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This is so much fun. Thanks!


Last month Jobbik rallied against the World Jewish Congress in Budapest, protesting "against what it said was a Jewish attempt to buy up Hungary".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-22413301

They frame themselves as fascist and anti-semite.


They do, actually, because it wins them votes. But the issues with corporatism that the parent is citing are very real ones; Hungarian politicians and business leaders alike (anyone who sees an opportunity to enrich themselves at the expense of the nation) have been very quick to sell parts of Hungary to anybody in Europe. There is one remaining grocery chain that is Hungarian. The malls are Austrian. The phone company is German. The gas company is French.

Land ownership is being concentrated in the hands of a very few, very rich individuals - partly simply because the average salary here is about $500 a month, and partly because of policy explicitly crafted to this end. (For example, the government now requires agricultural certification for you to work your own land. The only option is often to sell.)

All this works to the benefit of the richer European countries, so they're cool with it. Jobbik is one of the very few voices in the Hungarian political scene that questions any of this at all - so it's not just out of the goodness of European media's hearts that they report on the most lurid details of their admittedly unfortunate rhetoric.

Do you really think Germany is worried about antisemitism? Did you realize that Angela Merkel actually "joked" (scare quotes intentional) that the Hungarian situation wasn't yet dire enough to require Germany to come in here with tanks? Because you can bet that Hungarians do, in fact, remember the last such incident - and some of my wife's own family died in the concentration camps.

And no, my wife's family never left Hungary, and yeah, they're Jewish. She didn't even know about it herself until about twenty years ago, but I will say that the synagogue downtown is still there. Nobody burns it down, and they still have services as far as I know. They certainly have lots of papers posted in Hebrew.


So it's the mafia versus the fascists.

Fuck.


No they don't frame themselves as that! Simon Peres said they are buying up Manhattan, Hungary etc...[1]

Now Jobbik is not against the Jews. They are against the fact that they (admitted by them) buying up our country!

If Barack Obama would say the same they would protest against the USA. Would that make them or me an antiUSAic? No!

Wether they are Jews, aliens, englishmen or bushmans or whatever, we don't like other people buying up our country! That's all. It's not a race issue.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JL4Cu-K17vE


Hi, I'm an Israeli Jew.

The entire latter half of your "evidence" video is completely mistranslated. I would have to say deliberately.

Shimon Peres is talking about how amazing it is that Israel has achieved developed-country status.

Pashut ein lanu maspik shuk mekomi gadol. That doesn't mean anything about our talents or dynamism. It literally reads: "We simply don't have enough of a large local market." He's talking about Israeli exports.

The sentence "Anachnu konim et Manhattan, et ...." (literally: We are buying Manhattan, ....) does occur early in the video, but without a whole lot of additional context it's meaningless. He's using a simple, conversational mode of Hebrew there, in which it could mean "We're conspiring to purchase all the buildings in these countries with our Joo Moniez", but it much more likely means, "Israelis can now buy apartments in these locations."

So basically, your far-right is playing the Jooz Card to pacify your proper rage against the consequences of neoliberal economic policies in Hungary.

I'm descended from a once-somewhat-prominent Hungarian Jewish family, but if you actually believe this kind of crap, the chance I'm visiting Budapest where my great-grandparents lived any time soon is basically null.


I don't have actual sources (and I don't think they exist) about how widespread antisemitism is in Hungary, but anecdotally it's like one in three. I know way too many who openly hate Jews.

I've heard people talk openly about how there should be another holocaust.

I find it depressing, or even scary that I live in a county with people like this. While I'm not aware of any recent attacks against Jews, so technically you should be safe, but I still can't wholeheartedly recommend you to come here.


Dude, I know Jews here who openly hate Jews. Hungarians talk a lot of bullshit.


As in Hungarian Jews hating Israeli Jews?


As in Hungarian ethnic Jews telling me how sneaky Jews are. It's kind of weird.


The recent history of Hungary is very sad, and we must remember also that it was also a model in education in the past and the best minds, including John von Neumann, came from Hungary. The list on Wikipedia is illustrative: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Hungarians

For a quick overview of the Hungarian history I recommend the film Sunshine (1999): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0145503/


I will also say that John von Neumann was (ethnically) Jewish, and left because of rampant antisemitism among the academic community at the time. Antisemitism is an endemic problem in Hungary, and it would be foolish of me to pretend it wasn't.

For an American, the weirdest thing about Hungarian racism is the fact that they widely discriminate against people who are visually exactly identical to one another. There are many people who don't know they're Jewish here - that Jobbik guy being a case in point (sorry, I don't remember his name, but it was pretty funny).

I just heard a joke the other day. There are three women at a hospital giving birth on the same day - a Magyar, a Roma, and a African woman. Unfortunately, all the paperwork is misplaced, and nobody is sure which baby is which. So the Magyar woman grabs the black baby and screams, "I'm keeping this one until we can figure out which of the other ones is a gypsy!"

This was told to me by a Hungarian - an older guy who always says hi when we walk the dog past his workshop - laughing about the racist element who discriminates based on nothing. Food for thought.


I did not see that particular movie yet but the movies are generally not a good source of information.


Yes, don't expect "Hungary for Dummies" and the movie traverses many generations.

Just curious: how is the education level of computer science in Hungary now?


I would imagine it's still very good, at least on the theoretical side.

Hungary has perhaps the strongest mathematical tradition of any country, particularly in graph theory and other combinatorial math.


I am not sure, that's why I am asking.

On TopCoder Hungary is ranked #39. On the ACM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACM_International_Collegiate_P... they are not in the top.

On IMO http://www.imo-official.org/results.aspx the numbers are also not good.


Remember that the population of Hungary is about 1/30th of that of the United States. Correct for population size and you may get more interesting statistics.

You would not believe how excellent math education is here, and how important education is in the culture in general. Very stark difference from the United States.


The theoretical foundations for math and CS is very strong, however, most newgrads has no real world experience neither particularly useful practical skills.


Don't worry, you're safe in Budapest. What's going on with Jobbik is pretty clearly the rich fanning the flames of division in order to cement control of the economy.

Although I suppose that's what most antisemitism always is, when you boil it down. But (for example) Hit Gyülekezet is a large, powerful, pro-Israel church here.


Let's put it this way - you're more likely to encounter overt antisemitism in Chicago than in Budapest.


I am also descended partly from a Hungarian Jewish family.

I think Shimon Peres is not talking about "Israelis can now buy apartments in these locations" scenario, Jewish people can do that for like decades, that would have no frigging information content. So why should I believe that?


I think Shimon Peres is not talking about "Israelis can now buy apartments in these locations" scenario, Jewish people can do that for like decades,

It was allowed for decades, yes, but it's only in the past decade or so that Israel has achieved the wealth of a First World country. It used to be that an Israeli would need a foreign, First World source of income to buy property outside Israel. Hell, it sometimes used to be (and still is, in the premier locations of Israel!) that an Israeli would need an exogenous income source (family savings or illicit money or something) to afford property in Israel!

But the thing is, given only 40 seconds of footage clipped out and mistranslated by a far-right nutter, I can't tell you for crap what Peres actually meant. I can, however, assure you that neither Jews nor Israelis own whole cities.


Downvote him all you want, but foreigners buying up the country really is a serious problem here. It's very unfortunate that the only politically coherent party questioning it happens to be antisemitic, but it's still a real issue.

And friendly_chap? I hate to break this to you, but we have bought your country. Who do you think owns Gyõri Keksz now? Wholly owned subsidiary of Kraft Foods - I just noticed that label last week. Sorry, man. I've stopped buying Gyõri Keksz in protest, but I don't think it's going to help.

Also, they're made in Slovakia now. I'm sure they work cheaper.


> There is also an ongoing international propaganda about how "antisemitic" are we.

> Simon Peres said they are buying up Manhattan, Hungary etc.

Umm ...


So if I dare to repeat a possibly threatening sentence said by a Jewish person I am instantly antisemitic? Give me a break!


The difference is that if you were talking about an US president, you wouldn't refer to him as "a Christian person".


To be fair to friendly_chap, I don't think there's anything wrong with saying

"So if I dare to repeat a possibly threatening sentence said by a Jewish person I am instantly antisemitic?"

or

"So if I dare to repeat a possibly threatening sentence said by a Christian person I am instantly anti-Christian?"


Do please recall that friendly_chap is not a native English speaker.


Neither am I. But I don't think that would have any effect in this matter.


Also, it's widely known that the US president is a Muslim.


Are you being sarcastic? In any case, I said an US president; I wasn't referring to the current one.


Because in general, delegation tends to lead to object schizophrenia. Specifically, SimpleDelegator will leak the original delegatee object when a delegated method returns `self`.

     s = "foo"
     
     d = SimpleDelegator.new s

     s2 = d << "bar"

     s2.object_id == s # true
I think SimpleDelegator is really neat but totally dangerous. Doesn't this ring alarm bells with you?

  # delegate.rb L117
  #
  # Returns true if two objects are considered of equal value.
  #
  def ==(obj)
    return true if obj.equal?(self)
    self.__getobj__ == obj
  end


We use StatsD and Graphite a ton at lonelyplanet.com: http://bit.ly/lp-perf-and-metrics


Haha. I'd love someone to release a greasemonkey/userscript for that status page to make degraded service more obvious.


Brings back happy memories of hacking on the BBC Micro.

    > MODE 7
    > PRINT CHR$(136);"GOODBYE CEEFAX!"


veewee is being merged into vagrant.


I wasn't aware of this. Have you seen anything that supports it?


I recommend Elise Huard's recent talk on Ruby GC: http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/home/ruby-bin-men

(Also, I'd love to see the Hungarian Folk Dance interpretation of different GC approaches http://t.co/l8ADbEQR)


Lovely. We do something very similar in front of EC2 clusters with http://openresty.org/


In the meantime, you can listen to every track from every John Peel Festive 50 at http://peelplayer.com

Disclaimer: it's a site I hacked together in a few hours for John Peel day last year


That's awesome, thank you. I suspect this will waste a lot of my time.

What does the site actually do? Did you have to find all the tracks manually on Youtube? Were they all findable? What happens if they disappear?


Cheers! Really enjoyed making it!

I compiled a JSON index of all the tracks from various sources. The site loads the index and calls the YouTube API to find the best match video. Simples! I manually blacklisted and whitelisted some video ids as reports of missing/broken tracks came in last year, but it's pretty robust as videos come and go.


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