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Comment by isbjorn16 | Hacker News Reader

I was super pumped by this, and took some time to look into pdoc3 too.

- https://github.com/pdoc3/pdoc/issues/87

- https://github.com/pdoc3/pdoc/issues/64

That's a hard pass from me. I'm not going to link my employer's name (much less my own name) to anything with a swastika on it.

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I saw that as well, late into the project creation. The pdoc3 maintainer claims it's not that - but there are other reasons to want to want to avoid pdoc3. I'm going to be working on replace the pdoc3 dependency with pdoc in a way that is transparent to users.

Great to see you are receptive to this change. I didn't notice it earlier but then when I see on the right hand corner of the website I was astonished it's there.

The change away from pdoc3 and to a new fork of the original pdoc (called pdocs) has landed:

https://github.com/timothycrosley/portray/blob/master/CHANGE...

https://timothycrosley.github.io/pdocs/

Thanks!

~Timothy

Fantastic! I look forward to this :)

The change away from pdoc3 and to a new fork of the original pdoc (called pdocs) has landed:

https://github.com/timothycrosley/portray/blob/master/CHANGE...

https://timothycrosley.github.io/pdocs/

Thanks!

~Timothy

There is no question that these are Buddhist swastikas; they are clockwise and also rotated 45 degrees compared to the most common nazi version.

It is difficult to appreciate how ubiquitous swastikas are in the Buddhist world until you go there and see them everywhere. I have no doubt that this was an innocent decision.

It stopped being an innocent decision once it was pointed out and he doubled down.

Put another way: I cannot put my or my employer's interests in Western markets at risk because something is acceptable in Eastern markets. The maintainer can do whatever he wants to do; I'm not questioning that. I'm just saying I won't be using it, even if it would save me from sphinx-autodoc fragility.

As the original author of pdoc, thanks for not using pdoc3, which---even separate from the Nazi imagery---is something that I consider to be an unethical fork. You might instead consider using the original pdoc, which is now maintained by mitmproxy[1]. Although, it does seem like activity on the project has waned.

[1] - https://github.com/mitmproxy/pdoc

> I cannot put my or my employer's interests in Western markets at risk because something is acceptable in Eastern markets

My employer works in both markets, so rejecting something because it's Eastern would look much worse than rejecting it because someone in one market might not know what it is.

Anyway, it's a tiny icon on the boiler plate of a dependency of a project used to generate documentation. It would be a huge stretch to say your employer supports Nazis because of this.

I highly doubt the absence of any religious iconography is going to harm my employer in eastern markets.

> There is no question that these are Buddhist swastikas; they are clockwise

They are paired mirror images, so they are both clockwise and counterclockwise.

His github profile picture is the swastika counter-clockwise. It's very clear from that his intention is to include things that appear like the Nazi swastika but are technically not. That's bad intention in my book.

In all fairness to the GitHub account, the Python logo itself could be perceived as the same logo made out of two snakes.

But troll culture masquerading as innocent plausible-deniability really is ruining the internet because it's hard not to assume the worst (we see the same symbols being used on purpose to illicit a reaction and that person did respond with "Made you look. :grin:").

It looks like it's not on the website anymore?

It's true that that swastika (usually going in the other direction) is a buddhist symbol, but it looks like the person who forked it is from Slovenia, which has never been a buddhist country but was briefly a Nazi country. It's hard to believe that was an accidental oversight.

Still here: https://pdoc3.github.io/pdoc/ (bottom only).

Seems like he means well, but if he means that well, why not remove them?

I think being told what you are not allowed to do by strangers on the internet can elicit a certain stubbornness. I don't blame either side, but think it is strange for people to be so sure of another's intentions.

For what it's worth, I'm not claiming I'm certain he's a nazi sympathizer. What I am claiming is I cannot risk media or competitors making a big deal out of it, even if he means well. Surely that isn't a far out proposition, right?

oh man that's sneaky. They're very faint. The sneak factor does not belie good intentions, regardless of claims.

These barely appeared on my laptop's screen. I went back and checked twice because of comments before actually seeing it.

It's only sneaky if you assume bad intentions. Otherwise they're discreet.

Symbols get irrevocably besmirched all the time. I'm not going to be the person roping in a documentation tool that results in "<FAANG Company X> uses software linked to Nazis" as a BBC headline, you know? That headline alone is going to roflstomp any amount of nuanced rhetoric - and that's giving the maintainer the absolute most kind benefit of the doubt, which I'm not even remotely convinced they actually deserve.

The site has been updated (see issue 64)

But the site hasn't been updated and that issue dismisses them as not a problem?

I didn't find the symbol on the site linked anymore, and it's different from the screenshot. I may be missing something though?

It's still in the footer. From the screenshot I thought it was directly around the quote but it's actually closer to the edges of the screen when in desktop view.

My bad. I was looking in the wrong spot, they are indeed all the way out to the side and pretty light. Probably in my blind spot on this particular screen size!

I thought it's common knowledge the Nazi symbol is rotated 45° and vents clockwise. Still, agree that removing it is the smart move to increase adoption.

Many comments are addressing the fact that there is a difference between the clockwise and counter-clockwise symbols and that they should not be confused, but they are both on the website?

It's common knowledge amongst Nazi apologists, internet trolls, and actual Nazis.

The way your comment is phrased is disturbing.

Its not a problem of adoption. It's a problem of normalizing hate. If you don't understand that, I don't want to be associated with you.

Ok. Put me in the internet trolls one, that seems the least offensive (I know this from 40 years of watching Holocaust Memorial Day movies)

I feel bad for the author. To be labelled a nazi for using the counter-clockwise svatiska is undue.

Edit: Can I have any argument instead of simply downvoting me?

My reasoning to critizise him goes like this:

It is quite apparent that he knows about the meanings and uses of the symbol, therefore he could (and should) have anticipated the discussion. I grew up in an environment where nazi insignia are forbidden, and a very common way for convinced nazis to get around this was to just flip the damn thing and claim it is ok now, while in spirit you still go and use it to hail hitler with your friends.

I grew up in southern Austria next to the Slovenian border (which is where this guy is based). This part of Austria had a 40% right wing majority in the past and after a few beers right wingers still openly hail hitler in a pub, despite that beeing illegal. My grandfather who passed away a few years ago was a convinced nazi — this thing is still alive here.

The author is based in slovenia, literally a hour by car from where I lived. There is no way somebody from that area uses that symbol accidentally, without having considered its nazi connotations. This is an area where every other person had somebody in his family killed by nazis or were profiting from it in some way.

So either this person is incredibly naive and tries to overwrite history that is still very much ongoing or it is somebody who in full knowledge of all of this still decided to go with the symbol. In any way it doesn’t look good to me.

He rotates it the other way in his github profile picture.

You are right about it, didn't pay attention to his github picture.

i don’t think people were labelling him a nazi; i think they had issue with their own projects, or their name being accidentally associated with nazis

Do you have the same bad feelings for neo-Nazis who try to rules-lawyer the anti-swastika laws of Germany by displaying the mirror image?

We're talking about an EU citizen, who is professing to be ignorant of what he learned in school, after he is informed about the issue.

You know the Python symbol is a swastika, right? Technically it's a couple snakes that are coiled like a swastika, but if it's "anything to do with a swastika" we should avoid it, right?

https://www.flaticon.com/free-icon/python-file-symbol_28884 https://www.python.org/static/img/python-logo.png

I think the average person is going to have to have you point out the relation and squint for a while before they see it, if at all. I had to close one eye and really look at it before I saw what you were talking about.

Syntactic whitespace is pretty high on my personal fascism chart.

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