jwieczorek

But Git is a distributed VCS. They could just as well cleanly merge pull requests into the main branch as hosted on GitHub and then merge GitHub's main branch into their canonical system's main branch.

> 2) because China's population is heavily concentrated in the west

I know it's likely just a typo, but anyway: it is heavily concentrated in the east.

Norway isn't part of the EU but is part of the EEA. It is through that membership that it's bound by the same as other EU countries economic agreements that through simplification people tend to associate with the EU.

Meanwhile, Russia just today announced it is starting the release of the first batch of its own vaccine to the public.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/08/sputnik-russia-corona...

It's interesting to see modern-day “certified forgiveness coachers” transmit the millenia-old Christian teaching on sin, resentment and forgiveness.

HN is also probably not the place where calling a person a "Russian troll" constitutes a valid counter-argument.

The city was wiped off the surface of the earth during the World War II, it suffered much worse than Warsaw or Dresden. And you wouldn't expect the Soviets to rebuild it in anything other than social realism, so that's what Minsk is today. Though there are two or three streets of pre-War architecture left.

The mobile application from Yandex.Taxi is in my opinion the best taxi app in existence, much better than Uber. And it's not like the quality of the service can differ between apps all that much, the pool of taxi drivers is the same after all…

Yes, Euro is a disaster. It's a predominantly ideological project that economically is totally unsound. Okay, it was conceived as a way to boost the German economy (before Euro the German mark was just too strong so Germany couldn't export as much as it does now) but ends up painfully backfiring at all Euro economies. First the weaker economies (Greece and Italy) and now Germany.

Ludwig Wittgenstein: the borders of my language are the borders of my world.

English is a language many young Slavs learn in preparation to or in the course of their professional life as in the world of the Pax Americana it quite simply has become an economical necessity to know it well. However, the English language cannot naturally transmit any of the linguistic particularities (proverbs, turns of phrases) and, generally, cultural notions and historical familiarities that to a certain extent are shared by the various Slavic peoples. English for Slavs is a foreign language in the true sense of the word, whereas a language like Russian is much closer linguistically and culturally. There's the heritage of the Soviet Union which makes Russian the trans-national language of choice for the generations educated in the Soviet times. And indeed that could be the very same reason why these days it's rather unpopular among the young people in, say, Poland. Which is a real shame because as a trans-Slavic language IMO it does a great job and is a very beautiful language as well.

I am Polish and when speaking to a fellow Slav, I much prefer to try to get us to speak in our own languages, even if it requires effort. Otherwise, I prefer to speak Russian if the person I'm communicating with knows it too. I find it very, very awkward using English in those situations, i.e. in conversations with a Serb or a Czech (but not with a German or a Swede).

A video encouraging people to participate in an illegal gathering could in some jurisdictions be considered a form of incitement.

There's room for building instruments like this at a state-sponsored level in, say, the EU. The EU has already been working on a special clearing house that would help European businesses circumvent the US-imposed sanctions.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/06/system-circumvent-san...

Well, seeing we already talk anecdotes… I was there myself this year in May on a week-long hike and a few days at the sea, and they're doing alright. The year of 2014 was quite rough (especially with the electricity shortages when Ukraine cut off their supplies), but now, with the two new power plants, they're energetically self-sustainable. After the bridge link to the mainland opened last year and with a newly-rebuilt airport in Simferopol, they also no longer feel so isolated.

By that wording, who is a national of the Crimea region? Did they mean residents?

Sure, and falsified all the votes? The Crimean parliament proclaimed sovereignty against their will and so was the Ukrainian navy chief forced to switch allegiance?

When it comes to the reasons behind sanctions, there's no need to correct me, because I wrote just that: that the international reactions were a response to, in the words of the sanctioning countries, international law being violated (as if that had not happened before, see the Kosovo case), and namely the principle of territorial integrity. All I'm saying is that sanctions targetting the people who expressed their will in the referendum are counter-productive. If there were people left in Crimea, who still haven't made their mind up whose umbrella Crimea would be best off under (though comparing the mayhem state Crimea was left in after the Ukrainian rule and the investments going on there since 2014 – I doubt there are many), then acts like this will surely make them anti-American, not anti-Kremlin. This was my point.

The legality of the Crimean referendum might be an interesting question for lawyers or political scientists (especially the double standards observed in the rhetoric of the US and its satellite states). Or for us, not living there. For the people who voted in the referendum and have seen their lives improve as a result of their vote – it just doesn't matter. And that's the reality some should accept, while rejecting it leads to sloppy analysis of issues like the one discussed in this very post.

After the Ukrainian air traffic control spent weeks bringing the same flight closer and closer to the war zone, even though a ban on air traffic over that territory should have been put there immediately. No one is questioning the Ukrainian side how come they've "lost" and have not put forward before the Dutch Safety Board the primary radar recordings of the Dnepropetrovsk area from that period. The Ukrainian government, and the U.S., at that very moment needed something like this to happen to get the Western European governments to put their stake in that war and the Western European societies to approve it. They're partially responsible for this crash and in that regard your description of this event is highly misguiding.

There's hardly any military work that would involve using code from GitHub in Crimea. All the R&D is done in mainland Russia. This targets common people who use GitHub for their pet projects or just regular work.

In general, this thread demonstrates that here there's very little understanding about the mass psychology of Russians, and, really, any nation other than Americans. No one in Crimea is going to rebel against the Russian government because of the U.S. sanctions against them exclusively. A policy like this only validates the Russian government's narrative of the U.S. going after Russia as such. If the U.S. government wanted to seek allies in Crimeans, they could perhaps focus on sanctioning Moscovian oligarchs. Well, except they won't, because Russian oligarchs that lose leverage in the Kremlin later make for good dissidents to be used by the U.S. as an ideological tool against Russia. And the oligarchic system is keeping Russia from modernizing, which is also in the U.S. interest.

Especially when they democratically voted in favour of being part of Russia. This is essentially a punishment for them for voting the way they did.

> for people who still live there

You're making it sound as if people were suffering and running away from there. Well, sorry to disappoint you, but the net migration is positive and rising.

Companies like Siemens are doing business there. For now, they have to pretend that they don't even know about it, but that is going to change too as the U.S. continue to lose their hegemony in Europe.

Please, let's look at the facts. Here we have a case where the population of the territory in question would in no way describe this state of affairs as an occupation. They did vote in favour of Crimea becoming part of Russia and the international objections have to do with legal concerns, not the well-being of the population (with, at most, an exception of some Crimean Tatars, but they're a small minority). So, the U.S. are effectively punishing the people of Crimea for voting the way they did. Is that a good policy? I don't think so, it will only give boost to anti-Americanism. If it's about targetting the economy of Crimea as a whole, then I don't think that will work, since Russia has been subsidizing it the whole time at a grand scale, and Russia together with some European states will find a way around it (we have seen that with the Siemens turbines, for example). Moreover, moves like this will only give fuel to the project of building a sovereign Internet that the Russian government has been pushing forward.

Judging from the state of affairs in the two states in question – the Ukraine and Russia – I highly doubt Russia would be the first one to collapse.

Counter intelligence is FSB's pretty much the only job. If they do intelligence, it's in CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) countries such as Belarus or Kazakhstan. It's SVR and GRU that are Russia's intelligence agencies.

Such a combination is what Unbabel does in translation. ML-driven automated translation followed by crowd-sourced human review and corrections. It's a neat idea and could be the future of translation (as opposed to full automation).

> And how do you know that the right moment will ever arrive? And when it arrives how would you know that it is the right time?

It's called political realism, so you look at the reality, do an analysis and try to draw conclusions based on a calculation of chances of success/failure and potential benefits and losses compared with the status quo. You look at how strong you are, and how strong is your opponent. You look at how much you have now and how much you could possibly gain. You look at who else could benefit from your action, and whether those foreign parties are not provoking you to take a certain course of action in their interest, not yours (the classical question cui bono?). Sadly, the ones who were bothered to do any of this, were being marginalized, and in today's pop historical discourse (fortunately, not the scientific one) are often referred to as predators or collaborators. And Fins were smarter than that.

When it comes to Poland regaining independence in 1918, the role of "us" is often blatantly overestimated in the Polish historical mythology. First of all, there wasn't really an us. There was a land-owning class and there were peasants, with often conflicting interests. The land-owning class would do just fine without an independent state (well, it became a concern for them after the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, for obvious reasons), and the peasants were bothered not so much about independence but who would give them right to land, and who would not. Their varying role in the 1920 war gives us a good idea about this. Second, while the role of the very blurred us is overestimated, what gets neglected is the role of foreign powers, who were drawing the maps of the post-war Europe. And here, I'm afraid, they couldn't care less about how many hazardous insurrections the Poles pulled off in the 19th century. All that mattered was that the Western Europe needed a cordon sanitaire between them and the Soviet Russia that'd protect the interests of the capitalistic model from a foreign intervention (this was way before the Bolsheviks settled on building socialism in their own country). Plus, the Anglo-Saxons needed a political arm in Central Europe, which would serve as an instrument in their policy of keeping Germany and Russia conflicted or at a distance, in the spirit of their perennial divide and conquer strategy towards continental Europe. And even the Polish representatives, whose signatures can be found under the Treaty of Versailles, were indeed the realists (national democrats), not the romantic insurrectionists.

I don't know too much about Kurds and their political situation, so I won't be making opinionated statements.

No, there's no insurrection of Native Americans going on. And they can, if they wish to, speak their indigenous languages, and are not being expelled to Alaska. Indeed, you properly identified the cause-and-effect relationship between imprudent and reckless insurrections, and the repressions that follow. That link is the reason why so many residents of the Kingdom of Poland were strongly against insurrections at the time when they were provoked. And it is the very same reason why there was no such thing in Finland, which was also part of the Russian Empire. Finland, in contrast to Poland, kept its autonomy the whole time, and patiently waited for the right moment to say “cards up” to try to separate from the Empire and have an independent state, which was at the end of World War I.

Well, this isn't so much a question of whether there was progress at all, because, as you're saying, the industry was booming all over Europe, but a question of what parts of the Russian Empire would benefit from it the most. One would think that a Russian Emperor would do everything to make sure that it's the metropolis that gets the cake, not the peripheries. All the more that Russia had been lagging in the industrial development, as would later be brutally demonstrated during the Revolution of 1917, so focusing on the western provinces would seem like a misinvestment (clearly, in the case of a war they would be the first ones to be chopped off). Of course, I'm not saying Alexander II was a covert lover of all things Polish. In fact, at times he, just like Alexander I during the Kingdom of Poland era (1815–1831), would have to back down under the pressure of the Saint Petersburg elites, who were not happy with a favourable policy towards Poland. Intuitively, one would think that a Russian emperor would put the interests of the metropolis first, and use, or even exhaust, the peripheries for the good of it. It's what the British Empire would do, for sure. ;-) Yet, under Alexanders I & II it was different. Which is why I think he deserves a radically more nuanced description than an occupier.

The truth is where the truth is, not in the middle. :)

> But the truth usually is somewhere in the middle.

No, it's not.

> he was simply an occupier

That's not the history, as you just admitted yourself: he abolished serfdom and started a period of unprecedented prosperity in Polish history (when the Polish city Łódź had gone from a village to become one of the main industrial centers in the whole of Europe), among many other things. The list could go on but the point is this: you pick statements that suit your feelings and therefore are not even close to serve as an objective description of a historical figure.

I would even argue, as a separate point, that he wasn't an “occupier” at all, much like Donald Trump is not an “occupier” of Native American lands.

I think there are grounds to be surprised and dissatisfied when the school curriculum teaches kids shallow, anti-intellectual ressentiments, instead of actual history, with all its shades of gray. And when it does that, it's awful for their future. Indeed, as one great Polish historian once said, false history is a mistress of false politics. Mistress in the old Shakespearean sense. Although the modern alternate meaning of the word gives the saying quite an appropriate twist…