When the HOLC provides wording, they do so in response to a request from an elected member or that member's staff, right? What I'm getting at is that it doesn't matter whether provenance is found via the commit author or via some other change-associated metadata -- the key thing is making precise change provenance trackable and (perhaps after some predefined delay) public. This would mainly aid journalists.

Is the HOLC currently functioning as an anonymizing service for changes to in-progress legislation? And if so, is that by design, or more by gradual and organic evolution?

Fundamentally, if we can't get at that provenance information in a reliable way right now at all, then version-control-style tracking would be a pretty big qualitative change in how things are done: information that wasn't available, except through unofficial channels, would now be available (again, maybe with some time delay or whatever, but in the long run it would be available). On the other hand, if that information is currently obtainable but is just not easy to obtain, then this would be more of an incremental improvement: since journalists and others with the requisite know-how could get the information right now, but maybe have to jump through hoops to do so, this would just reduce the number or height of the hoops.

I don't know which of those two scenarios best describes reality, but maybe you do?

"... Think of what version control software could mean for the Congress [...]. If bills were created under a system where strike-throughs and additions were carefully tracked, the public would know which legislator made which change to a proposed piece of legislation as it made its way through the Capitol.

At last, there would be transparency in the legislative process. Best-case scenario, it would shame legislators from inserting language against the public interest and only meant to reward political contributors; at worst, it would make such insertions public and allow the voters to punish the politicians who made them. ..."

(from https://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/23/business/media/23link.htm... )

We use Zulip (https://zulip.org/) for our corporate chat, and we've never looked back. It's been good, and it's fully open source. We self-host, but paid hosting is easy to get too if you want.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43996842

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

TL;DR: The author originally tried to call n8n "open source" but while using a non-open-source license. After much discussion, he kept the license but stopped using the label "open source", to the relief of many people.

That half-decade-old thread is still what I point to when I want to explain to someone why preserving the specificity of the term "open source" matters.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43423939

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

I believe it implements Bill Gosper's hashlife quadtree algorithm (already mentioned elsewhere in the comments here).

Xlife is unbelievably fast.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41058741

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

I already have plenty of non-tiny computers that run Debian GNU/Linux. Suppose I wanted to run an e-paper display from one of those computers, using this code, just via a normal USB cable. I could do that, right? There's no reason I would have to use a Raspberry Pi or something similar?

Get together with experienced users in person and have them watch you edit. That's it.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39051655

Points: 573

# Comments: 483