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by _justinfunk 318 days ago
Presuming 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?
3 comments

I 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...

[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-1/sec... for a working annotated site, though even it is mildly broken.

If this article is to give an example: it will be posted, get a few votes, then be flagged anyway.
> Presuming this is just incompetence instead of malice

why would you make this presumption?

Because 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.
You make presumptions to examine arguments.