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Comment by sschueller | Hacker News Reader

Maybe because the actual name is "Brötli" and "Zöplfi" coming from the Swiss German naming of small breads. Umlauts are usually converted like so: "ö" to "oe" but not always. So there may be confusion as to if it's "brotli" or "broetli".

Then again, this is just some wild speculation. :)

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Actually, they decided the header would be .bro

During a lot of overplayed drama it was decided to rename it to .br instead.

I feel like ".brot" would've been a reasonable compromise compared to ".br". (Though I also still think absolutely nothing was wrong with ".bro".)

That's because you're a man.

I am a man, but I don't think that's why I think it. I'd be perfectly fine with a ".girl" or ".chick" or ".fem" or ".sis" extension, or any similar variation, if it happened to be a valid acronym for some technology.

Unless the issue is that "bro" has some other kind of objectively offensive connotations, which I completely disagree with. Many women (and some men) use "sis" (or, much more rarely, "dudette"), in the exact same way as "bro".

(And for the record, I didn't downvote you.)

There are some common connotations for the type of people who call each other "bro", e.g. the muscle-bound narcissist who still smells like last night's kegger, where he got to feel up three different blackout-drunk girls. Of course, that isn't actually representative of the population of bro-sayers, so it's just as much a bigoted stereotype as anything else is.

I've actually known some stereotypical sorority-ish girls who use "sis" / "sister" in a very parallel way (shallow, narcissistic, petty, immoral). Doesn't somehow invalidate all use of the word. (And obviously not all sororities are like that, hence "stereotypical". Nor are all fraternities.)

You pretty much can't win in that culture. You're a man, so you can't even grasp what it's like to be a woman, but trust us, it's horrible. And if you wouldn't mind if it were "sis", that's because you haven't been oppressed by women.

I understand there are gender issues, but if you have to overcorrect so much that you're changing an abbreviation to avoid the short form of "brother", you've gone wrong.

I am very thankful that my culture doesn't have this gender hostility and easy offense that's prevalent mostly in the US.

Women can't oppress men because men as a group are privileged.

Don't ask me how this works but this is What (intersectional/third-wave) Feminists Actually Think.

.sis is already taken, it is (was?) the package files for Symbian. Basically .apk before Android, if you'd like.

What about .sys files?

Thank god the man utility was created a long time ago, nowadays it would need to be called something else.

You probably have also heard the joke where shells have the "herstory" command.

And "kill" system call is eliminated for obvious reasons; processes can decide themselves whether they do anything when they receive the "euthanise" signal. Plus the biased "mail" delivery is replaced by "gendre".

Tumblr aside, "kill" is a dumb name anyway. It just send signals, and it's default signal isn't kill, it's terminate. And hangup doesn't have anything to do with terminating.

A better name would have been "signal" (as in the verb), avoid a default signal (how often do you actually send TERM?) and to use lowercase for the signal names consistent with other commands.

  > And hangup doesn't have anything to do with terminating.

The default hangup action is termination because people generally don't want interactive processes sticking around after their I/O is gone.

  > how often do you actually send TERM?

Each common termination trigger has its own signal so that programs can distinguish the source and potentially act differently for each — HUP for hangup, INTR for tty, TERM for kill(1).

> The default hangup action is termination because people generally don't want interactive processes sticking around after their I/O is gone.

Sure but 'hangup' is used to reload configs (which may not actually mean terminating the process).

That came later, though. Assuming re-purposing of an existing signal, SIGHUP was a smart choice because it's exactly the one that a daemon (not attached to a terminal) will never ‘legitimately’ see.

I don't know the history of SIGHUP-to-reload (perhaps a good question for TUHS) but I'd guess it originated outside of Bell or Berkeley, who would have simply added a new signal.

What overplayed drama? The discussion happened on Firefox bug 366559, 'bro' was raised in comment 146 and 'br' was proposed/"accepted" by 152. There was of course a lot of complaints/trolling after the decision was made, but the actual rename happened in a small number of comments over the course of a few hours.

[146]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=366559#c146 [152]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=366559#c152

Indeed, although I said it this way to avoid starting another debate – obviously, that failed.

Look, talking about "a lot of overplayed drama" thus introducing your opinion that "a lot of overplayed drama" had taken place is surely NOT the right way to avoid starting another debate - but I'm inclined to believe you already know that...

Overplayed drama because I consider the whole situation to be ridiculous. It does not matter if it’s bro, br, brötli or whatever.

The whole drama around it, and "feminism gone too far" is ridiculous, and, worst of all, everyone claims the other side did far worse stuff than what actually happened.

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