The Swedish Number – Talk with a Random Swede | Hacker News Reader

The Swedish Number – Talk with a Random Swede

theswedishnumber.com

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Carl from Sweden who actually received calls, recollects his experience here - https://medium.com/@carlheath/stories-from-the-swedish-numbe...

Like nearly all other Swedes, you can google 'carl heath' and find a page with his phone number, home address, birthday, and a button 'send him flowers': http://personer.eniro.se/resultat/Carl+Heath

haha yes! I used interflora

Oops, just found out he's a colleague :)

And we can also use google to find stories on ourselves too, in Sweden. Havent seen any flowers yet, though. ;)

Anyone try this yet? I've always wondered what Swedes think about IKEA in America...

Ok, I'm not sure why I was downvoted for a simple question, but thanks HN! Way to encourage open discussion.

I upvoted you on both your comments because of the unfairness of downvotes without explanation. I can find nothing wrong with your comment.

Ditto. I hate when that happens, so upvoted as well

Hopping aboard the Upvote train and dishing out upvotes for you all :D

Welcome to Hacker News! You'll receive stray downvotes sometimes, but usually it gets undone pretty quickly.

Ask a random Swede.

They probably just think it is fair that the joy of furniture assembly is shared with Americans. :)

The offerings in IKEA are a bit larger in Sweden, other things that can be bought* here: Apartments[0]

[0]: http://www.boklok.se/

* Company owned by Ikea and buyers are selected with a lottery system held at an Ikea location

I dated a Swedish woman, and she would go to Ikea whenever she felt homesick. She would sometimes run into other Swedes there.

In her Volvo?

Probably a Saab.

Definitely a Koenigsegg.

I did this when I first moved abroad. First weekend out of Sweden I went to the local IKEA and got stuff.

As a Swede currently living in California who also has visited IKEA in several different countries I can report that the general experience of visiting IKEA is pretty much as stressful and disorienting here as in Sweden. There are some local variations in the product portfolio both due to different standards like in bed sizes and kitchen and cultural differences. You cannot find a cheese slicer in my nearest IKEA and they have icing on their cinnamon buns (almost blasphemy).

To be honest, IKEA is a Swedish company by brand only. The products are sourced from wherever it is cheapest to manufacture right now and the ownership structure is so complex, multinational and tax-avoidance schemy that probably only the head honcho Ingvar Kamprad (IK in IKEA) who until recently resided in Switzerland, knows where the profit ends up.

(edit: got Ingvar Kamprads name wrong first time around)

The Swedes are using cheese slicers too? I always thought the Dutch were the only people in the world to use cheese slicers.

Finn here. How else are you supposed to slice cheese?

Knife i guess or buy factory sliced. Most cheeses in america is a bit to soft to slice with a cheese slicer anyway.

American cheese? Does that relate to real cheese as Pizza Hawaii compares to an actual Italian pizza?

It's flimsy processed orange milk-based goop in thin sheets. Great on burgers and literally nothing else.

Actually, it ruins the burger...

Actually, no u

In my experience, the more popular american cheeses are quite mild and have a low melting temperature to get a good melt and stretch on warm food. I don't find them particularly interesting to just slice and put on a piece of bread. It is often easy enough to find good but expensive imported cheeses.

There's cheese which is made in America which for most intents and purposes is cheese like everywhere else, and then there's "American cheese" which comes in slices or blocks and is "cheese product" and only vaguely resembles the real thing despite being delicious in certain guilty-pleasure situations.

Don't look for American cheese, look for Wisconsin or Vermont cheese. Maybe California in a pinch. Those will be good.

That makes no sense. The geographic source of the cheese is trivila compared to the way it is made. You can get cheap American process ccheese food or you can get expensive classic varieties of cheese from anywhere.

Or Swedish cheese is made hard enough to be used with an osthyvel.

Well, for that there’s a special danish type of cheese slicer that works better with soft cheese.

We use this one for soft cheese:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=danish+cheese+slicer+wire&t=ffab&i...

That’s exactly what I meant! We (my family being German) found it on one of our shopping trips at Bilka Kolding (we sometimes drive up there), and just bought one.

Sooo awesome.

My foodie friends call that a `guitar'.

Cheese wire maybe?

Potato peeler? https://www.cookipedia.co.uk/wiki/images/thumb/5/5c/Peeler.j...

In Switzerland we do cheese shavings like described in the following article (although only for a specific type of cheese, the 'tete de moine' (monk's head). http://itotd.com/articles/217/the-girolle/

For any other hard cheese it's a bit blasphemic.

Yes, but it was invented by a Norwegian. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Bj%C3%B8rklund

Cool, didn't know that and I use his invention literally every day!

And here I was thinking this was a Brazillian invention (they are wildly popular in Brazil, everywhere you go in Brazil, even the middle of nowhere, like Amazon Rainforest, you will find someone that owns one).

That is interesting. I thought that it was mostly and European thing. What kinds of cheese is common in Brazil?

Oh no, they don't use it on cheese...

the most popular cheese, far ahead of anything else, is mozarella... it is not high quality as actual italian ones though (it is way less "fibrous").

then we have Prato (it means "Plate" as in dinner plate... or dinner dish...), that has the exact same recipe as Danbo, but is made with brazillian milk, and seemly tastes very differently (I dunno, since I never ate Danbo).

then we have a purely local invention called Minas, named after the state of Minas Gerais, despite being a São Paulo invention... (go figure...), that one is hard to describe, since it refers to 4 different cheeses (or the same cheese with 4 slightly variations in the process to make them, but with end results drastically different).

Then other italian cheeses are popular here, maybe because the large italian community here, and how much Brazillians also love pizza, so here almost every supermarket offers Provolone, Parmesan and Gorgonzola.

In urban areas you can find frequently "Steppe" cheese, it is a russian cheese it seems, it is expensive (double the price of "Prato") but not much as local clones of french/swiss cheese (Steppe is half of the price of local clones of Emmental, Gruyere, etc...)

cheddar cheese is sold a bit, but most people consider it low quality crap, the biggest seller of cheddar cheese don't even bother in selling actual cheddar, and instead sell a clone that tastes mostly the same, for very little... people still prefer to buy more expensive mozarella instead.

And for the record: The cheese slicers sold at IKEA are horrible, slicing way too thick slices.

Can you not bend them until the angle produces thinner slices?

I have two slicers, a really good one and a bad one both from IKEA. Consistent quality is not really their thing.

I've always had one in England but most people who encounter it have no idea what it's for, so they're not exactly common place.

Danes do too.

Huh. I've had a cheese slicer at home forever (Scottish-American).

It mostly gets used at dinner parties, when we buy nicer cheeses; inexpensive cheese is almost all pre-sliced in the US. Same holds true for my parents.

Most cheese sold in Britain is not sliced, but most people use an ordinary knife for slicing it.

I'd guess grated cheese outsells sliced cheese.

Dude, the Germans love cheese slicers. (Granted, the cheese we slice is mostly Dutch. But still :)

The food seems the most Swedish.

> experience of visiting IKEA is pretty much as stressful and disorienting here as in Sweden

Weird- I visited an IKEA with four friends and it felt much like a theme park. There was a cafeteria and everything.

Granted, our 5th friend--whiskey--was there too.

If you visited there with 4 friends, wouldn't you be the 5th friend?

Is friendship reflexive?

It was four friends and then this guy. The other four hate him.

He was +1 of their 5th friend.

Yes, he's Whiskey.

Whiskey is usually the fifth.

Ingvar Kamprad now moved home to Sweden, probably to spend his last year. All other still apply.

http://www.svd.se/ingvar-kamprad-flyttar-hem

Thanks. I have edited my post :)

It seems most of the profit ends up in the charitable foundation which is now paying a bit out to the needy after some prodding http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/sweden/8772...

"Charitable" foundation. Aka IKEA R&D department and funds bunker.

> You cannot find a cheese slicer in my nearest IKEA

Hmm, they sell them at the one closest to me (in Japan) [Yes I'm a Swede)

Is the aesthetic and design Swedish, or is that mostly a myth as well?

Their main design office is in Sweden and most designers are Swedish. Sometimes they collaborate with 'star' designers and they have been accused of plagiarism quite a few times.

Just some anecdote on Kamprad: Switzerland was also the first country for IKEA to expand into and we now have some of the largest stores. I suspect it had to do with Kamprad's early interest in the country, and possibly because it was a good test market for them. Most Swiss have heard some of stories about him - e.g. him driving an old Volvo, using and washing up plastic dishes and also that he often visited the first Ikea in Switzerland (Spreitenbach) in order to see how things go and optimise the strategy.

For me it has always been impressive how streamlined an Ikea is towards maximising revenue. I'm one of these people who tends to analyse my surroundings constantly for possible optimizations - yet in Ikea I couldn't come up with even one improvement that would make it better for the company. This alone is actually rather refreshing for me, finally a place where I can switch off my brain and just indulge in a bit of consumption!

IKEA is owned by former Nazi and famous tax evader Ingvar Kamprad. IKEA is actually a Dutch non-profit(!) foundation. It's part of a very intricate scheme to minimize the tax burden of the owners. IMHO, Kamprad has been exploiting Sweden's good will abroad (and maybe reputation for quality?) but he doesn't give a whole lot back. They do sell good and cheap furniture though. :)

The main takeaway here being that you can take advantage of the political climate for a century to win the game of life.

He wasn't exactly the only teenager that were swept away by the rather popular national socialistic party at the time before the war. Germany was an important cultural influence and they sort of bootstrapped the economy, etc. There are publicly available lists for anyone that is interested. The researcher Tobias Hübinette seems to be focusing on issues related to Sweden, "whiteness" and race. http://www.tobiashubinette.se/

Regarding the trusts... I think that at the time (1970) and heavily socialist influenced era, it was more or less the only option to secure a privately owned and growing company from the tax man. The taxes were absurd at the time and small privately owned companies were very vulnerably to death-by-tax, especially if the owner died unexpectedly.

When the trusts are set up and the ownership is moved, there is not that much you can do about that actually, and the trusts can control to some degree how much tax the corporations pay as the trusts can charge royalties and set rates to minimize the earnings in the corporations that are "IKEA". Kamprad is probably a board member of all the important trusts, but the trusts are limited by their charter though, so there are limits to the control. It's true that they can't just give money away, at least without a courts ruling.

But still. IKEA have done a lot for the Swedish economy, there is still plenty of production in Sweden (as in Poland, or any cheap place in the world), and a lot of designers and engineers are employed in Sweden.

Swedes, as citiens of a kinda small and inherently insignificant county kinda fetishise any foreign recognition. I think that's why we like IKEA and H&M.

There's an old but good show that discusses the subject of our self-image pretty accurately (dunno if there are any english subtitles available) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4-V8_r0y-o

And yet you're the home of Roxette, Abba, Ace of Base, and more than a few others in my collection...

And Max Martin, the Swedish songwriter behind most of the international superstars of the last decade or two. Liked a song by Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Kelly Clarkson, Pink or Britney Spears? Good chance it was actually a Max Martin song: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Martin

IKEA is much the same the world over.

Sadly, the Swedish food they sell has deteriorated last few years. I can no longer recommend people to buy it.

the horse-meat balls arent what they used to be?

From this Swede's point of view, IKEA is primarily a global distributor of fresh Lingonberry jam. (I hear they also sell furniture.)

(Seriously, I don't get why lingonberries don't get a wider, eh, distribution. It's brilliant in so many things. My favorite is just tossing lingonberry jam into cream-based sauces.)

After moving to Hawaii, I've discovered that IKEA products are largely not appropriate for tropical climates -- all the fiberboard stuff has gotten severe mold infestations.

In CA, I loved going to IKEA to stock up on some swedish foods they have. I was very sad when they stopped carrying the foam cars, now it's mostly IKEA-branded stuff...

Those wonderful things are called Bilar:

http://www.cloetta.se/ahlgrensbilar

"... sold since 1953 and marketed as "the world's most sold car" (which is possibly technically correct, by number of cars)."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GWDqdnE2yk

"Det finns bara ett sätt att stoppa den - i munnen!"

Hej Hej! I spent 4 months (in the dead of winter) consulting in Stockholm Sweden and it has a special place in my heart. I meet some great people... Some from just posting in reddit /stockholm.

Highly recommend visiting, if you can, go during June (end) for midsummer. I was there Dec - March, it was damn cold.

Ahh the new SaaS(Swede as a Service).

SaaB (Swedish as a Business)

This made me laugh so hard I thought an upvote was not enough. We're building a SaaS thing at work and I'll open with this at the daily stand-up tomorrow.

I am from Norway, and decided to call. Ended up talking 30 mins with an extremely nice lady in the south of sweden. 10/10 would recommend - Swedes are awesome

Can't wait to see what /b/ will do with that.

There were actually postings on 4chan's /pol/ about this. Mostly anons asking Swedes what they thought of Muslim refugees raping women in their country (in the rudest way possible) and Swedes politely denying that claim.

Would have been interesting if the anons weren't so hostile; instead it was just aggravating as 4chan always is.

From what I've heard from actual Swedes, any non-leftist opinion (or one that isn't leftist enough) will quickly result in the media turning on you and labeling you as a racist, Islamophobe, etc. It'd make you a social pariah and probably end your career. It's apparently not even kosher to suggest decreasing the number of immigrants coming in each year.

I wonder what their responses to that question would be if they weren't afraid of being identified (by their voice, information they provided on the call, etc.).

Do you read Swedish media? I don't say there haven't been a blind spot regarding immigration, but lately the government ministers have acknowledged the current refugee crisis is a problem.

Anyway, portraying the whole immigration issue only in terms of a rightist / leftist divide isn't very truthful. Moderaterna are not exactly a leftist party.

I'm not Swedish but I'm living in Sweden. This past weekend, my girlfriend, who is Swedish, wanted to participate in this phone number thing. I told her it was a terrible idea and I had to show her /b/ to convince her.

/b/ is actually educational when it comes to showing people the really bad face of the internet.

Shame. other people seem to have had lovely connections with the service, like Karl mentioned in another comment: https://medium.com/@carlheath/stories-from-the-swedish-numbe...

Interesting but not surprising website. I visited Stockholm for the first time recently and I was impressed with the usage of tech to increase everyday efficiencies. Things like: app for the rail station tickets/yellow cabs/buses, electric/hybrid vehicles commonplace, free wifi in abundance...

This was featured on BBC R1 last week - the presenters calling random Swedes via the number looking for a 'Freida'.. it's as bizarre as it sounds.

Did people sign up for this or was it involuntarily and anyone, including those who don't want to be bothered, will get calls?

People sign up. There is also a http://twitter.com/sweden that is also run by citizens who sign up (it rotates every week).

How does that twitter profile switching work technically. Is there actual shadow account support available to Pro Twitter accounts?

"Here you go, the password is bfGeAgwRHU5bwMNd."

Some technical problems don't need technical solutions.

So there is some kind of 2fa that prevents whover has the account that week from changing the password and email?

They don't just give the account to random people. It's always people with already some kind of social media presence, and stealing an account as well known as @Sweden is not something someone like that would just do.

tweetdeck (now owned by twitter) officially supports team access to twitter accounts. So you can add someone to the team account and let them tweet using the handle, and revoke the access a week later easily.

However, because tweetdeck isn't available on mobile devices, most of these rotated accounts end up using password sharing.

Not just citizens! I was fortunate to be asked to tweet as @sweden last year and I've only been living here for a few years.

Cool! A happy mistake to get corrected.

Ireland also does that: https://twitter.com/ireland

It's right on the page:

> WHO ANSWERS WHEN I CALL? Everyone who lives in Sweden is able to register as an ambassador.

We had a similar initiative but with other purpose here in Brussels after the November terrorist attacks on Paris

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/01/09...

Similarly, the @Sweden Twitter account is given to a different random Swede every week.

The abuse of the @Sweden Twitter account is obvious -- just look at the lebanese immigrant Elias Kreidy who wrote “I’m the immigrant fking your daughter while you’re trying to sleep ignoring her moans calling me ‘daddy'”.

Now imagine this guy answering a phone line as an ambassador for the country!

NSFW article about the tweet: http://www.infowars.com/im-the-immigrant-fking-your-daughter...

Got a link to an article by anyone who doesn't think the moon landings are fake or that the US government was behind 9/11 and the Oklahoma City bombing?

I've no idea if that article is factual or not but let's not uncritically link to infowars.net, eh?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Jones_(radio_host)#Religi...

https://mobile.twitter.com/sweden/tweets

Primary source, but I haven't checked what it says.

Don't you think it'd be highly likely that the offending tweets were deleted by the account?

This site seems to be run by a conspiracy theorist [1]. Next time a more reasonable source would probably be in order.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Jones_%28radio_host%29

http://www.friatider.se/jag-ar-invandraren-som-knullar-din-d...

http://curatorsofsweden.com/curator/elias-kreidy/

Use Google Translate. Obviously English sources for Swedish news is hard to find. It is, afaik, not the first the time @sweden account has been used for trolling by douches.

There is an American living in Sweden that is answering calls. He's got some interesting perspectives on life in Sweden. Not sure if he is still taking calls or not.

Nobody has mentioned the language issue yet?

Unfortunately what I've seen implies they talk in English. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But my son has been taking French language class in school and this provides the obvious extension to their idea of "talk to a random French-speaking person" or whatever other language someone wants to learn. Something like that probably already exists anyway. I suppose there would be the predictable issues with most foreign language learners being minors.

In practice, all swedes are bilingual english (yes, including young kids).

I've visited Sweden quite a few times and have travelled around quite a bit. I didn't meet a single person who couldn't speak English to some extent. I didn't meet a single person under about 50 who wasn't completely fluent.

I can't image the US ever doing this.

Imagine it quickly being turned off due to abuse.

I've troubled imagining how you can abuse this though.

"Is your refrigerator running?"

Well yeah, why?

"Is your refrigerator running?"

"Yes."

"Well, you’d better go catch it!"

(Click.)

"Yes it is, are your doors unlocked?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSxP3sUYjU4

Never heard of a prank call?

it says "talk about anything". How could you prank that ?

Men furiously masterbating on the other end of the line might ruin the experience for a few people.

Depends on the people, doesn't it?

Maybe do it at the state level?

If nothing else it would be good to hear the different accents :-)

Do swedes get to opt out of this?

From what I can gather from the FAQ, it's entirely opt-in. Swedes sign up to be cultural ambassadors.

You have to actually opt in, as an ambassador.

It's opt in. In a radio segment the other day they said 6k people have volunteered. Which makes it very much non-random, but still, cute concept.

probably a good thing, you wouldn't want most of the calls to be answered by people very unhappy to be cold-called by some random foreigner...

The fact that they are volunteers doesn't change the fact that it's random, it just changes the set from which the random values are selected.

Reminder: A trumped-up Swedish arrest warrant is the reason that Julian Assange has been trapped for years inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London and denied his right to asylum... all for journalism that made the US government look bad.

Don't travel to Sweden. Don't support the Swedish government in any way. They are cooperating in a large-scale effort to censor the types of things you can read about in the newspaper.

Watch the Swedish Prime Minister answer The Swedish Number.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S087OHdCG8I

I can only praise the idea and wish it to be an initiative that others follow. It sure helps connect people around the globe.

I'm working on an application, submitted to fellowship, that will allow people to confess about something and others will be able to comment on this confession.

This topic makes clear that I need really good, and fast, moderation tools

The prime minister answering the call :)

http://youtu.be/S087OHdCG8I

Skype has something similar back in 2005. You could ring random person and have a chat.

I dont understand obsession about Sweden. It is expensive country in decline with high crime. There are better places in Europe.

Any sources on that?

No, I tried to find some screenshots, but its 11 years ago. Current skype does not have this feature.

It's not the part about Skype that needs sources...

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11474253.

Lived there in 2012 for 6 months. What an amazing country, probably the best place in Europe to have a family. Stockholm is one of the most beautiful and safest capitals in the world.

We're in 64th place for crime, just behind UK and Australia and way behind the US (obviously). But Japan is absolutely great if you're looking for low crime rates, and the food is fantastic too.

http://www.numbeo.com/crime/rankings_by_country.jsp

Compare Sweden and Denmark. All countries around Sweden have lower crime rate.

That index claims that there is less crime in Colombia and Russia than in the US. Also that there is less crime in Azerbaijan than in New Zealand.

Yes, sorry that was a terrible reference; I should have been more careful. But take instead the murder rate from Wikipedia (which gets stats from the UN): Sweden is in place 205 out of 218 countries and no other nordic country is lower except Iceland (and the rate in Iceland is not accurately measurable since they had only a single murder).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

This despite the fact we're in the top ten for gun ownership: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_guns_per_capita_by_c...

In decline? Sweden had the highest growth rate in Europe in the last quarter of last higher. Highest population growth rate in the EU. How do you define decline? Or crime for that matter :) Sweden does not have high crime. I'm Irish, living in Sweden. I know high crime.

I'm sorry, but this is a ridiculous statement. I live in Stockholm. I'm a Swede and grew up here; No, crime is not generally a large problem in Sweden. In reality crime is not a big issue anywhere in Scandinavia. You can find some statistics here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention... and here: http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/...

Swede-roulette

This reminds me of https://mapc.am/, a browser based variant.

https://vimeo.com/162594920 though

Does the Swede in question get notified beforehand about the source of the call?

No. They simply get a call where the caller ID is the "Sweden number". However, they can hang up at any time if getting abuse calls.

I wonder how long will it last until it is filled with junk calls

Cisco Web Reputation is blocking this domain for malware.

Another case of malware blocking gone wrong. Well, it’s not malware, but if you don’t trust it, you can probably use the archive.org version of the site.

Ingenious; Will also reduce suicides;

Let's clear this up once and for all; That Sweden has a high suicide rate is a rumour and not true. Sweden's suicide rate is below the average of the OECD countries. Feel free to read up on it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_Sweden

Low tech chatroulette.

OT: i submitted this 3'days ago, I wonder how this got resubmitted.

Me too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11449020 :)

I thought you can't post the same link twice?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com