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Comment by fforflo | Hacker News Reader

This popped in my GitHub feed.

There's an "awesome web-scraping" repo with ~5K stars.

A few days ago the maintainer added the Russian flag at the top of README.md

Someone raised this as an issue [0]

"Just a suggestion, having a Russian flag at the top of the page might not be the best idea?" to which the maintainer simply replied

"Why not? I am Russian citizen and I support my country."

Seems trivial, but got me thinking of the implications. E.g. how would a Ukrainian dev feel having his project showcased in this list, under the Russian flag?

[0] https://github.com/lorien/awesome-web-scraping/issues/136

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> "Why not? I am Russian citizen and I support my country."

Did they not support their country until a few days ago?

One problem with such political gestures is that they have even less nuance than a tweet, which makes it easy for people to misunderstand the point being made (and also easy for others to deliberately misrepresent what is being said).

Perhaps like a README or LICENSE file, we need a POLITICS file that maintainers can put in their repo to list which countries and policies they support, to avoid any ambiguity. The absurdity of that idea, though, suggests that the only winning move is not to combine national politics with international software projects.

Code of conduct might cover this. You could say that the repo is dedicated to [mission statement] and content/speech not in alignment with that will be removed.

Pretty civil discussion as far as the Internet goes.

It's sometimes nice to have a break from politics when programming, but it's the author's choice what they want to do with their repo. It can always be forked and maintained elsewhere if there's interest.

The Russian flag isn't Putin's exclusive flag; the Russians who don't support Putin and the war do not have a different flag from that one. A national symbol such as a flag isn't simply some signal of agreement with something that is happening.

> how would a Ukrainian dev feel having his project showcased in this list, under the Russian flag?

In any number of ways depending on their attitude, and in some cases, it might not be enough not to have the flag there; the dev in question might simply not want their work to be aggregated in a Russian's link farm repo, period.

But the developer didn't just become Russian 8 days ago. He's been Russian all his life. The fact that he only added the Russian flag there 8 days ago makes it really likely that he is indeed supporting what Putin is doing.

Likelihood is best used as a tool for predicting the average outcome of many events, based on data from many past events.

This person either supports Putin, or not; there is no probably about it, and no way to meaningfully apply probability to figure out his individual motives; he would have to be interviewed.

For example, maybe he feels that the widespread ostracism of Russia and Russians is unfair, and just wants to support the morale of his compatriots.

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