kutakbash

Lots of them were banished from the island by Russian Empire.

You either use this as a very politically loaded term for Stalinist Soviet Union (which is a problem with your post on its own right), or you are wrong.

- But russians usually don't remember Dagestan(Russia) or the Chechen Republic(Russia) where the number of russians is less than 5%. Or Belgium with german speaking people .

Russia and Belgium, unlike Ukraine, aren't nation states. Russia is a multi-ethnic country, which is stated in its constitution.

Ukrainian regions were a part of the Russian Empire for quite a long time. Why would they not join Russia?

Why should they?

- Crimea is an autonomy, but even now russians stimulated by pro-Russia politicians say that they want Ukraine to be a federation. Do they know what is the difference between autonomy and federation?

So some Russians say one thing, other Russians say different things, so what? I tell you that there is a great deal of difference between unitary state with some autonomies and federation (which is obvious really, think Spain and USA).

If you look at the Russian Imperial Census of 1897 you will see that people living in the eastern part of modern Ukraine were 80-90% ukrainian speaking. And now if you go to the country area of eastern regions you will see lots of ukrainian speaking people.

How is the census of 1897 related? You wouldn't say parts of Far East and Siberia, which were predominantly Ukrainian-speaking then should be parts of Ukraine now?

There were 3 man-made famine in Ukrainian SSR conducted by Soviet regime and lots of repressions killed more ukrainians than ukrainians died during the 2 World War.

Oh, now 3 man-made famines specifically designed to destroy Ukrainian nation, great. What do you think of people of Lower Volga, North Caucasus and Siberia who perished of famine of 1932-1933? I guess you prefer not to notice their existence because they don't serve your political goals of the day.

And now guess what Stalin does? He invites russians to the industrial western part of Ukraine. This region required a work force at that time.

Yeah, I guess it's also Stalin (a Georgian btw) who put all the iron ore and coal there, just to extinguish all the Ukrainians so when Ukraine becomes independent there are less Ukrainian-speaking people there? What a prophet, wasn't he? Or should he just ignore industrial potential of Eastern Ukraine whatsoever?

This is a really telling example of Russia-directed scare-mongering, I feel uneasy about it, as a Russian.

countries crying for help

That's a huge stretch. The 'cry for help' isn't unanimous by very far.

starts to eat more money for social subsidies than it produces

Crimea has been always unprofitable even with its lucrative tourism industry

Not a marker of anything, there are only a few oblasts in Ukraine that are profitable (taxes - government spending), until very recently none of them were in the Western part of the country. This may be not the best way to judge contribution of different parts of the country into the economy. If you give a look at exports structure (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/13/Ukraine_E...), you can clearly see that it is dominated by products of exclusively Eastern industries.

Do you guys consider federalisation as an option? Ukraine seems like a sufficiently big and diverse country for that. It sure as hell won't resolve the problem of which trade block to join though.

Probably no unrelated people at all were executed or imprisoned in 1917 or 1905. Even for the most frantic career revolutionaries it wasn't uncommon to flee from the deportation and live illegally in Russia or to emigrate.

I don't think what you are describing is in any way specific to Russian Revolution and Civil War. If reasoning like that is justified, you can 'prove' the same thing about any society that lived through a social calamity.

That's so very simplistic though. You by no means kept your head low in 1905, and 1917 since those were years of revolutions, the later two pretty successful, which brought freedoms unmatched in that time. In what other army was an order compared to Order #1 of 1917 in act? What other nation decriminalized homosexuality in 1917? There were select few to allow women to vote as early as 1917 and none at all to admit women to general workforce as equals. In what other nation had organs directly elected by workers and soldiers (eg peasants) ruled the country at least for one day? Of course it was all very short-lived (not without involvement of armies of certain 'freedom loving' nations), but this one event so utterly debunks this theory of 'keeping your head low'. And even then, 'in 1800's and earlier' were very different times, when people 'kept their head low' pretty much anywhere in the world.

I am talking about people who immigrated as adults. The way he talks about his experience in Russia cues that he belongs to that group. His post may be too harsh, but it is certainly not in the same league with truly ignorant knee-jerk comments about gulag.

"serious people are the rulers, because if you do stupid crazy things you are dead" over thousands of years that forge a culture.

This is the pinnacle of all the BS political mythology in this thread. Stalin and his best friend Rasputin would so totally impale you for smiling.

What's your point? Russians don't smile because they are chimps, but Lithuanians don't smile because they are true to themselves and others? Ok.

That's pretty interesting and bears some ramifications. Like the fact that Americans might have been not a smiling bunch before dentistry became widely accessible (this might have happened not too long ago). Or that before advent of cariogenic foodstuffs (eg in Middle Ages and antiquity) people tended to smile more. I wonder if it is any true.

You mean people in America don't feel this way about street preachers? Even the kind that walks around with a sign and shouts REPENT! and all?

I could give a $100 bill to a cashier at the grocery store without getting in trouble.

You mean you literally handed her a 100 dollar bill? That's not her fault, you should exchange your money. Imagine someone trying to pay with hrivnas in 7-11.

So somehow before 1930s people trusted one another better? I believe it seriously lacks evidence. What about people in Western Europe who don't smile all that much really?

Is this some knee-jerk reaction or something? Russia-gulag and all? For a foreigner it is permissible, not so much for a Russian. I think we need to overgrow this if nice things are to be had.

To be frank, he does sound like a Russian-American. They are often pretty dismissive of their heritage. Rightfully so, judging by your comment.

they're more utilities for managing multiple framework instances. Still, you're likely to find tutorials that use them as a de facto standard, which only adds to noob confusion.

That sounds more like a problem of php. Tools like composer should be more widespread and when they are switching to virtualenv probably isn't going to be so much of a hassle.

I'd say this whole regional distinctions thing is utterly mythologized and politically motivated. It's more like branding than anything tangible. No one wants to be associated with the less well off parts of the world and some want to add flair of objectivity to their purely political claims. Like current Russian and Kazakhstani govts pushing all things 'Euroasian', or German strategists inventing Mitteleuropa back then.

I guess typical solution is to come up with a new word with desired meaning. This way 'programmers' became 'developers' and 'system administrators' are becoming 'dev ops'.

Ha ha good one. Being pedantic is a curse, yes.

I guess it would also ruin compatibility with previous polls. Sigh.

Southern North America (eg. Mexico)

Northern part of South America

Souther part of South America

Looks needlessly fragmented and imprecise. What is 'Southern part of South America'? Cono Sur? Then Brazilians from Minas Gerais and Porto Alegre are in different groups? Was that the intention? Why 'Southern North America' and not Central America? Where does Caribbean belong? Middle Asia (say, Kazakhstan)? Is Spain Western Europe or Southern Europe? Is Czech Republic Eastern Europe or Western Europe (since you don't offer 'Central Europe' as an option and some Czechs may be unhappy with identifying as Eastern Europeans)? Is Estonia in Eastern Europe? It damn well is in Eastern Europe, but some Estonians identify Estonia as Scandinavian.

Next time you guys should use some well established scheme such as this one http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_geoscheme and just link to it in the post so no one is confused.

Почему? Все просто: ты зарабатываешь в Москве 50 тысяч рублей и снимаешь квартиру за 30. Так зачем там жить, когда в родном городе ты сможешь зарабатывать столько же, только жизнь будет спокойнее?

Сразу видно москвича. Проблема с регионами не в том, что там доходы ниже (хотя они объективно ниже), а в том, что в регионах нету множества работ. Это важно, если ты не программер / дизайнер на удаленке и не водитель троллейбуса. Не в любом российском милионнике можно найти софтверную контору, которая занимается чем-то кроме аутсорса. В российских стотысячниках в этой области нет вообще ничего, кроме сопровождения одинесок и сборки визиток на джумле.

Voting system is a great cleaning mechanism (akin to current in a pond), something that keeps mediocre submissions and poor comments out of sight. If this feature is rationed (eg flow of the current is weakened), comments and posts ought to be rationed as well, otherwise HN gets overwhelmed with poor input.

Is that, like, Russia Today channel on Hacker News?

Охуительная рационализация.

That 'cartographic' parallax is seriously cool. They even increase scale indicator accordingly.

Well, that's correct; Nevertheless, I think people should have been reminded that Gini coefficient exists someplace ITT.

So… bottled water is superior? I thought it's essentially filtered tap water…

You are not supposed to drink water off the tap (well, actually you can, if you don't value your kidneys in the long run), you are supposed to filter it through $40 device or boil it, then you can drink it. That's something that everyone does, I don't see this problem, like, at all. I dunno why restaurants charge for water, maybe because they can.

The irony of this is that lack of 'proper processes' occurred because the new government had to do this ASAP, before the 'red managers' (actual management of properties in question), backed by labour collectives, assume control over the means of production in the country and reverse the 'democratization', privatization and whatever new shiny things reformists intended to do.

The problem with this comparison is that choice of size of the wealthiest share of population (top 110, top 400, top one family, top 20%) greatly influences the outcome of comparison. Why won't we all just refer to good old Gini coefficient and call it a day.

That's a bit dodgy of you. Presumption of innocence is obviously used colloquially here.

About Politkovskaya and Litvinenko:

The version about Politkovskaya murder I find the most plausible is that her murder is linked with Putin's ally and appointed president of Chechnya Kadyrov. Before her death she was working on human rights violations in Chechnya, including torture. In fact, you can still find her last interview about it on Novaya Gazeta (newspaper she worked for) website, dated 9th October of 2006. What Russian government did here is covering Kadyrov and finding scapegoats who are supposed to represent Chechen 'terrorists' (opposed to Kadyrov and Russian govt). Torture committed by federal and local pro-Russian forces is still a reality in North Caucasus, just about a year ago there was a story on it in 170 thousands readers strong Russian Reporter Magazine. Western press didn't seem to give due attention to the cause Politkovskaya died for, instead preferring, as usual, to focus on apparently more important issues such as gay people forbidden to proclaim their sexuality in public. At least no one has died over that story yet.

Litvinenko case is a weird one. So he is some sort of whistleblower who apparently disclosed Putin's inside job and had to die due to Polonium poisoning. The story goes like this: Litvinenko has disclosed Putin's inside job (which most likely isn't an inside job, basically it's a Russian equivalent of 9/11-as-an-inside-job story), so FSB had to make him painfully die almost in a Sicilian mafia fashion. I am not a Western layman so I don't automatically deem crazy everyone who happened to be in power and at the same time to the East from certain meridian. I see why Sicilian mafia would kill somebody after the fact: it doesn't care much about publicity and it doesn't want to be betrayed once again. But I don't see why would Putin do that, he deeply cares about his perception in the West (as long as it doesn't meddle with his authoritative pretensions and support of his electorate) and he doesn't often blow up houses (if at all). Since the word already spread and you could buy a book in Putin-blows-up-houses genre in any Russian kiosk that sells cigarettes, yellow rags and pulp fiction, killing the man responsible for that in such a bizarre fashion (poisoning someone with radioactive materiel is in the same basket with feeding someone to their pet bear, between two shots of vodka, saying 'Na zdorovje, tovarishchi') is acknowledgement of guilt. Tldr if Putin did kill Litvinenko, it was the most stupid thing he did in his entire career.