joshdata

If your application also runs NFKC normalization (which it should — ENS, GitHub, and Unicode IDNA all require it)

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/.

Is the goal to make good ORM queries easier or to prevent bad queries? It's not clear there's really a compiler solution to the latter. If you're inside a loop in which a database cursor is in scope, then further database queries are prohibited? It's hard to see how that could be enforced other than something like What Color Is Your Function (https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2015/02/01/what-color-is-...) with some functions marked as making queries and others as not.

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).

Without commenting on the merits of that idea, I'll just say that I do not want to be the one who has to moderate user generated content.

That's not really the right picture.

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.

I did much of that so I appreciate you saying that the documentation is excellent. :)

Hi. I run GovTrack.

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.

Totally agree with you that pride is important, but there's definitely more. Being a good engineer is frequently a problem of design --- whether it's user experience or code abstractions. Design is partly art, and that makes us artisans at least some of the time. The code that I've written that has endured the longest --- decades --- has been code that was designed well.

Hi. Author of that article here, and I worked with the DC Council to get the initial prototype going, if anyone has any questions.

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.

Millions of Americans already use GovTrack.us to track legislation in the U.S. Congress and how their representatives and senators vote. I created GovTrack twenty years ago with the idea that information in context helps us hold our government accountable and empowers us to become the best advocates for the issues we each care most about.

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

I agree that ethnic Jews with Christian religious beliefs is a legitimate concept. But I would rather call them Messianic Jews (or just Christian Jews) rather than adherents of "Messianic Judaism." To say that "Judaism" can include Jesus erases the Jewish religion by leaving it without a name, conveniently benefiting the dominant Christian religion. (And Messianic Jews who are not Jews should be called something else entirely.)

Yes and that was what I was saying (sorry it wasn't clear).

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.

The unfortunate part is where Christians try to pass themselves off as Jews by adding "Jewish" to the name of their denomination. I wish my great aunts and uncles could have added "Christian" to their denomination to escape being murdered in the Holocaust, that would have been nice.

Text is unexpectedly complicated. Use Unicode.run to debug text. Paste text or click an example to see: See when characters like emojis are composed of multiple code points. Click code points in the debugger output to highlight them in the text. Switch between text / UTF-32 / UTF-16BE. See where text changes direction in bidirectional text. Get warnings about hidden code points that can alter the display of the text and normalization. See each code point's escape codes in a variety of programming languages and the “length” of the text.

Agencies will just need to work with Congress to help them write laws

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.

Yeah, I don't want to be responsible for user-generated content, and I don't want to collect data on users.

I am pretty sure it's the simulation.

Author here. Glad to see this making the rounds again after a few years.

Go science! Support your local climate scientist!

U.S. law requires that agencies perform this public disclosure of their analysis so that interested parties in the general public have an opportunity to meaningfully weigh in before the proposed regulation becomes an actual regulation. It's an incredibly valuable aspect of accountability if you are someone affected by the regulation.

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.

Just to clarify the headline, it's Congress and President Biden who are requiring critical infrastructure to report ransom and other cyber incidents, per a law enacted inside must-pass legislation in 2022: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/117/hr2471/text/enr#l.... The law requires CISA to issue a regulation for how that would work in practice, which is what this is.

Self-replying...

I found the comments really helpful so I wrote up some thoughts on different approaches to tackling projects. Hope this might be helpful to others.

https://joshuatauberer.medium.com/bullet-time-and-elephant-h...

I think the idea is that for a slice of an elephant to be "elephant shaped," it has a bit of all of the key parts of an elephant - a bit of the trunk, a bit of a heart, stubs for four legs, whatever else makes an elephant an elephant. But what do the elephant's organs map to? I agree that the information on Elephant Carpaccio that I've been able to find doesn't really answer this.

My best guess is the idea is that it maps to aspects of a user story like "get input from the user," "do some business logic," "show output to user." So even the first slice is a working prototype in some superficial sense. The elephant organs might be app components (UI, database, etc.), but in the first slice you don't have a complete UI (maybe you have text input) and you don't have a production database (maybe you just have an in-memory dictionary) and you don't have robust business logic. You have the whole stack, but each part of the stack is incomplete. That's what I think makes it a vertical slice.

A horizontal slice (what not to do) would be one complete elephant organ. Maybe that's a production transactional database. So in the first slice you have a complete database or you've written the final business logic, but none of the other things that you would need in a mockup/prototype/MVP or an integration test.

Anyway, this is my best guess.

This is a similar idea to how I understand the Elephant Carpaccio exercise by Henrik Kniberg & Alistair Cockburn (2013), from what I've been able to Google. The key idea is that work should be broken down into "vertical slices" where vertical means that the entire user story is captured, or as it's described at https://uploads-ssl.webflow.com/5e3bed81529ab12a517031ab/5ec..., "very thin slices, each one still elephant-shaped." The first vertical slice might be a mockup or very-low-fidelity prototype of the complete project and subsequent slices are enhancements following user stories. Horizontal slices might be, say, system components or other subtasks that leave you without something prototype-looking until all of the slices are complete. At least, this is how I've interpreted what I've read about it.

We don't ask for dollars back. The government asks for a loan that pays interest and lots of people gladly want to make that loan - like probably your retirement investments. This is where the national debt comes from. If we printed money there would be no national debt.

This article seems to be extremely confused about the difference between increasing the supply of dollars (printing money or other tactics of the Federal Reserve) and deficit spending (moving already-created dollars from the public, including foreign holders, to the government and then right out to the U.S. public again).

You shouldn't be comparing the mailbox part of email addresses at all other than as literal bytestrings

It's hard to know what to do in practice, but this seems to be wrong according to https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6532#section-3.1: "normalization form NFC SHOULD be used".

Right. And I think subsidies are being offered to switch. (I saw an ad outside yesterday promoting this.)

It's complicated but thankfully you don't have to reinvent the wheel:

https://github.com/JoshData/python-email-validator (my project)

The README covers a lot of ground: internationalized domain names, internationalized local parts, SMTPUTF8, Unicode normalization, not performing SMTP checks, not permitting obsolete email syntax, and missing UCS-4 support in Python 2.7.

Of course. DC however has an unfortunate history of being ruled more like a colony than a part of a democracy, a consequence of racism, and talking about the city as if the residents don't exist is a part of the problem and perpetuates that consequence of racism. I don't think Cupertino has that problem.

Worth pointing out that the article is about rich politicians elected from around the country. The 700,000 residents of Washington, DC do not have an insider trading problem. Wish the article and the HN headline didn't blame DC for other states' problems.

Thanks for your work! (If our paths crossed you would have known me as the persistent guy at GovTrack asking for bill status XML over and over. :) )