeat yourself, and if needed GO ALL CAPS"</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which page is your entry to HN? - <AUTHOR>

Where do you start?
+ The actual "Front Page"
+ The new submissions?
+ The comments page?
Starting with the Front Page, there's loads that you miss because there's loads that never attracts enough attention to get there, even if it's good.
If you start from the "New Submissions" then you read the item before there are comments, so you don't get the benefit of the discussion that's often the best part of HN.
If you read the "Threads" page then you get everything mixed together.
So, where do you start? <comment><USER2> I start with the "front page", then hit up "newest". If there is something in the top 10 or 15 on the front page that I don't understand the popularity of, I go to /classic to see if it's just me or not.

</comment><comment><USER3> /classic

<comment><USER4> How is /classic different? I've heard it mentioned a couple times, but there wasn't an update on news news. Pros/cons? The submission order looks just a bit different to me.

<comment><USER5> The rankings are based only on votes from accounts that are over a year old: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=607271></comment></comment></comment>


How to make a fractal shape - <AUTHOR> http://georgemdallas.wordpress.com/2014/05/02/what-are-fractals-and-why-should-i-care/

<comment><USER2> The author confounds (fixed points of) iterated function systems with fractal geometry.

Always unfortunate when introductory discussions confuse the reader.</comment>


T * sin (t) ≈ Christmas tree - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/anvaka/atree

<comment><AUTHOR> Someone also reimplemented it in Mathematica

[http://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/175891](http://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/175891)

</comment><comment><USER2> This reminds me of when I first started programming in Turbo Pascal. I made a Christmas tree using graphic mode and trig functions. I also only used if-then statements so i ended up with about a thousand lines :) Looking at this more elegant tree reminds me of why I went into this career.

</comment><comment><USER3> Quick reimplementation in the desmos graphing calculator: [https://www.desmos.com/calculator/brjshfkaof](https://www.desmos.com/calculator/brjshfkaof)

Press play next to t_0 to animate.

</comment><comment><USER4> Original reddit post: [http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1tswai/t_sin_t_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1tswai/t_sin_t_christmas_tree/)

</comment><comment><USER5> It seems awfully appropriate 'starring' this repository.

</comment><comment><USER6> I _really_ like the simplicity.

Can you reverse the direction of one of the spirals?

Or maybe slow down one to half-speed?

(Maybe it would look better, maybe not.)

</comment><comment><USER7> Same formula on Quake's Railgun

<comment><USER8> Got a link? Google found this Quake2 railgun, but it doesn't look to be the same on first glance [https://github.com/id- Software/Quake-2/blob/master/ctf/g_wea...](https://github.com/id- Software/Quake-2/blob/master/ctf/g_weapon.c#L653)

<comment><USER9> That's the game attack logic, not the rendering logic. You want this instead:

[https://github.com/id- Software/Quake-2/blob/master/client/cl...](https://github.com/id- Software/Quake-2/blob/master/client/cl_fx.c#L1613)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Extra credit to anyone who can implement this in HTML/CSS without using the canvas element. Since CSS transformations are hardware accelerated, I bet it can be made to look as smooth as the reference GIF.

<comment><USER11> Still canvas, but is that any smoother?: [http://jsfiddle.net/rYa5d/8/](http://jsfiddle.net/rYa5d/8/)

<comment><USER12> Nice touch with the subtle parallax!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> with dynamic alpha, and mouse orient around x-axis: [http://jsfiddle.net/rYa5d/1/](http://jsfiddle.net/rYa5d/1/)

<comment><USER11> Actually it's a little better when more spaced out: [http://jsfiddle.net/rYa5d/8/](http://jsfiddle.net/rYa5d/8/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Yet another entry. The Christmas tree in Tao Presentations is less than 30 lines of code, with a star at the top and blinking lights. Code here: [http://www.taodyne.com/shop/dev/en/blog/275-a-christmas- tree...](http://www.taodyne.com/shop/dev/en/blog/275-a-christmas-tree-is-x- sin-x).

</comment><comment><USER14> [http://runnable.com/Ur4mzpVUigJbAALD/christmas- tree-%5Bt-*-s...](http://runnable.com/Ur4mzpVUigJbAALD/christmas- tree-%5Bt-*-sin-t-%E2%89%88-christmas-tree%5D-for-javascript-and-animation)

</comment><comment><USER15> Yeah it's a helix.

</comment><comment><USER16> Oh god staring at this just motivates me to work. Thanks a lot for sharing, as well as all the commenters showing the different implementations of it.

</comment><comment><USER17> Link to github.io page for the lazy: [http://anvaka.github.io/atree/](http://anvaka.github.io/atree/)

</comment><comment><USER18> May I suggest t * sin( k * ln(t) ), for some constant k? That makes the path self similar about the (0, 0) point. Maybe you'd like that.

</comment><comment><USER19> Very merry cleverness

</comment><comment><USER20> Very nice and not complicated at all -- good work!

</comment><comment><USER21> Really like that - beautiful and elegant.

</comment><comment><USER22> Thanks for sharing!

</comment><comment><USER23> Nice job</comment>


AngularStrap - Bootstrap directives for AngularJS - <AUTHOR> http://mgcrea.github.com/angular-strap

<comment><USER2> looks nice, but one thing I really don't get is how

        ...

is any different to

        ...

I'm all for declarative code but isn't stuffing javascript in html attributes something we learnt not to do about 10 years ago? Why the resurgence?

<comment><USER3> An interesting discussion about the difference between

      ...

and

      ...

and why context / scope matters could be found here: [http://www.bennadel.com/blog/2439-My-Experience-With- Angular...](http://www.bennadel.com/blog/2439-My-Experience-With-AngularJS- The-Super-heroic-JavaScript-MVW-Framework.htm#comments_41586)

<comment><USER2> thanks, that was interesting and it's obvious how it can be useful. but for some reason it still feels dirty.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It seems to solve a very similar problem to Angular UI's bootstrap project: <http://angular-ui.github.com/bootstrap/>

<comment><USER5> Yup. I guess the differenece is no dependency on angular-UI and it cuts straight to the bootstrap part.

<comment><USER6> I don't believe ui.bootstrap actually depends on angular-ui, the project is just rolled into angular-ui's brand/github org. They could probably be more clear about that.

All three of them (angular-ui, ui.bootstrap, angular-strap) have been a pleasure to work with.

<comment><USER7> You are right, this project has _zero_ dependency on any other external JavaScript code. Those are native AngularJS directives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can we please stop posting links to this project? It's a really good example of how _not_ to write Angular code.

The (official) AngularUI project has a much better solution (as has already been linked to in previous comments, but I feel the need to re-iterate): <http://angular-ui.github.com/bootstrap/>

<comment><USER9> Considering every component provided by AngularBootstrap is tested, I think what you're saying is false.

Can you show us how they're wrong?

<comment><USER10> Compare the code yourself (should be an easy comparison) bootstrap alert widget

angular UI version [https://github.com/angular- ui/bootstrap/blob/master/src/aler...](https://github.com/angular- ui/bootstrap/blob/master/src/alert/alert.js)

strap version [https://github.com/mgcrea/angular- strap/blob/master/src/dire...](https://github.com/mgcrea/angular- strap/blob/master/src/directives/alert.js)

<comment><USER7> And more examples like this, unfortunately... Compare buttons for another striking example...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> AngularJS is _very_ interesting, simple and powerful, but can anyone give some insights of how to properly use it for just a part of the website? I don't want to have JS only webapp, but to serve full server-generated pages. Or maybe it's wrong tool for the job?

<comment><USER12> It works just fine for that purpose. Just include angular.js and add an ng-app and ng-controller directive to a div you want angular to be concerned about and you're on your way. We are going to transitioning our javascriptMVC app over to an angular.js app piecemeal by following the same strategy.</comment></comment>


German hackers plan DIY space program - <AUTHOR> http://www.popsci.com.au/technology/space/german-hackers-plan-diy-space-program

<comment><USER2> I always thought that a parallel-independent-underground network is inevitable and if it's achieved succesfully I think the ramifications could be huge, it could be the first step towards seriously thinking about the posibility of leaving Earth and start to colonize the space, if you can have a reliable network out of a DIY space program, I can't think why in 100 years they wouldn't start a colony outside to basically move further away from the rules of goverments on Earth.

</comment><comment><USER3> Surely nothing could go wrong!

</comment><comment><USER4> What's the cost per kg to get a satellite into space and how do you solve that problem, knowing there's no financial ROI ?

<comment><USER5> The cost per kg currently around $10k, about half what it cost on the shuttle. If you assume a payload mass fraction of 2% and a vehicle mass fraction of 10%, you have a fuel-to-weight ratio of 44:1. So, it takes--switching to English units because milk is in gallons--44 pounds of fuel to launch 1 pound into orbit on current launch vehicles. Fuel is roughly as dense as water and roughly the same cost as milk. So, about 6 gallons of fuel at $3.50/gallon. $21 in fuel for 1 lb of payload, then.

How do you solve this problem? You work on the difference in engineering cost between $21/lb and $5k/lb, say by simplifying systems, building them more robustly so the $30k paper trail that guarantees that the otherwise $700 part will perform exactly as advertised goes away, or aiming for reusability.

Of course, if you did that on a large enough scale, you'd be Elon Musk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Cool ... this project requires specialized skills for some aspects but it would be great if even those tasks could be crowd-sourced.

Good luck guys!

</comment><comment><USER7> "But should a nation like China decide it doesn't want uncensored Internet streaming to its shores from space, there's nothing really stopping it from blasting the satellites out of the sky either."

After the recent events, I wouldn't be completely surprised if the US decided to claim them to be "a threat to national security" (which translates to enabling copyright infringement) as well, in a not too distant future. It may sound too extreme today, but so did SOPA ten years ago.

<comment><USER8> Is this story really true? If so then I am amazed that hackers could be so naive at all.

<comment><USER7> If you mean that it is possible to "blast satellites out of space", then yes, it is true. China used it on one of their own satellites to test with, and considering other nations were not informed, the US-government was outraged.

<comment><USER8> > if you mean that it is possible to "blast satellites out of space", then > yes, it is true

No I meant the story about the hackers. No doubt about it that the nations could (and would) blast their satellites out of space. I wonder how these hackers can be so stupid to even think about such a crazy idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can anyone attempt to send a rocket into space? Or are there designated launch pads and clearance times?

<comment><USER10> It is possible, and the Copenhagen suborbital hackers launch a rocket last summer. YOu can read more about it in their website.

<http://www.copenhagensuborbitals.com/>

<comment><USER11> The CS team circumvented the launch area problem by going out in international sea. Getting permission to launch on land was just too much work. To make it just a bit more awesome, they use a home build submarine to transport the rocket to the launch area.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I am very curious as to how much truth there is behind the statement "unregulated nature of space" and especially curious, if true, how long it will be before governments start attempting to

<comment><USER13> For all it worth, right now most anti-satellite weapons are limited to low earth orbit (useful for knocking out satellites looking at stuff you don't want). Most communications satellites will be a much higher altitude.

While there is no fundamental reason why governments couldn't create ASAT weapons to reach higher altitudes, the costs go on significantly. Previous (like cold war era) attempts at high altitude weapons pretty much just strapped a big nuke to a full out launch vehicle. For reference, the weapon used by the US in their ASAT kill in 2006 was made using a modified ballistic defense missile (the SM-3). Your Aegis equipped warships can carry a -lot- of them.

Anyhow, it'd be far easier for governments to attempt to regulate the receivers and transmitters than to shoot down the satellite. Also, it would be easier for them to deny launch privileges than wait till after they launch. They might not own space, but they own their airspace.

<comment><USER14> I'm not familiar with the area but aren't anti-satellite weapons forbidden under certain treaties, similar to how nuclear weapons in space are banned? The US spun their test as preventing damage from a bad satellite and the Chinese said something similar.

<comment><USER13> Nope. The Outer Space Treaty forbids many things, but does not forbid anti- satellite weapons, especially if those weapons are not based on orbit. In fact, the Outer Space Treaty does not even forbid conventional weapons in orbit. It basically only bans WMDs in space, and forbids military use of other celestial bodies (nothing about space itself).

Anti-satellite weapons were largely held in check by technical issues, cost, as well as avoiding escalation/arms race. The recent weapons test are an example of that. Once you start actively developing these weapons again, everyone else who can will follow to protect their interests. Both of their spins are largely for PR, not legal/treaty reasons.

<comment><USER15> The other thing that has put a brake on too much ASAT exuberance is the large amount of long-lived debris that kinetic ASAT kills create. It wouldn't take many kinetic ASAT shots before LEO was entirely unuseable for years to come, an outcome which (so far) has been sobering for all concerned.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Grace Hopper on Letterman - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZOxtURhfEU <comment><USER2>
        Letterman: How did you know so much about computers then?
        Hopper: I didn't. It was the first one.

What a beautiful tribute to Grace Hopper's pioneering spirit.

<comment><AUTHOR> I hope I'm not being too sentimental in thinking of her as an über-hacker. She invented the very first English-like programming language, FLOW-MATIC:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOW-MATIC></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to learn Spanish quickly and effectively? - <AUTHOR> In my early 20s, want to learn Spanish - as spoken in Mexico, South America and not the one in Spain - quickly and effectively.
Please give me proven tricks / tips that has helped you learn a new language, bonus if Spanish. Also how long it took, how many hours per day etc. Age range if you are ok sharing (since I am adult, I am told it's difficult to learn new languages).
My background: Indian-American born and raised in Hawaii and California. Can fluently read, write and speak English, Hindi, French and know a bit of Gujarati, Punjabi, Tamil (all from Indian Uncles and Aunts lol) and sparse Dutch and Polish (don't ask me how lol).
Thanks! <comment><USER2> Might not work for you, here's what I do:

[http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/LearningLanguages.html?HN_2017...](http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/LearningLanguages.html?HN_20170107)

It's a non-trivial amount of time. You need about 800 to 1000 words to start bootstrapping properly, about 2000 words to communicate effectively (but not fluently). If you target six months, that's still 10 to 15 new words _every single day._

For me, I learn sentences and phrases and most of the grammar emerges. That's not true for everyone - you will have to work hard on fixing the bits that don't come as part of the study process.

I spent about an hour every day, plus 30 minutes vocab revision spread through the day, for about six months and I was able to communicate in Danish, although I was never fluent. It's all gone now, you need to use it actively and relentlessly. But that's what I did in my late 30s.

Immersion and practice with native or near native speakers will cut the time in half (for some value of a half).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! This seems like something that could work for a person like me (assuming I know me lol.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> How to Learn a Foreign Language by Paul Pimsleur is a short book that has a lot of gems about language learning.

My tips as someone who has learnt a foreign language to fluency after becoming an adult:

Focus on sounds before the written language. Pimsleur's courses are good for this, but also just watching TV shows etc in the language you want to learn. The flow, rhythm, any extra sounds etc are all important. Mess around and try copying what people say when you hear it. Ham up the accent.

Try to learn everything in a context. "Where is the money?" as a line in a tense movie thriller is far more memorable than reading it in a textbook. The brain loves little connections. It's not like a hard drive. Remembering more is often easier than remembering less.

Don't feel you have to learn any particular thing right now. If some word/phrase/grammar form is hurting you just put it down and come back another time. It might be months down the line. You will have probably picked up more knowledge and more examples in those intervening months so learning it will be much simpler.

Use materials that are intended for natives. Books for learners are more likely to have mistakes or have very unnatural phrases in them. Sometimes they swap out the more common phrase for a less common one because "We haven't learnt that yet". Have a healthy suspicion of textbooks.

Learn how to use a dictionary. Look up words you already know to help you get the measure of a dictionary. Look words up in one and then cross check in another. Always be aware of the fact that a certain idea may be very common in one language but uncommon in another, thus the words may match in meaning but be wildly different in frequency. Context and materials for natives helps a lot here, if you're reading a Spanish magazine it will contain a good cross- section of common Spanish words.

Have some way of reviewing words. I recommend a flashcard app like Anki[1]. While useful, try not to spend too much time reviewing. Flashcards are just something to remind of what you learnt last week, not to learn new words. If you want new words, go back to native materials.

[1] www.ankisrs.net

</comment><comment><USER4> Being immersed in another culture is a known method of acquiring fluency fast, but I take into account that it might not be for everyone.

Having said that, one of the easy ways (as in approachable, maybe not so much efficiently) of taking advantange of such contact with another culture, in my experience, is to watch movies based in the country (or countries) with a subtitle on the same language; of course, a transcript is better than an adaptation. That way you not only get access to context, which I think is a great way to assist in understanding, but also learn a bit about manneirism and varied pronunciation. Two things that are hard to grasp in courses and instructional videos.

Just for disclosure: I'm Brazillian. If you rate my English skills poorly, bear in mind that I've never took a course whatsoever. OTOH, American/English content has influenced my childhood (and culture actually) to such a degree that makes me biased, but the argument for movies as a tool in this case doesn't seem so far off to me, TBH.

</comment><comment><USER5> Try Pimsleur, Memrise and the book Fluent in 3 months.

[http://www.pimsleur.com/learn-spanish-latin- american](http://www.pimsleur.com/learn-spanish-latin-american)

[https://www.memrise.com/](https://www.memrise.com/)

[http://www.fluentin3months.com/](http://www.fluentin3months.com/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Hey there, I recently created a post in a web developer forum, few hours later I already had a Spanish guy who wanted to get into web development.

I'll teach you web dev, you teach me Spanish.

This might be also a possible route for you, or you could post in a French, Punjabi forum ? There are always people who really just want what you got.

</comment><comment><USER7> [https://www.duolingo.com/](https://www.duolingo.com/) consistently

</comment><comment><USER8> The best way is to get a native spanish speaker significant other.

</comment><comment><USER9> Live in a Spanish speaking country, in an area where nobody speaks your language, and DO NOT hang out with other foreigners.

That is the single fastest way. Should take you at most 6 months to become fluent.

</comment><comment><USER10> Get a girlfriend

</comment><comment><USER11> I was born in Spain, so I know Spanish. Being born Spanish is an easy way to learn Spanish :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Isn't the Spanish spoken in Spain much different from the Spanish spoken in Mexico / South America? At-least that what I see on youtube comments in Spanish teaching videos.

<comment><USER11> No. Intonation (not even pronunciation) is a bit different but perfectly understandable.</comment></comment></comment>