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Comment by shawn | Hacker News Reader

So, funny story: I registered the "nazi" npm package. When you require it, it says "I did nazi that coming." That's it. (Though it would've been a funny name for a linter.)

... Or it did. I received a harshly worded letter from npm saying they axed it. It hit all the talking points about inclusiveness and making sure no one feels even slightly annoyed.

Meh. No point to this story. Just an interesting situation with an inconsistently curated package manager. I was surprised there was an unofficial undocumented banlist.

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They document that they curate package names here:

https://www.npmjs.com/policies/conduct

I guess lots of people will think that a policy like Avoid using offensive or harassing package names, nicknames, or other identifiers that might detract from a friendly, safe, and welcoming environment for all. stifles their inner something or other though.

seems like a good reflection of the current social climate: they have a policy to prevent mildly offensive package names, and they enforce it, but they don't have a solution to packages randomly disappearing and being replaced with malicious versions.

It's a shame there are enough edgy teenagers making npm packages that such a policy is warranted

The term "nazi" is not simply mildly offensive, there are likely legal implications if you want to serve users in Germany.

I doubt they did it out of a desire to better serve users in Germany.

Correct.

Because probably every country has some words they don't like.

Like nazi? Give me a break.

what?

Even if (which it doesn't, the term is not forbidden), why should npm care?

Even if what?

even if they would be problems in germany because of the name.

>why should npm care

Name aside, the package as described is useless and serves no legitimate function.

If they're going to curate, they should do some quality control.

gotta have priorities.

I miss the days when everyone predicted and solved technical bugs with ease and didn’t have time to do eye—rollingly simple things like say “don’t be an idiot”. Remind me when that social climate was in place, again?

Or it could be that it's easy to do simple low-hanging-fruit things and harder to do more complicated things. The whole JS ecosystem has come together in a rather ad-hoc way, it's plain stupidity or moronic political gamesmanship to assume more motivation than "nobody thought it worth blocking the entire platform to build a fully-trusted base infrastructure so far."

It's funny how many people get easily pissed off about other people allegedly being oversensitive. And it's sad how many of them are part of my same bullied-as-young-nerds cohort, considering that it appears their reaction to getting some power for the first time in their lives was to jump into the bully camp themselves.

> it appears their reaction to getting some power for the first time in their lives was to jump into the bully camp themselves

Or maybe they see others using political correctness to bully people around them.

That seems like an implausible explanation for a comment trying to make a political issue out of two disjoint things: a package manager design flaw and an editorial control policy for package names. "Publishers" having a level of interest in what goes out on there platform is as old as anything, and so is flawed software design.

So I stick by my stance that it seems like tying to try those things together ("you screwed this up because you're morally in the wrong as shown by your focusing on the wrong things") to advance a personal political agenda is the more bullying behavior, here.

> using political correctness to bully people around them.

"Please don't use unnecessarily harmful/crude/we-don't-like-it language when giving names to pieces of computer software that we host, manage, and coordinate for you" counts as bullying now? I think not. As they say, if you don't like it, don't play.

And besides, NPM seems pretty focused on package names alone (as they should be). If you absolutely must live out your libertarian fantasy by being insulting, nobody's stopping you from making the API to your package something like:

  const pkg = require('totally-innocuous')
  
 pkg.IHateYouBecauseOfYourEthicityOrGenderOrReligionAndIAmProudOfIt()

It certainly does not count as bullying.

But people do have knee-jerk reactions, and people do overreact for fear of it being bullying next time. None of those are likely to be necessary on this case, but people's feeling aren't very contextual. Many people will react to overreaching political correctness for fear alone, and it isn't nice for the GP to accuse them of bullying.

Yes, it's sad what people do out of fear. But excusing and ignoring unpleasant behavior as a "knee-jerk reaction" or "overreaction," and complaining about someone criticizing it, has many, many dangers of its own.

One thing is probably easier than the other, and can be tackled asynchronously.

Try a package named Nazí, which provides a collection of the chess games of 2016 US Women's Chess Champion Nazí Paikidze [1]. At the same time also do one named Fabiano, which provides a collection of the games of Fabiano Caruana [2], the 2016 US Chess Champion.

If they take that down the Nazí one but not the Fabiano one, you can then take your mischief making to the next level by accusing them of being misogynists for banning a package promoting a woman chess champion but leaving up the one for the man.

[1] http://www.chessgames.com/player/nazi_paikidze.html

[2] http://www.chessgames.com/player/fabiano_caruana.html

This isn't the Supreme Court. They don't need to be consistent and they are going to see past the pointless trolling.

Does "stalinist" work?

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