That's not right. Most of the web requires NFC normalization, not NFKC. NFC doesn't lose information in the original string. It reorders and combines code points into equivalent code point sequences, e.g. to simplify equality tests.

In NFKC, the K for "Compatibility" means some characters are replaced with similar, simpler code points. I've found NFKC useful for making text search indexes where you want matches to be forgiving, but it would be both obvious and wrong to use it in most of the web because it would dramatically change what the user has entered. See the examples in https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr15/.

To solve this, maybe instead best practice would be to ensure the database connection is not in a global variable and must be passed down. That would make it more obvious when a database is improperly used within a loop.

The same problem exists for any expensive operation within a loop (say, a database query while parsing the results of an API call, or vice versa).

Congress.gov, originally THOMAS.gov, was a product of the Republican Contract with America take-over of Congress in the mid 1990s. Republicans in Congress, including Rep. Issa for example, were helpful in expanding the information that Congress publishes publicly. In the last 15 years, efforts to make Congress publish more and better-structured information have been relatively bipartisan and, mostly, led by nonpolitical staff. I would not describe Democrats as having been the ones to have exclusively created the access to congressional information that we have today, although Democrats in recent years have led on government transparency and accountability issues generally, beyond the Legislative Branch.

Changes that have required legislation have, as far as I'm aware, not really been influenced by the President, other than being signed into law, since they are Legislative Branch concerns and not Executive Branch concerns.

OP may have been unlucky on the timing. The site isn't usually down. Here's the link to the text of H.R. 1 on GovTrack: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/119/hr1/text

We automatically add links to U.S. Code and other citations. In this case Congress.gov is missing rich formatting which we have (I'm not sure why they are missing it for this bill, normally they have it). GovTrack also allows making diff-like comparisons between bill versions and between bills (for example, you can see the last-minute changes made ahead of the vote on this bill).

Source code is available on GitHub if anyone wants to try making GovTrack better, although it's quite complicated because Congressional information is complicated and there's no real money behind this: https://github.com/govtrack/govtrack.us-web/

If anyone has particular thoughts on what would be helpful when viewing bill text --- within the realm of the information that is actually freely available --- I am all ears.

What's important in the story is that the law went from being not open to open and the law-publication-process was modernized internally. The fact that it ended up on GitHub was the least important, but most fun, outcome.

GitHub adds nothing of any value for the transparency and accountability of the lawmaking process (I mean, what lawmakers do), but it is a great platform for publishing structured data files for the law to create open access.

Now, help us expand our work to tracking the President and the White House.

What it means to be a Jew is complicated. Jews form an ethnicity of interconnected people with a range of beliefs and practices (it is, definitionally, not whether one is religiously adherent to Judaism). To me, one could in principle be religiously Christian and also ethnically Jewish (that's an unusual view among Jews), but to do that requires having an actual connection to the Jewish ethnicity (e.g. if one was raised ethnically Jewish and maintains a Jewish identity). My impression is that "Messianic Jews" are religiously and ethnically Christian who are importing Jewish practices into their otherwise non-Jewish identity. If OP's wife was born Jewish or converted prior becoming a "Messianic Jew," I would stand corrected.

If I, a very white person, start singing songs from Back churches, that doesn't make me Black. I wouldn't face the real-world struggles against racism of Black people, for example, and I think that's a useful hint when thinking about who is and isn't a member of a minority group like Jews. Likewise, acting out Jewish practices doesn't necessarily make one a Jew, and as one example it doesn't subject one to the sorts of anti-Semitism faced by Jews. I'm not saying facing anti-Semitism a necessary or sufficient condition for being a Jew, but if not that, then there must be something else that connects one to the Jewish ethnicity --- the interconnected people who believe they are Jews --- other than just by saying so.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41590746

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

This is already exactly how it works.

One reason why legislating takes so long is because there is an enormous amount of collaboration between legislators and agencies to get it as right as they can.

Go science! Support your local climate scientist!

A more recent law also required that CISA create a regulation on this particular subject. (It's explained in the regulation itself.)

If you want simpler regulations, the issue isn't that we're missing a law to ensure regulations are simpler. The law requires that exactly this happen all the time: Your(?) legislators in Congress are constantly writing laws that direct agencies to do exactly this.

Of course, if they didn't and regulations were simpler, all of the ambiguity would be decided by courts instead. The world is complicated with or without complicated regulations. So we can either have less-ambiguous but more wordy laws, or we can have more ambiguity, more court cases, and judges unpredictably deciding how to resolve the ambiguity.