News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

Snild

Well, how's his wife holding up? ...by Verisign, you say?
Re:How does IKEA come up with names for its products? on Tuesday August 18, 2026 @03:09PM (#49351011)
The Swedish version of the page just says "siffror" (literally "digits", but colloquially "numbers") once.

I'm not aware of any relevant Swedish expression that would repeat the same word like that. Maybe something like "siffror och tal", where both words could be translated as "numbers" by someone not paying attention to the resulting sentence. :)

Re:How does IKEA come up with names for its products? on Tuesday August 18, 2026 @03:01PM (#49350888)
Those are the letters we have that are distinct from English. Not exotic to us, but yeah, "weird letters" is probably considered part of the international brand now.

By the way, we consider them unique letters, not A and O with diacritics. The Swedish alphabet goes …XYZÅÄÖ.

Oh, and I just learned that we only officially added W in 2006. Before that, it was considered a variant of V. We still pronounce them the same, which is why many swedes will mix them up when speaking English. Mostly in the W->V direction, but I've heard the opposite happen too.

Re:Do We Need Billionaires? on Friday June 05, 2026 @02:08PM (#48416136)
I hadn't thought about this until I recently saw it (lazily) translated to Swedish literally, where it would traditionally be written more akin to "net fortune".

And yeah, "worth" feels super weird.

Re:If I Could Make My Own GitHub on Friday May 01, 2026 @02:28PM (#47978253)
Not to mention the huge amount of people who think git == github.
I've never had a problem like that. People don't bother looking it up -- probably because your socioeconomic class is apparent anyway from e.g. the area you live in. AFAIK, the only ones who have ever looked mine up are banks, when I was applying for mortgages.
What a hassle!

Here in Sweden, your tax filings are public information; companies can just ask the government what you made last year. I have no idea if they actually do, though, and the data will be somewhat obfuscated if you have extra income on the side.

Re:Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux on Thursday January 29, 2026 @12:39AM (#46806235)
I bought it in late 2013, so 12 years from purchase.

Intel lists the launch date of the CPU (Atom D2500) as Q3'11, making it 14 years old when OpenSUSE Leap 16 was released.

It looks like Intel was releasing Atom CPUs without SSE4.1/4.2 up until 2013, e.g. Atom Z2420.

Re:Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux on Wednesday January 28, 2026 @02:31PM (#46800388)
> “you can’t install unless you upgrade your CPU”

To be fair, I recently had to switch distros for my little Atom-based server because of a similar deal:

https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:X86-64-Architecture-Levels#...

Granted, I only had to convert to Tumbleweed (not trivial, but easier than reinstalling), and the open source nature means there will always be lots of other alternatives, too.

Re:no strpy either on Tuesday December 30, 2025 @10:28AM (#46434234)
Ah.
Re:no strpy either on Tuesday December 30, 2025 @09:08AM (#46433450)
I don't see a problem with that, but for the record, the title on the site is lower-case for me (both browser tab title, and the header when in reader mode).
Re:Text Rendering Hates You on Sunday December 28, 2025 @05:30AM (#46410050)
Keep Swedish out of this, you dirty Danes!

Edit: Checked out your profile, correcting myself: "you silly north-Danes!"

Re:Rob Pike Goes Nuclear over GenAI on Friday December 26, 2025 @09:56AM (#46392598)
It exists, hence e.g. AGPL.

But for most open source licenses, that example would be within bounds. The grandparent comment objected to not respecting the license.

Sounds kind of like https://asciinema.org/ (which I've never used, but it seems cool).
Re:Debian's Git Transition on Tuesday December 23, 2025 @10:09AM (#46365865)
It is, except after rebasing.
Re:Debian's Git Transition on Tuesday December 23, 2025 @03:53AM (#46363624)
But that Commit-Id footer has no functional effect. I don't see how it would help me if I have a clone of the repo, and my upstream (in this case, the debian maintainer) rebases.

> Which you won't.

Why not? Doesn't it make sense to be able to track the history of what patches have been applied for a debian package?

Re:Debian's Git Transition on Tuesday December 23, 2025 @02:21AM (#46363169)
Rebasing would mean there's no continuous versioning of the "patches on top", which might be undesirable. Also, the history rewriting might make cooperation difficult.

Merges would avoid those problems, but are harder to do if there are lots of conflicts, as you can't fix conflicts patch by patch.

Perhaps a workflow based on merges-of-rebases or rebase-and-overwrite-merge would work, but I don't think it's fair to say "oh just rebase".

Re:Jimmy Lai Is a Martyr for Freedom on Monday December 22, 2025 @01:45PM (#46357276)
Not necessarily:

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/martyr

> a person who suffers very much or is killed because of their religious or political beliefs, and is often admired because of it

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/martyr

> 2: a person who sacrifices something of great value and especially life itself for the sake of principle

Sounds interesting. Tell me more?
Re:The disguised return of EU Chat Control on Saturday November 15, 2025 @09:54AM (#45937821)
We have that in Sweden and Finland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_public_access_to_...

The principle says that information is non-confidential by default, rather than the other way around.

We can request almost any information held by government agencies, including copies of communication like email and documents.

One thing that has surprised European acquaintances is the fact that this includes government-held info about individuals, e.g. address and tax returns.

A terminal maximized on my screen says:

    ~$ echo $((2 * LINES * COLUMNS)) triangles
    34272 triangles
That's nothing for a modern GPU. For example, this benchmark[1] says to expect on the order of 10-800 million tri/s. At the low end of that, you'd have a frame time of 3.427ms -- 292 fps.

The original Playstation could do 180 000 textured polygons per second[2], so it could've managed ~5 fps. Of course, you wouldn't render that many chars at its available output resolutions anyway. :)

[1] https://github.com/ctsilva/triangle-rendering-benchmarks#:~:... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_technical_specific...

Re:Carmack on Operating Systems (1997) on Friday October 24, 2025 @11:19PM (#45701133)
My favorite is his email on inlining code: https://cbarrete.com/carmack.html
Small code is easier to review, so projects with strict security requirements might be one?

Also, license compliance is very easy (no notice required).

Re:Stepping Down as Libxml2 Maintainer on Thursday September 18, 2025 @05:30AM (#45287522)
Expat is suffering from similar problems: https://github.com/libexpat/libexpat/blob/7643f96bd5b9f5d3b2...

> <blink>Expat is UNDERSTAFFED and WITHOUT FUNDING.</blink> > The following topics need additional skilled C developers to progress > in a timely manner or at all (loosely ordered by descending priority):

Re:Stepping Down as Libxml2 Maintainer on Thursday September 18, 2025 @01:31AM (#45285809)
> we should have a software building code

This made my brain go "Oh no, not this again. Open source projects don't owe you..." etc etc.

> or you can't use it commercially or for safety-critical things

Oh. Yeah, okay, absolutely! For safety-critical, I would like to think the responsibility already lies with the integrator/seller, but making it explicitly so can't hurt.

Some do. Most don't.

Remember, the deal includes universal health care, tuition-free university, government-backed sick pay, five or six weeks of paid vacation, and more.

I'm from Sweden, which has a similar system. I could not have afforded to attend university in the US system. Here, I could -- with my (government low-interest) student loans being spent only on my living expenses, not tuition. As a result, Sweden has an extra engineer we otherwise wouldn't have, with a good salary contributing to the tax base.

That seems like the opposite of dystopian to me.

Re:Beyond Meat Fights for Survival on Sunday July 20, 2025 @01:58AM (#44622359)
"UPF"?
I currently use borg, and have never heard of Duplicati. What made you switch?
Re:The metre originated in the French Revolution on Friday May 23, 2025 @01:32PM (#44074758)
It seems the Canadian site gives both sets of units: https://www.ikea.com/ca/en/p/brimnes-cabinet-with-doors-whit...

I guess they thought the mere sight of metric would offend the Americans. :)

Maybe the product ranges between the countries is close enough that the Canadian site is an alternative?

Older »