I am having a hard time understanding why, help me out. I’m not sure about airports, but the US doesn’t check passports on the way out at land borders, so you could walk from the US into Mexico without the US side checking, and then when the Mexican official asks you, you could just present your German passport. Of course American citizens are obliged to reenter the US on their American passport, but if you are getting the new US passport back by post, couldn’t you have a family member DHL it to wherever you are outside the US?
Most developed countries stamp on the way out. The USA is an odd man out in not checking passports of outgoing people at border crossings. Even in Schengen where a computer system was rolled out that automatically flags overstays, etc., it is still common for passport control to scrutinize foreigners' stamps just in case some previous passport control didn't properly enter the movement into the computer system.
HN comment threads go off into tangents all the time. Any link that draws into the hundreds of comments is going to have many tangents, and this one was no exception before I even came to it. Your account was created in 2014, it puzzles me that this isn't something you're well used to already.
The OP wrote “I wonder how the signers of this letter would feel if the Python conference was to be organized in a country where slavery was still legal.” I mentioned a country that is known for modern-day slavery yet draws foreigners, with the implication that it might not be as shocking for tech organizers as the OP thinks. For example, the country has recently been prominent in the OpenStreetMap community[0], but I have never seen the discussion go off into concern about slavery, and I wouldn’t expect a large outcry if one of the big international OSM conferences like SotM was organized there.
Google is so big a player that they don’t even need to check if the name has already been applied to a technology. As soon as they apply it to their product name, that will become the main association for the term. And as fond as some are of the Gemini protocol, it never got widely known outside of HN/Lobster circles.
Again, the Hungarian-speaking part of Transcarpatia is a fairly small area, see the convenient map[0] on Wikipedia. Most Rusyns in Ukraine live to the north or northeast of that small area in green. These are statistics that you can consult for yourself, no need for anecdotal evidence. Congratulations, your wife’s granddad must have got stationed in one of those very few communities in Transcarpatia where Hungarian is spoken. That means nothing for categorizing a people spread over Ukraine, Slovakia, and Poland as “akin to Magyars”.
You do realize that the vast majority of people from Ukraine passing the Hungarian nationality test are ethnic Hungarians, not Rusyns?
It has been a few years, but I don’t remember it as any different from the previous West African capitals (Dakar, Bissau, Conakry, Freetown) that I had cycled into.
> Would you feel safe being in a country where your sexuality was illegal?
The answer seems to be yes for at least some number of travelers. I have traveled the Muslim world and sub-Saharan Africa extensively and I have met plenty of fellow travelers who are gay, whether individuals or even gay couples. The couples simply don’t show affection in public, but heterosexual couples shouldn’t either. Even sharing a room as two men or two women is no issue, because the locals will assume you are friends unless you explicitly, deliberately, tell them otherwise.
And twice when I got the contact info of local Europeans living in the region who were known for extending hospitality to any travelers coming through, I arrived to find that it was a gay couple who had been there for decades. I must say, this whole thread is full of uninformed stereotypes, and posters would benefit from firsthand experience of the world.
Owning a Bible is not forbidden by law in Morocco. (If there is legislation, you are misinterpreting its scope and intent.) Morocco has its own Roman Catholic jurisdiction[0]. There are even Roman Catholic monasteries/convents in the country that do philanthropic work with rural communities, on the condition that they don’t try to openly convert locals, and of course they all possess Bibles and liturgical books for their services.
This is something that even tourists are often aware of, because in Tangier the Anglican parish[1] is a popular tourist attraction. The Agadir Roman Catholic parish is attended by also some of the loads of German/French/Italian pensioners who spend winters there.
Slavery is still de facto legal in Mauritania (ostensibly outlawed back in the 1980s but still omnipresent), and foreigners go there all the time. Overlanding from Europe to West Africa is popular. States where slavery is legal, or remains de facto legal as in Mauritania, generally have had a system for who becomes a slave, and it isn’t a posh foreign visitor. It is prior slaves’ progeny, prisoners of war, or purchase on the market from sellers selling the former two groups.
In fact, it isn’t just posh foreigners. Many Senegalese people go to work in Nouakchott for a few years, save up money, and then return home. They aren’t worried about being enslaved because, again, the slavery system isn’t about them.
Are you autistic? I ask because this is HN where lots of people are, and choosing to speak the literary norm in countries with diglossia is often associated with autism. For example, foreigners in Finland are urged to quickly get to grips with puhekieli (spoken Finnish) because speaking kirjakieli (the literary norm) in everyday contexts, or writing it in chats, is “something only autistic people do”.
I remember, in the early millennium, reading Kurzweil’s idealism about the coming singularity, and feeling similar. So much of the advanced technology that he thought will soon be in the hands of ordinary people, could be potentially so lethal that obviously the state would feel the need to restrict it.
(That was one argument against Kurzweil’s vision. Another is that state regulation and licensing moves so slowly at each major technological change, that it would take us decades to get to the point he dreams of, not mere years. You aren’t going to see anything new rolled out in the healthcare sector without lots and lots of debating about it and drawing up paperwork first.)
No, not to any significant extent. I speak Hungarian and have very frequently passed through that small part of Transcarpathia where Hungarian is still spoken, and I have rarely encountered an ethnic Slav who learned Hungarian to proficiency. The language of interethnic communication in Transcarpatia was generally Russian during the Soviet era, and even remained such into the post-Soviet era, though Ukrainian has naturally gained ground.
And again, most of the Rusyn population in Ukraine is living far enough to the north or northeast that they have no contact whatsoever with the Hungarian language. I don’t think you have any actual knowledge of this part of the world.
Mycroft users really wished that Mozilla had kept up efforts in this direction, because otherwise the only option for reliable speech-to-text is uploading every command you give your agent to Google or Baidu. The browser is important, and I don’t support Mozilla’s vacuous projects for social-justice cred, but there are a handful of areas where we need some non-profit to provide a privacy-respecting solution.
Firefox being “heavily advertised (or astroturfed)” on social media isn’t something I personally have ever seen in the last decade. (Unless one includes Mastodon as social media, even though its userbase is nowhere near representative of the general public.) And today a substantial number of internet users are mainly using smartphones, and the default browser on that smartphone, and the very idea that one can use a different browser has faded from the culture compared to the early millennium.
Caesar was brutal in Gaul, a mere part of the vast Celtic-speaking world, and his campaign probably impacted a decent amount of Proto-Basque or Para-Basque speakers as well. Many historians and linguists prefer to see “Celtic” as a linguistic distinction only and therefore are reluctant to speak of “the Celtic people”. If you ever see anyone online write of “Celtic genocide”, you can be pretty sure that the person has little formal training in this field and is going off of low-quality pop-sci publications or pure internet amateurism.
Both me and the other poster in this thread have posted links on the overlap between Rusyn and Ukranian identities in Eastern Slovakia. The Magyar identity is centered around the Hungarian language and Roman Catholicism or Protestantism, while any history of the Rusyn people will emphasize how they are East Slavic-speaking Greek Catholics, so why you feel that the Magyars are relevant here is beyond me. Some of the Rusyn-speaking world was under Austrian administration in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, so they weren’t even under Hungarians politically.
I have been using Sway and Firefox for the last three years at least, and have never experienced crashes. Sway and Firefox as packaged by Debian Stable. I really wish people on HN threads complaining about Firefox bugs clearly stated 1) their environment, and 2) who packaged the Firefox, because those are what could make all the difference.
Which villages does your family descend from specifically? Although it wouldn’t be surprising if a person of Rusyn descent has never heard of this, since one of the most frequent remarks in histories of the Rusyn people is that the identity has sometimes flourished more in the diaspora than in situ.
My experience is from mid 2019 in communities around Medzilaborce where I was collecting microtoponymic data. I was obviously inclined to think of this minority East Slavic material as Rusyn, but my informants insisted that it was “Ukrainian”. Considering that these communities have produced figures who went on to be famous in wider “Ukrainian” movements, it is no surprise that the two ethnonyms have competed in that region.
EDIT: So I went searching to read more about this using "Čertižné" (one of the supposedly “Ukrainian” villages) as a search term. In this essay[0] where a writer of Čertižné descent is mostly busy criticizing Timothy Snyder, he briefly sketches the phenomenon I witnessed:
"The end of WW2 saw the annexation of Subcarpathian Rus’, renamed Transcarpathia, into the USSR. To legitimize seizure of this territory, Stalin brought the debate over the ethnic identity to a close and deemed all Rusyns Ukrainian. Rusyn became a bourgeoise term placed outside of law and all those who identified as such were now forcefully Ukrainianized. Some Rusyns in Czechoslovakia, given the choice of complete assimilation or at least a partial preservation of their culture, accepted the Ukrainian label. For example, the current director of the Rusyn Museum in Prešov, Ľuba Kráľová, identified as a Ukrainian during the communist regime even though she doesn’t speak Ukrainian. Other Rusyns felt closer to the Slovak ethnic identity than to the Ukrainian one."
The October Revolution didn’t involve the majority of the population (workers). The Bolsheviks had strong support from railroad workers and the army specifically, and with key infrastructure captured they were able to eventually win the day, albeit after a famous civil war with working-class people fighting on both sides. Many successful revolutions throughout history were won by minority groups.
The October Revolution also wasn’t Russia’s first revolution that year. The tsar had already been ousted in the February Revolution, and considering that Russia had already begun to industrialize significantly in the final years of tsarist rule, it is certainly likely that Russia would have enjoyed rising prosperity even if Lenin had not returned from exile and made his coup.
Again, what you say is true, but irrelevant in the context of this discussion thread. You look like you are searching for reasons to get upset, and you ought to calm down, take a deep breath, and consider that some of your interlocutors here are not your enemies.
You copy/pasted the same text in the reply to me as you did to another user in this thread. Please don’t do this, it is considered poor form on HN.
If there are entire neighborhoods in Bucharest and Brasov, then name them. I suspect that this is complete hyperbole, because when I think of the worst and most shunned neighbourhood in Cluj – Pata Rât where the Roma population was gathered to dwell on a rubbish dump – it isn’t a dangerous, no-go area by USA or South American standards at all. I and fellow cyclists have often passed through Pata Rât at night when returning from cycling trips in the surrounding mountains, felt no danger when stopping to chat with some kids in the street curious about the bike, and the real danger is merely the fumes of burning plastic. Quite a few tourists and Erasmus students also go to get a look at that neighbourbood.
Is the 3-month thing actually enforced in Norway on those who do not cause a nuisance or seek benefits? Not only is it rarely enforced in EU countries, but I vaguely recall hearing that there have been court judgements in some country or another that EU/EEA citizens who overstay there cannot be forced to leave.
In this particular case, article describes a style passed down through the women in the family. If you spend all day at home, you have time for things like that, and the Indian Subcontinent continues to have a substantial percentage of women who remain in the home. However, as women eventually join the workforce it might be inevitable that this and other such traditions fade.
Not necessarily. Impressive stone buildings in the Western Balkans were often built by people who were quite poor, except for what livestock they held. It helped that society was clan-based, so resources were pooled, and when these families had to build a house in a region of vendetta and invasion, for protection they chose stone that has held up well over time.
An interesting parallel might be those old Amish houses in the US built well through communal effort, even though the families might have been cash-poor.
While what you say is true, it is irrelevant in the context of the discussion here about the popular misunderstanding of pierogi ruskie. This confusion is due to multiple factors than just “Russia stole”, including that the Ukrainian-language literary canon is centered around “Ukrainian” as the ethnonym, instead of making any attempt to preserve or revive the ethnonym “Rus”. While some Rusyns did maintain the ethnonym, other Rusyn speakers have preferred to identify with another ethnonym instead. If East Slavs other than Russians and Belarussians did not stand up for the ethnonym en masse, no surprise that peoples elsewhere no longer have the ability to distinguish.
I have cycled Africa extensively and I would agree for most cities on the continent. Africa is very safe in spite of dumb stereotypes, even when one is entering cities through the sprawling impoverished neighborhoods, and locals don't warn a visitor against anything. But Nairobi and South African cities have a mugging problem that all local people showed great concern about, and sometimes "dodgy area" is a central district of the city.
If you write, “In fact the only cities I’ve been to where I felt like I needed to really have my guard up and head on a swivel were US cities”, I wonder if you have ever been to, say, Argentina (Buenos Aires, Córdoba, Rosario), South Africa (Johannesburg, Durban, Cape Town), Peru (Lima), or Kenya (Nairobi). There it is one’s local contacts who encourage one to be vigilant and plan routes across the city carefully. The US has wacky urban safety issues, but it is just one member of a whole set of countries with urban safety issues.
Indeed. “Rus” is an ethnonym, of famously Scandinavian origin, used across the entire East Slavic area and was never something limited to people in now-Ukraine that people in now-Russia could “steal”. The Uralic- and Turkic-speaking peoples of the Middle Volga, for example, already called the neighboring Slavic-speaking populations “Rus” in the medieval era.
Even the Ukrainian state’s non-recognition of the Rusyn people isn’t so simple: in Slovakia you can meet minority East Slavic speakers who insist that what they speak is “Ukrainian” (when it’s obviously not), and that “Rusyn” is a weird label outsiders keep trying to pin on them.