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Constitution of the United States Website has removed sections
- hamuraijack 1y agoThis is definitely deliberate
- josefritzishere 1y agoThis is not normal.
- sundaeofshock 1y agoTrue, but I’m glad they are making it public. The old US is gone; time to figure out where we go from here.
- toomuchtodo 1y ago+1, better to know what you’re up against from a shared reality consensus.
- frogperson 1y agoWell, the first step is cutting out the cancer, healing can not begin until then.
- AlexandrB 1y agoBy "cancer" do you mean ~50% of the US population? That sounds pretty extreme. What does "cutting out" the cancer mean here?
- frogperson 1y agoI am talking about removing fascism. Remove its supporters from office, jail the ones who broke the law, and reverse any fascist laws or policies that have been put in place. Also, Trump does not have the support of 50% of the population. At best he has 20% of the popularion which are very vocal plus the support of many of the richest americans.
- IAmGraydon 1y agoHang on…you think 50% of the US population supports what is going on right now?
- johnnyanmac 1y agoMy estimation is 5% of the US is fully supportive, 15% are manipulated into thinking that all of this is necessary through very selective coverage, and some 10% don't necessarily like everything, but still prefer this over "other team" being in charge. Meanwhile, 50% live in apathy (be it due to burden, a means of escape, or otherwise)and that's probably the biggest shame. I can only hope enough of those people rise up or wake up before it's truly irreversible. There's probably so much damage as is to take decades to repair.
- root_axis 1y ago40% support it and 15% don't care either way.
- cjaackie 1y agoSounds like maybe a positive spin on the erosion of the fundamental building blocks of our democracy. This to me is a strange take, if I’m reading that correctly, what do you mean by it?
- sundaeofshock 1y agoI mean that the US, my country, effectively ceased to exist in its old form on January 20, 2025. The Trump regime has been working aggressively to destroy all vestiges of our democracy and replace it with autocratic rule. This is some bullshit and pisses me off, but here we are. While I’m not happy they are changing the text of the constitution on this website, I’m glad they are such bumbling idiots about it. “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.”
- andrewla 1y agoHahaha -- making "it" public by cutting out the part of the constitution that says that we can have a Navy. What are you even talking about?
- unethical_ban 1y agoNo, none of this is. However, at first glance, it seems like the sort of edit that would be made in protest by a webmaster.
- 65 1y ago[flagged]
- CalRobert 1y agoGood use case for a git diff. The removed bits discuss habeaus corpus, emoluments, and congressional oversight of the military.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y agoI wanted to do the Constitution (and US law in general) in git, but dates before unix epoch weren't possible. I don't think it's since been fixed. I had went so far as to start digging up treaties (about 700 of them, ratified) and draft constitutions (would have been non-master branches of some sort). It would be nice if Congress and legislatures actually used git as a matter of law, having names attached to every commit and so on. The way they handle repeals is absurd...
- OtherShrezzing 1y agoI don't really think Git is the appropriate tool for version control on legislation. There's hundreds of thousands of actions/conversations/motions on each "commit" to a nation's legislation, and all of those actions need to be tracked permanently. Moreover, most countries have an "append-only" approach to legislation, where the original document doesn't get removed, but overridden by the new. Look at the UK's Hansard[0] as an example. Every word spoken in Parliament leading up to legislation being introduced is tracked and published. Those conversations eventually turn into Bills on the Parliament site[1], and eventually those bills turn into legislation[2]. These websites are all digital versions of the old paper copies which go back centuries. [0] - https://hansard.parliament.uk https://hansard.parliament.uk [1] - https://bills.parliament.uk https://bills.parliament.uk [2] - https://www.legislation.gov.uk https://www.legislation.gov.uk
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago>Moreover, most countries have an "append-only" approach to legislation, where the original document doesn't get removed, but overridden by the new. One of it's biggest flaws, actually. Completely understandable, of course, they were working on paper... weren't any reasonable alternatives. >Look at the UK's Hansard[0] as an example. Every word spoken in Parliament leading up to legislation being introduced is tracked and published. Those conversations eventually turn into Bills on the Parliament site[1], and eventually those bills turn into legislation I'm ignorant of how things work in the UK's Parliament. But somehow this all seems doubtful. In the US, legislation isn't drafted in such a manner at all.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- mattbrewsbytes 1y agoWhen do specific actions taken by the current US administration cross the legal line into treason or other legal lines where defense against domestic enemies is warranted?
- Kapura 1y agowell you see, the congress and supreme court have decided that no, actually, this is what they want to happen.
- ahmeneeroe-v2 1y ago[flagged]
- unethical_ban 1y agoBait post. Make a point. edit for clarity: My point is that faux-witty slights at communities to suggest nothing is wrong with a government is intellectually shallow and appeals to authority without making any point itself.
- bloomingeek 1y agoGood point and needs to be said.
- ahmeneeroe-v2 1y agoThese are questions of governance, not debate club. Appeals to authority are the only valid arguments.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1y agoYou misunderstand what an argument from authority is if this is your justification for it. It's not "authority" meaning they can tell you what to do but instead meaning they are an expert on the subject matter. It is valid when a consensus of experts all say the same thing but if there is not an expert consensus then it starts to become more questionable. In this context, if many independent legal experts and scholars are looking at the decisions being made by the three branches of government and saying there could be bad ramifications, the argument from authority falls flat; there is another authority saying the first authority is wrong.
- gotoeleven 1y agoLooking at the diff it looks like just the end of Article 1 got truncated. It's not like there are lots of random edits here and there.
- ahmeneeroe-v2 1y agoSorry for the downvotes, but facts don't fit the narrative here
- joot82 1y agoYou can downvote here?
- sickofparadox 1y agoOnce you reach a certain points threshold (500?) you can downvote and vouch for flagged comments.
- dilap 1y agoI would have to imagine this is an accident or rogue vandalism -- I don't think USGOV is trying to stealth-edit the constitution by truncating the last 18 paragraphs of Article I.
- foolswisdom 1y agoWhy not? Congress is meant to be a check on the other branches of government (though the filibuster rule / partisan omnibus bill system has degraded its collective will, which is why they won't do anything), so pre-emptively removing the powers of congress from the list sounds like a power grab. It's not like it's something completely irrelevant. Same for the limitations of government listed there. Besides, the thing about organizations is that they encourage behaviors. A big corporation encourages different behaviors than a startup, and different company cultures can also encourage / optimize for different things. There's also a reason why we do expect ultimate responsibility to rest with leaders.
- pavlov 1y agoOne can imagine the DOGE staffers high-fiving each other as they pushed this change. Maybe they didn’t find any meaningful waste with their random Python scripts, but at least they got to own the libs.
- Levitz 1y agoBecause this is a government website and not the actual constitution. It's absurd. This is just not how any of this works.
- ahmeneeroe-v2 1y agothis is like when groups say they "hacked the CIA"
- foolswisdom 1y agoPower is power when it is exercised, and power can be exercised when people think you have the power. Overly formalizing things and ignoring how they play out is why congress is today a dysfunctional body, for example. See also here for an example in practice https://prototypingpolitics.substack.com/p/dead-letter-live-practice-how-congress https://prototypingpolitics.substack.com/p/dead-letter-live-...
- erikerikson 1y agodiff (changes highlighted in yellow): https://web.archive.org/web/diff/20250601021212/20250806023110/https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/ https://web.archive.org/web/diff/20250601021212/202508060231... (In case you don't want to visit reddit)
- pavlov 1y agoDOGE found some cloud storage savings?
- andrewla 1y ago[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jklinger410 1y ago> This is (obviously?) an error and assuming any sort of malice over incompetence here makes you seem like a moron. Giving any benefit of any doubts to this administration makes you actually a moron.
- foolswisdom 1y ago> It does appear that this is part of a site-wide refactor where some material got lost because the same truncation is visible in the annotation page You mean that if you already assume it wasn't malicious, there must be a problem that affected multiple pages because the source material in the build somewhere got lost.
- coreyp_1 1y agoYou know, everyone is jumping to conclusions here about the evils of whomever their political rival is. However, this is a website, based on code. And based on my most recent experiences with AI, I think it's more plausible that someone: A.) Copied a file into an AI prompt (or use an AI agent). B.) Asked the AI to do something to the file (like adjust the layout of the page, alter CSS, optimize something, or whatever. C.) Eyeballed the response and thought it looked good. D.) Copied the file back (or just saved it, depending on the IDE). E.) Caused the Internet to melt down. I've had AI chats and agents that randomly change things unrelated to what I asked it to do. It seems that people are so quick to jump to a conclusion that supports their bias. To be clear, I did not (and never have) voted for Trump, but I'm not going to entertain conspiracy theories about orange man bad when it was probably some dev thinking, "this AI thing is cool... look at what it can do!"
- jddj 1y agoThe Reddit thread is reasonably inflamed, but the theory about changing reality downstream by changing the sources that chatbots ingest is a chilling one.
- assword 1y agoLLM’s mark the true beginning of a post truth world. That’s why the serial liars are so excited.
- tim333 1y agoLLMs so far seem fairly good on being factual.
- AlexandrB 1y agoI wonder what portion of the reddit thread is posts by gen AI.
- eqvinox 1y agoChilling, but not very realistic. It's not like chatbots forget all the previously trained-in data when you change the source. In fact, it'd be a pretty hard problem to solve to get there (but actually desirable! - i.e. the ability to remove individual trained-in things.)
- llm_nerd 1y agoNew models are generally trained entirely from scratch, and we're constantly tossing old models into the dumpster and replacing them with the new hotness. Meaning it isn't like GPT-5 is just GPT-4 with some fine tuning, but instead they start an entirely fresh training process on their archive of source material. Now the archive of source material is a growing corpus, but a canonical source like the government's published version of the constitution will indeed get subbed out in an updated crawl, and that would be used as the basis of the training of the next model. Now the site has reverted to the correct text, but the hypothesis of corrupting models is a valid and real concern.
- _justinfunk 1y agoPresuming this is just incompetence instead of malice, when the missing paragraphs are replaced, will "Constitution of the United States Website has replaced missing sections" hit the front page of HN?
- JohnHaugeland 1y ago> Presuming this is just incompetence instead of malice why would you make this presumption?
- tpoacher 1y agoBecause in this case even if it were malice, it would still be of the incompetent kind. So as per the conjunction fallacy, it's far more likely to be incompetence than malice.
- _justinfunk 1y agoYou make presumptions to examine arguments.
- aaron695 1y ago[dead]
- slowmovintarget 1y agoI thought this was just a goof too, then I went to look at the commentary. There are "explainers" for each part of each Article. In the Explainer contents for Article I, where there should be 10 sections, the truncation of the Explanatory articles begins at Article 1 Section 8 Clause 13 and continues through the end of Article I on the site. Clause 13 establishes the maintenance of the Navy. This suggests that they were trying to do an overhaul of the contents and made a structural screw-up that caused this. Ironically, these pages are indexed in the search engines still. If you search for "USC Article 1 Section 8 Clause 13" you'll get link to the explainer page [1], and a 404 when you try to navigate to it. Someone royally screwed up here. [1] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-8/clause-13/ https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-8... [2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-1/section-8 https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-1/sec... for a working annotated site, though even it is mildly broken.
- emchammer 1y agoHow could discussion of such a grave matter be flagged?
- llm_nerd 1y agoWhile it's about a website and ostensibly could be considered technology related, to be fair it is mostly a political submission so all of the "No politics!" people will flag, and perhaps rightly so. But it will still exist on https://news.ycombinator.com/active https://news.ycombinator.com/active
- 93po 1y agoBecause really basic consideration of the situation gives us the very likely explanation. The idea that Trump was sitting at his desk and randomly pissed about the bottom 1/6th of Section 1 and was like "take that off congress's website!" is basically zero. 1. It's congress's website, not the whitehouse's 2. It's clearly a sort of crappy development approach - the website uses jquery and fontawesome and adobe analytics. this isn't FAANG level engineering happening here 3. It's a website about EXPLAINING THE CONSTITUTION. What do we know people use to make summaries or explanations of things? LLMs, of course 4. What is known for randomly deleting and omitting stuff? Also LLMs! 5. Can we guess why an LLM would have deleted that part? Why yes, actually, we can: if you go to the explanation part of the site, do you know what's also missing (and was prior to this update too?). Wow, it's the bottom part of section 1! What a coincidence The clear answer here is: someone was using an LLM to write, review, or edit content, and it deleted the bottom of section 1 because there wasn't an explanation to go along with it. It makes even more sense that this is what happening given that this section was already missing an explanation. It's really tiring how some underpaid intern making a mistake on a website has people suggesting trump is committing a new form of treason.
- dragonwriter 1y ago> It's congress's website, not the whitehouse's Its administered by the Library of Congress, whose head was just fired and replaced by the President. It may, in theory, exist to serve the interests of Congress, but that's rather less important than who is in practice exercising control over the people who in turn control it.
- Kapura 1y agoWhy is this flagged?
- jeffbee 1y agoIt's flagged because flags are crowdsourced, it only takes a few clicks to take down the post, and HN is crawling with MAGA accelerationists who are happy to destroy America.
- p_ing 1y ago[flagged]
- HaZeust 1y ago#2, #3, #9 and #10 of HN's most upvoted posts are inherently political.
- DamnInteresting 1y agoAccording to the Library of Congress, this was all due to a "coding error."[1] [1] https://bsky.app/profile/librarycongress.bsky.social/post/3lvqilhwb6k2x https://bsky.app/profile/librarycongress.bsky.social/post/3l...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- RemainsOfTheDay 1y ago[flagged]
- jordanpg 1y agohttps://bsky.app/profile/librarycongress.bsky.social/post/3lvqilhwb6k2x https://bsky.app/profile/librarycongress.bsky.social/post/3l... > It has been brought to our attention that some sections of Article 1 are missing from the Constitution Annotated (constitution.congress.gov) website. We’ve learned that this is due to a coding error. We have been working to correct this and expect it to be resolved soon.
- pogue 1y agoTrump is using notepad.exe to change the Constitution.
- slowmovintarget 1y agoAnd... it's back > The Constitution Annotated website is currently experiencing data issues. We are working to resolve this issue and regret the inconvenience.
- ccorcos 1y agoThis happened this morning. What are the odds that next week this will be fixed and this whole enragement and speculation was a complete waste of time? This is why I don’t read the news anymore.
- johnnyanmac 1y agoThey lost my benefit of the doubt by last februrary. They earned my ire when they decided a few dozen protestors in LA justified deploying 2000 National Guard and 700 Marines to my city. Meanwhile two political figures were assassinated and they can't even give the most basic false platitudes.
- Levitz 1y agoThe page is now back to the original: https://web.archive.org/web/diff/20250601021212/20250806193218/https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/ https://web.archive.org/web/diff/20250601021212/202508061932...
- 75345d4c 1y agoI'm so alarmed rn