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Comment by Analemma_ | Hacker News Reader

I don’t want to pick on you specifically, because this is just one example of a very common pathology, but this is such an “HN-brained” comment. “They didn’t use version control” is ten million miles from the real problem here, and adopting version control would improve literally nothing about this situation.

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I'm sorry you're not able to see that version control can really help in contexts outside of tech.

You can track changes, and diff, and blame.

Wouldn't solve the corruption in this case but could definitely shine a light on it.

The corruption is what prevents the use of the version control, by the people who would like to continue being corrupt. You would need a disinterested party with authority to mandate its use.

I deliberately didn't say version control (which would imply git or similar, and we know they're not going to learn that). I said version tracking.

They use word processors to write the things, they could at least learn to turn on "track changes".

I genuinely do believe that a law that says "all laws must be able to show author tracking on a per-line basis" would improve democracy. Convince me otherwise!

Enabling version tracking would not be any different from learning Git if both require passing a law. The real problem is that those people are clueless and there is no one to guide them. It's probably a decent startup idea, software for lawmakers.

While that may be true, software for this would never become commonplace nor useful.

Why? Because:

1. They’d never enable it for the final bill and thus all prior changes would fall under legislative privilege and thus the public would never see it.

2. Government moves slowly and isn’t generally apt to adopt technology as rapidly as they should. The workflows would need to change significantly and that would be impossible/take an inordinate amount of time. But; see #1.

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I went through a long and arduous legal process as part of my divorce. While my attorney preferred sharing redlines, the other attorney never shared it back that way, or even in a Word doc; they always sent PDF images.

Based on how many times we redlined stuff and the other side would just treat it as if it hadn’t happened was absurd. If this sort of behavior is entrenched in the legal field, I can’t imagine it would ever work when attorneys, governments, and industry players are involved.

If you were making a startup, this could be a feature. Automatically detect what changed, and generate a visual diff.

But you are right, and that's what I am saying. The government will never become better on its own. You would need to take its hand and keep holding it forever, or it will get lost.

I'll go further and say they should 100% use version control. I understand why they don't right now, but accommodating that seems like a relatively obvious lay-up for Microsoft. They could open source a docx-diffing/merging git extension, integrate it into GitHub, and integrate GitHub into Word.

I'd also add that Word could add first-class Markdown/.md support. Seems like a pretty natural direction to go in as AI-assisted drafting/editing becomes increasingly commonplace, and would further simplify the GitHub integration.

I think what you'd see is people writing changes on some other document (or on paper) and then coordinating who's office and who's aides will make the traceable commit to the law, in that case?

In the same way that right now industry interest groups write up proposed laws and then hand them to a favored allied lawmaker to "introduce" the proposal for them, and so on?

You're probably right about it improving democracy, but version control and version tracking are synonymous. It doesn't imply Git.

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