MHmhils·Oct 7, 2025
pdoc3 is not pdoc, see https://github.com/mitmproxy/pdoc?tab=readme-ov-file#pdoc-vs....
In Pdoc – Generate API documentation for Python projectsmitmproxy
pdoc
Python2013–2025
mitmproxy / pdoc
pdoc
API Documentation for Python Projects
3Distinct people
10Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
2.5KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
API Documentation for Python Projects
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 12:54:37 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year10 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2013-08-15 14:25:07 UTC to 2025-10-07 17:06:59 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 2 | 0 |
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
10 sourcesRE browser vs reading the code: sounds like you have a nicer setup than my neovim setup. Although I think my first point still holds unless CLion handles that case too.
With respect to the rest of your comment, indeed, those are issues. Although I think I take issue with you pinning this on rustdoc. I actually think it's a dance between documentation presentation (so, rustdoc), API design and familiarity with the language.
I've long said that rustdoc makes unknown unknowns difficult to discover, and this is particularly painful for folks new to Rust. Because you don't really know what to look for yet. And writing docs is a difficult exercise in perspective taking, where you need to balance what you think others know. If you assume they know too little, it's not hard to end up writing too much and adding a fair bit of noise. With that said
Read the rest
, I agree that "too little docs" is a far more common problem than "too many docs."
But yeah, your experience is a perfect example of what I mean when I say "generics complicate APIs." They introduce indirection everywhere, and I'm not sure how much rustdoc can really help with that. You might be right that maybe there are some visualizations that can be added, but like you, I've always seen those as gimmicks in other tools that are rarely useful. IMO, a heavily generic API really requires the crate author to write more prose about how their APIs are intended to be used with lots of concrete examples. But that's really hard to do, because writing good docs requires being a good communicator, and most of us suck hard at that.
The interesting bit here is that I've personally found the documentation experience in Rust to be far far better than any other ecosystem. All the way from writing docs up to consuming them. I've sampled many different ecosystems (C, C++, Haskell, Python, Go to name some) and other than maybe Go, I thought the doc experience was really just not great in any of them. Python specifically seems to be a case where I tend to see a lot of variance in opinion. I hated Sphinx so much, for example, that I built an alternative.[1] (Well, alternative for API docs, pdoc does not deal with the non-reference case.) I also just generally dislike the output that Sphinx produces. I find that it lacks structure, and I've always had a hard time navigating my way through Python library docs.
[1]: https://github.com/mitmproxy/pdoc
'cargo doc' is absolutely one of my most favorite things about Rust. I've never once seen it as crippled and I've never once reached for an "entirely separate static site generator" to write docs despite maintaining several serious projects.
Writing out explicit links sucked, but we have intradoc links now. It was a huge win. But my first paragraph above was true even before intradoc links too.
Also, I hate Sphinx. It's awesome that folks have been able to use it to produce great docs, but I've never been successful in using it. I disliked it enough that I wrote my own tool for generating API documentation in Python.[1]
[1]: https://github.com/mitmproxy/pdoc
In Rust: A Critical RetrospectiveHi HN! Some of you may remember @BurntSushi's pdoc tool, a lightweight alternative to Sphinx. We're a bit in an unfortunate situation with a hostile work assuming our name [1], but I figured that we shouldn't give in and continue the legacy of that tool. Long story short, we have just published a major new "modern Python 3" release, which hopefully makes pdoc a really compelling option again. :-)
[1] https://github.com/mitmproxy/pdoc#pdoc-vs-pdoc3
In Show HN: Pdoc, a lightweight Python API documentation generatorAs 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
In Show HN: Zero-Config Documentation Websites for PythonI had that same frustration and wrote pdoc: https://github.com/BurntSushi/pdoc
Example output: http://pdoc.burntsushi.net/pdoc
In Announcing pydoc.io betaPython docs, easier than Sphinx
3 points · Open discussion> pydoc still doesn't work
Are you using `pydoc` on the command line? If so, try pdoc: https://github.com/BurntSushi/pdoc. I wrote it as a tool to replace epydoc (strictly automatic documentation), but it works on the command line just like pydoc. (It can also generate HTML documentation with cross module linking that isn't crap. See an example here: http://pdoc.burntsushi.net/nfldb)
In Show HN: Vex, a new way to run things in Python's virtualenvsA documentation generator for Python code (replaces epydoc)
9 points · Open discussionShow HN: pdoc – A documentation generator for Python code (replaces epydoc)
2 points · Open discussion