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Comment by dm2 | Hacker News Reader

If a name isn't legal then there is an "Icelandic Naming Committee" which can approve the child's name.

Names are used differently in Iceland, they always reference to people by the first name. There are thousands of pre-approved names by the way: http://www.nordicnames.de/wiki/Icelandic_Names

Icelanders also speak on their in-breath, I tried that just now and it seems like it might be possible to kill people by naming yourself a certain word they have to say while breathing inwards. (joking, kind of)

I'm not trying to be mean but this in no way relates to anything Hacker News is about.

It's a very slipper slope to cat pictures.

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personal liberty issues and freedom from censorship, government oppression and the likes are fairly regular subjects on HN. I don't think this is vastly different.

Personally I found this interesting and educational. The conflict between preservation of a society, language and its heritage against the personal freedom of parents to name their children. Quite different from cat pictures I'd say.

As they relate to technology, yes. That one qualifier is what separates HN from every other political board out there. Flagged for that reason - this is just plain old politics.

Personal liberty issues etc., are fairly regular subjects on HN?

I'm not sure they should be (despite the irony this presents).

A loose naming regulation in an absurdly cold country which already has strange customs isn't important news by any stretch of the imagination.

This is not a serious "personal liberty issue" or "government oppression", have you seen the shit happening in the rest of the world?

PG himself once cautioned about the connection between personal liberty issues and hacking:

  I do believe the TSA stories represent a danger.
  If there's a road from hacking to politics, it's
  probably civil liberties.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1934880

So I would be somewhat careful about using that reasoning.

> this in no way relates to anything Hacker News is about.

Disagree. It's a news story that relates to namespaces, encoding algorithms, language-independent operation, and the occasional need to hack around arbitrary bureaucratic restrictions/conventions. Could easily prompt interesting discussion that sheds light on related issues.

The Icelandic legal system's odd restrictions on allowable names are only a couple steps removed from the problem of computer systems that require people to have a middle initial (even if they have no middle name) or that prevent umlauts in a lastname field.

This story is hilarious and weird, but I agree that it's not germane to HN.

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