Hacker News: Sharparam

New comment by Sharparam in "Put the zip code first"

Sharparam — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 13:41:19 +0000

> and my language being set to English

Absolutely not. Language should never have any merit at all on country selection.

As a Swede that prefers the English language for tech and internet stuff, sites that try to be smart about country selection based on browser language or language selection based on IP location can kindly go die in a fire. An extra hot fire if they don't even let you manually override the automatic "detection".

New comment by Sharparam in "Put the zip code first"

Sharparam — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 13:34:53 +0000

I think the author is spending more effort on this international banner system now than the rest of the site. I got one that seems to be tailor-made for Sweden (mentioning our furniture (IKEA)).

New comment by Sharparam in "I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure"

Sharparam — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 11:11:49 +0000

I use my password manager across multiple devices daily.

Apparently it has not been working without me noticing it?

New comment by Sharparam in "GPT‑5.3‑Codex‑Spark"

Sharparam — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 12:44:35 +0000

This is why space is the only acceptable thousands/grouping separator (a non-breaking space when possible). Avoids any confusion.

New comment by Sharparam in "Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun"

Sharparam — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 11:06:53 +0000

Only mandatory in Eurozone countries, sadly. It won't be until 2027 (July at the latest?) where it will be mandatory for all EU countries.

New comment by Sharparam in "Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun"

Sharparam — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 16:07:35 +0000

> Venmo isn't needed, because bank transfers are free and "real time" as in <60s.

This depends highly on what countries and banks are involved.

If I (as a Swede) want to send money to my german friend, I have to use Revolut or Wise since going through my bank is an enormous hassle and involves higher fees.

New comment by Sharparam in "Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun"

Sharparam — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 16:01:12 +0000

The Eurozone has free instant SEPA transfers*

Non-Euro countries won't be guaranteed to have it until July 2027.

New comment by Sharparam in "Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun"

Sharparam — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 15:57:02 +0000

Caveat that Vipps support in Sweden is severely lacking compared to the other countries where it's the main system in use.

New comment by Sharparam in "Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun"

Sharparam — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 15:48:58 +0000

This is definitely not a thing in most of Europe.

Netherlands' anti-credit card stance is quite unique, perhaps only matched by Germany and their obsession with cash.

New comment by Sharparam in "Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun"

Sharparam — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 15:24:31 +0000

Certainly not the case in Sweden. Although travel insurance is usually included in your home/renters insurance.

New comment by Sharparam in "Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun"

Sharparam — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 14:45:30 +0000

> since they still don't accept Apple Pay/Google Pay. When I go in and make a purchase using my credit or debit card, they'll associate it with my Walmart account

Why wouldn't they be able to do that with at least Google Pay?

I pay with my phone using Google Pay at a Swedish grocery store chain and it's connected to my loyalty account there.

(Since I don't use Apple Pay I don't know if the same works there.)

New comment by Sharparam in "Tell HN: Azure outage"

Sharparam — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 17:06:15 +0000

Only for the Azure Portal, despite Front Door also being down but showing as green on the status page.

New comment by Sharparam in "Tell HN: Azure outage"

Sharparam — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 16:24:51 +0000

The learning modules on https://learn.microsoft.com/ also seem to have a lot of issues properly loading.

New comment by Sharparam in "Nginx introduces native support for ACME protocol"

Sharparam — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 19:03:30 +0000

The comment is strangely worded, I too had to read it over a couple of times to understand what they meant.

New comment by Sharparam in "Material Theme has been pulled from VS Code's marketplace"

Sharparam — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 16:48:20 +0000

It also links to his employer (https://lualtek.io). Maybe someone should let his employer know what their employee is up to :)

New comment by Sharparam in "Bitwarden Authenticator"

Sharparam — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 09:20:51 +0000

TOTP is still the MFA option that is supported by most services.

WebAuthN is of course better, but it's still a minority that supports it.

New comment by Sharparam in "Trick to find commands in the terminal quickly"

Sharparam — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 10:06:43 +0000

FWIW the sync server can be self-hosted.

New comment by Sharparam in "DOJ accuses Visa of monopoly that affects price of 'nearly everything’"

Sharparam — Wed, 25 Sep 2024 19:49:25 +0000

Despite it existing for a long time, support for it is far from universal still.

In Sweden there is only a single bank in the entire country that has proper SEPA instant support. Some banks still charge extra for it as well.

My own bank required some coercion before they would let me send money to my European friends (to pay for shared travel expenses).

New comment by Sharparam in "Sublime text started adding a “.s” to new files"

Sharparam — Tue, 24 Sep 2024 11:58:51 +0000

Why would they want to do that?

New comment by Sharparam in "Examples of Great URL Design (2023)"

Sharparam — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 13:45:12 +0000

> They don't copy cleanly if you use nonalphanumeric characters, as in nearly every language other than English.

I haven't noticed this ever being an issue.

At least in Firefox, non-ASCII characters will show as-is in the URL bar, but in the copied URL they will be properly encoded.