demetrius

But lot of people are treated like second class citizens because of their passport in Netherlands (or in America, for that reason). There are a lot of people who get treated worse in their native countries. And her story is nothing out of ordinary.

Sure, it might be hard to get a bank account opened. But on the other hand, she most likely could travel to Netherlands without a visa -- this is very difficult, expensive and time-consuming process for the rest of us. I dare say the paperwork to just to get a work visa for a citizen of most countries in the world is probably greater than her taxes forms (and they also include information about the source of the money, by the way).

Also, where I'm from, lots of young men would love to renounce their nationality just to avoid conscription. We don't have the chance: you need to have another country's citizenship just to renounce yours.

So being in a position when you just can renounce your nationality is a great privilege, and I don't see her acknowledging that.

The whole system with citizenships and visas is severely broken, and she is not the one who is harmed the most. So it's difficult to empathise with someone who has it much easier than we do.

I was supposed to read this at school, because it's a seminal work of Belarusian literature or something, but I somehow managed to avoid it back then. So I've decided to give it a try now. And... I just couldn’t finish it.

It's a book about nobility. And I just can't associate myself with the nobles, with their rules and ideas about life.

E.g. there is a situation when Aleś starts arguing about politics; he says some things that irritate his classmates, and he knows it. Then three classmates find him alone, tell him some things that irritate him. And he starts a fight, because honour or something. And he's supposed to be in the right here.

I just... it's just so different from my worldview. They way they act, the way they think.

____________________

Ohran Pamuk, İstanbul: Memories of a City

I just can't finish this book. It's just... I don't know, I don't feel compelled to continue reading? It's just a collection of memories, with no real incentive to read them.

Also, I find it difficult to empathise with the grief about the ruined empire, because for me, ruined empires are a good thing. So, a large portion of the book's sentiment is lost on me.

In fact, vim doesn’t do the right thing with Cyrillic either (vim binds commands to entered characters, not keys; so when entering Cyrillic you either have to switch layouts when entering commands — or do some ugly hacks), but it’s at least usable. Edit is not, right now.

But by the same logics, Windows is MacOS, Russia is a Saudi Arabia, and Hindi is English. Mostly false, but just true enough to be interesting.

Just like other words, they can unneccessary to convey the message. Just like any other word.

There’s a famous quote by Faina Ranevskaya that it’s better to say the word жопа (asshole, but it sounds ruder in Russian) ten times than the word духовность (immateriality) once. I think this is absolutely true.

To tell the truth, I’ve never found any use for this feature.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/kawa/Quantities.html

Quoting it: "In other words, you're performing string surgery on the serialized representation of a tree structure. Just stop and think how insane that really sounds!"

I think vim's strength is not being modal. Its strength is having less modes than other editors.

[1] https://github.com/v4hn/snotes [2] http://tools.suckless.org/dmenu/

It seems the only use of Objective-C outside Mac world is GNUstep, which seemed too buggy to use (though maybe I’ve missed something?..).

[1] http://wiki.call-cc.org/eggref/4/persistent-hash-map

[2] http://wiki.call-cc.org/man/4/Unit%20library#reader-extensio...

I must say I find most things in this article very strange.

I went to school here in Belarus. I can’t imagine a teacher asking which road should be taken and asking to re-think it. Teacher usually just said what we should do, and never pretended to give them choice when there is no choice. (In fact, I think such behaviour would be considered lying.)

And if we were expected to solve a math problem in a specific way, the way we should use was always stated. (Though I must admit, this applied only to match or exact sciences, much less to literature, and never applied to history, where ‘correct’ answers were always given.) And I can’t imagine that arguing about the mark can make it lower either: in fact, I've resorted to it quite a lot.

    Compiling the source code....
    $/usr/local/bin/fpc /tmp/13642583632841/HelloWorld.p 2>&1
    Error: /usr/local/bin/ppcx64 can't be executed, error message: Failed to execute "/usr/local/bin/ppcx64", error code: -1

If the treshold is set too low, we'll end up with false positives. I.e. we'll think the study shows something when in fact it doesn’t. And this is not something that can be fixed in follow-up papers.

Well, I've managed to get direct links by looking at data-original property in Firebug, so it doesn't look hiding it was a real reason... But why then? Why such a non-accessible script?