Google Noto Fonts - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/get/noto/ <comment><USER2> I don't think this communicates the _incredible_ amount of creative and technical work required not only to simply fill out over 100,000 characters in the UTF-8 space but to make them stylistically consistent.

<comment><USER3> Maybe they used AI to style the fonts? Train a neural network on a particular style (thickness, density, curvature) and then write out heuristics to generate new fonts based on other fonts, that get classified by a neural net. Let the bots do all the work. Might be an interesting article if the actually did that.

<comment><USER4> c.f. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8930894](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8930894)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So in a nutshell, typefaces which literally span every single defined character?

Are there special optimizations implemented for different use cases as well, e.g. screen v. print and sub-varieties of each? Ten years ago with Vista, Microsoft Typography ([https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/Typography/default.aspx](https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/Typography/default.aspx)) put out a family of typefaces--Cambria, Calibri, Consolas, etc.--which were optimized specifically for sub-pixel rendering on LCD screens while maintaining on-paper legibility. I'd be cool with Noto not having any such optimization in mind given that the stated objective appears to be to include every defined character, but I do wonder if it should happen eventually.

...or maybe not, who knows. Pixel densities now have approached ludicrous territories. It might just no longer matter at least when we're talking about optimizing for screens.

<comment><USER6> At the time I wrote to one of the team members who worked there (maybe a Program Manager - I forget exactly) and they sent me a beautiful book showing off each of the fonts with a description of why the font was made, how it achieves the goals, and some info on the font's designer.

I still have it at home - really impressed me with the attention to detail and the self-styled publicity.

<comment><USER7> It was called _Now Read This_ and it really is beautiful. As far as I know, it was not intended to be publicly available, but you can buy a copy on Amazon: [https://www.amazon.com/Now-Read-This-Microsoft- Collection/dp...](https://www.amazon.com/Now-Read-This-Microsoft- Collection/dp/B00NRKCS8C)

<comment><USER8>
      Currently unavailable. We don't know when or if this item will be back in stock.

Correction, you _could_ buy a copy on Amazon...

Own up! Who got the last one?!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Related blog post here:

[https://developers.googleblog.com/2016/10/an-open-source- fon...](https://developers.googleblog.com/2016/10/an-open-source-font-system- for-everyone.html)

<comment><USER10> > "Google's open-source Noto font family provides a beautiful and consistent > digital type for every symbol in the Unicode standard, covering more than > 800 languages and 110,000 characters."

Wow. That's a lot of work.

<comment><USER11> 110,000 characters is not every symbol in the Unicode standard, though. According to wikipedia Unicode 9.0 contains around 128,000.

<comment><USER12> Yep, Old Hungarian is still not there, nor anywhere else except for fonts that were specifically designed just for Old Hungarian.

I was happy when the script got included in Unicode 8.0 but if fonts don't support it, it's not much use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> We had to stop using this font as it didn't support back tick(`). Try typing ` multiple times in the search box.

We had reported this to Google some months back but got no response.

<comment><USER14> A quick summary of this issue:

\- 'Dead' keys are keys used to modify the next character

\- The backtick / grave key behaved as such on a typewriter

\- ` + a = à

\- Noto web fonts behave like this

\- The latest Noto local fonts do not

\- The expected modern behaviour in English is ` + a -> `a

\- This is not necessarily the expected behaviour in other languages

<comment><USER15> > This is not necessarily the expected behaviour in other languages

Which language, for example?

I'm french, we have characters with grave accent ('à', 'è' and 'ù'), and we do not expect the "` + a = à" behavior, as for one language.

EDIT: we _do_ expect that "^ + a = â", though, but that's an other thing, and we have actually two ^ keys, one for our behavior and one for the usual behavior.

<comment><USER16> Brazilian Portuguese expects that behavior to write words such as "àqueles"

<comment><USER17> Forgive me, I don't want to sound xenophobic but this seems preposterous to me. So much energy wasted. I am deeply grateful to the guys who were developing keyboard standards in our country that I don't have to go through such waste. When we want to use "o" with accent we just press right ALT with "o". Simple and fast. Frankly speaking, this is first time I hear about such weird combination just to get local characters, in western countries ofc. PC keyboard is not mechanical one. Why someone would copy the same behavior is beyond me.

<comment><USER18> If you write in a single language that has only a few combinations, sure. But as the number of diacritics - letter combinations increase, dead keys become a more attractive solution.

With just two or three Western European languages to write in, you can easily have grave, acute and circumflex accents, umlauts, tildes, plus a couple one- off letters (like ß for German, ç for French, or å/æ for Scandinavian languages). Combining those with every vowel they can apply to grows too much for the poor Alt key.

The US-International layout runs into this problem. Since Alt + A = Á, if you want to type Ä or Å or Æ in a single keypress you have to use Alt + Q, W, or Z respectively, which is hardly intuitive. And if you want À or Ã, you're SOL.

Dead keys (also in the US-International layout) solve this problem. I know which keys make the tilde, umlaut, both types of accents, and circumflex. If I want the bare symbol (or a quote in the case of umlaut) I press spacebar after the symbol key, otherwise I press any applicable letter to output the modified version. For example, I'm pretty sure there's a key combination for ç, but I don't remember what it is (Alt + C is ©); however I did remember that I could type it as ' \+ c.

The other main solution is to have a hotkey for switching language layouts - typing in each language will be slightly faster, but when I tried it I frequently forgot which layout I was on and had to stop, delete my mangled output, switch language, and type again. I find dead keys much more friendly to muscle-memory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I keep wanting to find a font to use on the portions of my website that contain Japanese, but they are all so big! No way I'm making my visitors download 115MB worth of font just so it looks a little nicer.

Edit: Thanks for the tips, I will look into those options :)

<comment><USER20> Since you mentioned that your entire site isn't in Japanese, in addition to what other people specified, I would now recommend using the CSS unicode-range selector. That allows you to list a web font declaration with a range of Unicode code points and most modern browsers now implement the optimization where it only downloads the font when text on the page contains a character in that range.

I tossed together an example several years ago:

[http://chris.improbable.org/experiments/browser/webfonts/uni...](http://chris.improbable.org/experiments/browser/webfonts/universal- noto-sans/)

The combined example on [http://chris.improbable.org/experiments/browser/webfonts/uni...](http://chris.improbable.org/experiments/browser/webfonts/universal- noto-sans/single-name.html) has CSS which looks like this:

        @font-face {
            font-family: NotoSansCombined;
            src: local("NotoSans"), local("Noto Sans"), url(NotoSans-Regular.woff) format("woff");
        }

        @font-face {
            font-family: NotoSansCombined;
            src: local("NotoSansArmenian"), local("Noto Sans Armenian"), url(NotoSansArmenian-Regular.woff) format("woff");
            unicode-range: U+530-58F, U+FB13-FB17;
        }

        @font-face {
            font-family: NotoSansCombined;
            src: local("NotoSansBengali"), local("Noto Sans Bengali"), url(NotoSansBengali-Regular.woff) format("woff");
            unicode-range: U+AD, U+D7, U+F7, U+964-965, U+981-983, U+985-98C, U+98F-990, U+993-9A8, U+9AA-9B0, U+9B2, U+9B6-9B9, U+9BC-9C4, U+9C7-9C8, U+9CB-9CE, U+9D7, U+9DC-9DD, U+9DF-9E3, U+9E6-9FB, U+200B-200D, U+2013-2014, U+2018-2019, U+201C-201D, U+2026, U+20B9, U+2212, U+25CC;
        }

        @font-face {
            font-family: NotoSansCombined;
            src: local("NotoSansCherokee"), local("Noto Sans Cherokee"), url(NotoSansCherokee-Regular.woff) format("woff");
            unicode-range: U+13A0-13F4;
        }

In modern versions of Chrome, Firefox, and Safari you can see that only downloads a few of the many language files available. This also works really nicely with the traditional CSS font stacks if your design goals allow you to specify system fonts which will work for many users so you can have a few local fonts specified before the downloadable one.

<comment><USER21> Does google fonts' css include do this directly? It's been a while since I've considered it, but would be nice to see a font-famly 'NotoSans' and 'NotoSerif' that has all the unicode ranges spec'd.

As an aside, I'd love to see something similar in a fixed-width font (where the asian block characters are double-width)

<comment><USER20> They did not in the past but a quick look at [https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Noto+Sans](https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Noto+Sans) shows that they do now, at least if you request it using a modern browser.

This is not surprising since the Chrome team is generally really aggressive about performance in general and they were quick to jump on this issue:

[https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=247920](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=247920)

On a related note, I've found the Chrome team to be really responsive about i18n as well – if you report something about even fairly obscure scripts not being supported, they usually respond rapidly. Quite pleasant to see.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I always thought the term Tofu was "mojibake": [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake)

Wikipedia disambiguation page: for "Tofu" mentions: Slang for the empty boxes shown in place of undisplayable code points in computer character encoding, a form of mojibake

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tofu_(disambiguation)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tofu_\(disambiguation\))

<comment><USER23> Mojibake is specifically the "garbage" from getting an encoding wrong—treating a sequence of bits as if they were a valid sequence of characters in some encoding, when they're either not from that encoding, or not from _any_ textual encoding (because you're e.g. trying to render the contents of an executable binary as text.)

"Tofu" is a more recent phenomena, that didn't really have a specific name until now: when there are Unicode code-points—correctly decoded—in a document, but you have no font installed that offers a glyph to represent them.

Mojibake results from "I did this wrong and didn't notice"; tofu results from "I know what this is, and it's something I don't have a visual signifier for."

Mind you, often mojibake will _result in_ "tofu"; the garbage code-points you get from bad encoding detection will turn out to be ones that don't have a currently-defined Unicode character, so they'll show up as U+FFFD REPLACEMENT CHARACTER (�). But that's a coincidence, rather than an equivalence.

<comment><USER22> Thanks! That was a super helpful response!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Is Google using aws to host this.

If you look at: [https://noto-website.storage.googleapis.com/](https://noto- website.storage.googleapis.com/)

You will see the following: <?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?> <ListBucketResult xmlns='[http://doc.s3.amazonaws.com/2006-03-01'>](http://doc.s3.amazonaws.com/2006-03-01'>) <Name>noto-website</Name> <Prefix></Prefix> <Marker></Marker> <NextMarker>emoji/emoji_u1f468_200d_1f468_200d_1f466_200d_1f466.png</NextMarker> <IsTruncated>true</IsTruncated> <Contents> <Key>css/emoji-zsye-color.css</Key> <Generation>1464738619772000</Generation> <MetaGeneration>1</MetaGeneration> <LastModified>2016-05-31T23:50:19.729Z</LastModified> <ETag>"e3aaae52d88ced070044f59d1efe2009"</ETag> <Size>152</Size> <Owner/> </Contents>

[http://i.imgur.com/yLiWUGq.png](http://i.imgur.com/yLiWUGq.png)

Are they using Amazon S3?

Edit:

They just changed it. @1:00 pm so it no longer mentions aws.

<comment><USER25> Good question. I can explain. "storage.googleapis.com" is an endpoint for Google Cloud Storage's "XML" API. Google Cloud Storage (GCS) is a cloud blob storage service similar to Amazon S3.

This particular API, the "XML" API, is designed to be API-compatible with S3. The XML namespace, '[http://doc.s3.amazonaws.com/2006-03-01'](http://doc.s3.amazonaws.com/2006-03-01'), is therefore the same. This allows third party tools like 'boto' and the like which work with S3 to work with GCS with only a switch in hostname.

<comment><USER24> Thanks for the answer. Do you know why they changed the scheme after the initial upload?

<comment><USER25> I have no idea. I'm not sure what you were looking at.

If you visit just "[https://noto- website.storage.googleapis.com/"](https://noto- website.storage.googleapis.com/"), that's a request to list all of the objects in the bucket, so you'll see an XML document with that namespace and the results of a listing.

If you were trying to download a specific object from that bucket, you'd either see the resource itself, or you'd see an XML error result of some sort (404, 403, etc). So I assume that either you mistyped the object name once or else the object had been deleted for some reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It was released originally in 2013: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noto_fonts](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noto_fonts)

Such an amazing project

<comment><USER27> I wish Wikipedia redirected m. links to the desktop site if you aren't using a mobile browser.

<comment> angry-hacker Maybe it would make sense, but I personally prefer their mobile site. It's much nicer to read. Not that their desktop site is filled with ads and gibberish, but for whatever reason I like it more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > _The name noto is to convey the idea that Google's goal is to see "no more > tofu"._

Nofu would have been a better name if that's actually the goal.

</comment><comment><USER29> Noto fonts are great. I especially love the OFL licensing. I wanted to include fonts in a mobile application and there was confusion on whether including a GPL version of the fonts would force me to GPL my app - something I could not do. I couldn't find a definite answer.

With Noto's OFL licensing, I no longer had that worry.

<comment><USER30> I think that you are looking to the GPL from the wrong perspective. I also made this mistake.

GPL does not _force_ you to licence your application under GPL.

Instead licensing your application under GPL _allows_ you to use other GPL licensed code.

<comment><USER31> That seems like a meaningless semantic difference to me. There is no practical difference between these two sentences:

If you wish to use GPL-licensed code, your code must be open source.

If your code is open source, you may use GPL-licensed code.

<comment><USER32> It's not meaningless. If I give something away under certain conditions, I'm not forcing anybody to adhere to those conditions.

Instead, if they choose to adopt those conditions, they get free stuff from me (and a lot of other people.) In other words, it's an incentive program, not a requirement such as a law or regulation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I wanted to try the Noto mono out for programming, but it looks like the `O` is indistinguishable from the `0` :/

Otherwise, it's a nice looking font for the editor.

<comment><USER34> I've just tried it, and it is absolutely the same as Droid Sans Mono (which I love and use), barring the extra line spacing. They haven't even fixed the kerning problem with "w".

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> It doesn't seem to support the Tangut script, which is added in Unicode 9.0. It's the first thing I test if a font claims to support all languages in Unicode. In my knowledge, I haven't really seen any general-purpose fonts containing support for Tangut (because probably no one is going to use it). I thought Google has already completed this project, but apparently they haven't yet.

<comment><USER36> They've completed it up to Unicode 6.0 (released in 2010).

Are there any Unicode fonts at all for Tangut? I looked but didn't find any.

<comment><USER37> Probably not -- unless you count the proprietary, obfuscated font they use to make the official Unicode charts.

Some people snark at Unicode for putting so much more effort into emoji recently than they put into scripts used in actual languages, but y'know, when they add emoji, at least people design glyphs for them pretty quickly. When they do the research to designate codepoints for Anatolian hieroglyphs, the codepoints just sit there unloved and unsupported.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Fun fact: People behind a WatchGuard firewall (default settings) won't see Google fonts (at least in Firefox) because the firewall filters the CORS headers.

<comment><USER39> What an awful overreach. Firewalls should not ship with defaults that break the internet, and such presumptuous header filtering can actually weaken security.

<comment><USER38> Filtering X-Frame-Options is bad for security. Filtering anti CSRF headers like in Drupal and ShopWare is bad for security.

But this seems to be the current reality with enterprise firewalls. :-(

(No, TLS doesn't help in the long run. If your boss wants to know which pages you are reading he will let the experts setup this: [https://www.howtoforge.com/filtering-https-traffic-with- squi...](https://www.howtoforge.com/filtering-https-traffic-with-squid))

<comment><USER39> Or this WatchGuard HTTPS proxy config: [http://www.watchguard.com/help/docs/wsm/xtm_11/en- us/content...](http://www.watchguard.com/help/docs/wsm/xtm_11/en- us/content/en-us/certificates/cert_https_proxy_resign_c.html)

<comment><USER38> Nice.

I'm just the victim. Whenever I suspect the firewall to be the cause of a problem I use a proxy via a ssh tunnel. As long as it's not forbidden for me to actually solve problems.

The list of software that isn't usable behind a WatchGuard firewall (and maybe similar enterprise firewalls) is getting longer and longer. No Google fonts, no Drupal, no ShopWare 5.2, JIRA barely usable, etc.

<comment><USER40> I'm sure I can find plenty of examples just by searching (and I'll do that in just a moment) but do you happen to have a list of these issues that you've encountered that can be attributed to WatchGuard firewalls?

I am (primarily) a network engineer and such a list would be wonderful to have when recommending for or against specific products.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Noto & Roboto are probably the two fonts I love more than anything now, I just find them so pleasing, they don't do anything stupid and they look good.

</comment><comment><USER42> The claim of full coverage of 110,000+ characters (they are targeting Unicode 6, apparently) appears to be false: Noto Sans CJK covers approximately 30K characters[1], while as of Unicode 6.0 there were 74,614 CJK Unified Ideographs (calculated from [2]).

Edit: Using a script I made to check codepoint coverage[3] I get 63,639 codepoints with glyphs defined for all Noto fonts included in their default download (Noto-unhinted.zip).

[1] [https://github.com/googlei18n/noto- fonts/issues/717#issuecom...](https://github.com/googlei18n/noto- fonts/issues/717#issuecomment-228440822)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CJK_Unified_Ideographs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CJK_Unified_Ideographs)

[3] [https://gist.githubusercontent.com/amake/53b2331a2547b94f430...](https://gist.githubusercontent.com/amake/53b2331a2547b94f43093b7809a5d54d/raw/b6d93e14cbe7dadaf9aa744fc65fd31045c380d2/list_ttf_chars.py)

<comment> iso-8859-1 Did you compare it with other fonts listed on [1] like GNU Unifont, Code2000 and Arial Unicode MS?

The table of that article is missing many useful columns.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open- source_Unicode_typefaces](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open- source_Unicode_typefaces)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> How to make a quick logo? Just write the name of the company and use the [https://www.google.com/get/noto/#sans- bugi](https://www.google.com/get/noto/#sans-bugi) font...

<comment><USER44> Luckily, the era where a different alphabet could be rendered by using a special font while using the exact same codepoints as Latin is behind us.

With Unicode, different alphabets use different codepoints and your trick won't work.

(unless of course it's a Buginese company)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Refreshing to see the lorem ipsum replaced with something meaningful.

<comment><USER46> It's better than the quick brown fox too.

<comment><USER47> not really. It's longer and it misses the letters j,k,v,x, and z. That's almost 20% of the alphabet.

<comment><USER48> When you select a different language from the search box, though, you see those same sentences translated into the other languages. Wouldn't be possible to get full alphabet coverage in all translation/alphabet combinations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> The sans has a real italic and not just an oblique. Color me impressed: real italics aren't very common in sanses, and that goes double for FOSS fonts. Very nice.

</comment><comment><USER17> Looking at any fonts, recently, I am starting to crave for a 4K LCD panel. When people were switching to HD panels there were big WOW around, but after buying a smartphone, I realized that HD is good for smartphone, but not enough for anything big. I love to read on my smartphone and I love to code, too, but fonts look just crappy (especially on Windows). Sadly, good 4K panels out there are still quite pricey.

<comment><USER50> This is why i still use xterm with the default bitmap font in xterm. 10pt vector fonts on <100dpi screens look just awful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I wonder why they didn't share the fact that it was created using AI.

</comment><comment><USER52> Wow, they implemented Deseret - the Mormon-invented phonetic alphabet

<comment><USER53> And Klingon

<comment><USER54> ? Klingon isn't in Unicode...

<comment><USER53> It _technically_ isn't, but it's listed in a private-use area: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klingon_alphabets](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klingon_alphabets)

And, if you check the languages for the full Noto font Klingon is listed so it should work.

<comment><USER54> Huh, I didn't know about that. Interesting!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Has anyone managed to install the Color Emoji font on Windows? Getting something about it not being a valid font file

<comment><USER56> I am getting similar errors on Mac OS 10.11. Looks like something may be messed up with that one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> That is great. I am working on a project where I require a font which includes all (or at leas as much as possible) unicode symbols. Until now I was thankful that I could use GNU unifont as a fallback, even if it was ugly. But this will make my app look so much better.

</comment><comment><USER58> Any idea why they don't just merge Roboto and Noto?

<comment><USER59> I don't have any inside information, but it seems like they have different goals. Roboto is primarily designed to evoke certain emotions and to display well across devices, whereas Noto is primarily designed to render consistently across languages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> This is really fantastic. It sent me looking for source materials for the character choices made for each language.

I'm dealing with a media experience in Dakota and Ojibwa right now where we have source material that is spelled/character-ed quite differently than the alphabet provided by Noto in those languages. Given the scale of this project, I assume that some considerable thought went into each language's character set, but it's difficult to know for sure without any sourcing. The git commit logs don't offer up any hints. Anyone familiar with the project, know where I could find this sort of source information?

Should I be referencing something in the Unicode definitions for these languages?

<comment><USER61> The Noto characters are from the Unicode definitions, so that's where you should look to understand why those characters exist. These proposals provides some background: [http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2008/08132r-n3427r-syllabics.pdf](http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2008/08132r-n3427r-syllabics.pdf) [http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2008/08342-n3507-syllabics.pdf](http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2008/08342-n3507-syllabics.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Why follow up Roboto? An honest question, not a rhetorical one. I don't yet prefer any one over the other.

I understand it covers a large part of Unicode, but if that is what makes it unique, couldn't Roboto just be extended?

</comment><comment><USER63> Is it possible to replace the Mac system font for some languages with this?

I prefer the Noto Japanese typeface over the one that comes with Mac and would like to replace it.

<comment><USER64> I'm not sure if you can replace system-wide fonts without some hacks, like [1], but maybe TinkerTool [2][3] can help a bit:

[1] [http://osxdaily.com/2015/10/15/change-default-system-font- ma...](http://osxdaily.com/2015/10/15/change-default-system-font-mac-os-x-el- capitan-lucida-grande/)

[2] [https://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerTool.html](https://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerTool.html)

[3] [http://i.imgur.com/HYwpDO4.png](http://i.imgur.com/HYwpDO4.png)

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> The font support spans so many languages. This is incredible. Font work is hard and tedious, and thankless. Kudos to Google for open sourcing it.

</comment><comment><USER66> What are hints and why are the noto fonts packages according to hinted and unhinted? I'm not sure which package to use for linux.

<comment><USER67> You need the hinted version if your freetype does hinting, whereas if it does autohinting (or no hinting at all) you don't need hints, as in this case hints are ignored. So if in doubt install the hinted fonts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Surprised to see that Google is supporting even archaic Korean [0], but it would have been nice to see a chunk of text in Korean, Japanese, and Chinese, as opposed to a bunch of gibberish in all three languages.

[0] [https://www.google.com/get/noto/#sans- kore](https://www.google.com/get/noto/#sans-kore)

<comment><USER69> They even support Linear B, which fell in disuse more than 3000 years ago with the Bronze Age Collapse of the Mycenaean civilization: [https://www.google.com/get/noto/#sans- linb](https://www.google.com/get/noto/#sans-linb)

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> How come I get "6 serious errors were found. Do not use these fonts." in macOS Font Book? v10.11.6

</comment><comment><USER71> Wondering if Matthew Butterick will like those. Will keep looking at Practical Typography for updates.

<comment><USER72> Matthew Butterick just hates anything related to Google since they started Google Fonts, don't hold your breath.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> I seem to intend to destroy it seriously.

[http://michinarinukazawa.github.io/TofuFont/html/index_en_US...](http://michinarinukazawa.github.io/TofuFont/html/index_en_US.html?tofu=false)

</comment><comment><USER74> Last time I checked, Noto Mono was not considered a monospace font by Windows' console (Command Prompt) and cannot be used for working in the console (including Bash on Ubuntu on Windows). Is that still the case?

</comment><comment><USER75> To see all of the characters that are on the internet, you will need to download a CD's worth of fonts, 473mb. #MindBlown

</comment><comment><USER76> I wish they would just support Latin Extended in Google Docs when Google Fonts are selected.

</comment><comment><USER77> APL is finally gonna take the world. Thanks to google.

Wait, does it have APL symbols?

<comment> iso-8859-1 "The Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane includes the APL symbols in the Miscellaneous Technical block, which are therefore usually rendered accurately from the larger Unicode fonts installed with most modern operating systems."

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> Hey google team,

Windows 10 reported an error:

"NotoColorEmoji.ttf is not a valid font file".

</comment><comment><USER79> Awesome. It took us only ~7 decades of Computing to invent this :)

</comment><comment><USER80> This would make an excellent character set for a roguelike.

</comment><comment><USER81> This would be better if it were called Nofu...

</comment><comment><USER82> There is Old Persian but not Persian?

<comment><USER72> Persian is written in the Arabic script. If you search for Persian it will give you Noto Arabic fonts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> I'm not installing 500 MB of fonts without a flipping contact sheet on the page :(

<comment><USER49> You mean a specimen page?

I couldn't find one linked from the article, but I found this while Googling: [https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Noto+Sans](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Noto+Sans)

<comment><USER83> thanks, i did mean specimen page, mea culpa. also thx for the link!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> No slash through the monospace zero. What a huge shame.

</comment><comment><USER85> Robot's won't take over the world! Google will.

</comment><comment><USER86> Ubuntu package?

<comment><USER87> Ubuntu has a metapackage in the universe repository called "fonts-noto": [http://packages.ubuntu.com/xenial/fonts- noto](http://packages.ubuntu.com/xenial/fonts-noto)

      Package:    fonts-noto
      Repository: universe

To install (if you have the universe repository enabled):

      sudo apt-get update
      sudo apt-get install fonts-noto

</comment></comment><comment> c-smile [pedantic] "UTF-8 space"... UTF-8 code units space is quite limited by single byte - 0...255. You probably meant Unicode Code Points space that, at the moment, is 21-bits number: from 0 to 0x10FFFF (1,114,112 decimal) [/pedantic]

<comment><USER88> Not true at all. Per the wiki article[1], "UTF-8 is a character encoding capable of encoding all possible characters, or code points, defined by Unicode"

It's a variable-length encoding, and just so happens to correspond to ASCII for the first 127 characters. But if the leading bit of the byte is 1, it indicates that it's part of a multi-byte glyph. With the encoding, you can represent the entirety of the unicode space - The latter bytes start with 10 to indicate they're middle parts of the glyph, while the first byte uses 11 and continues to indicate how many bytes long the glpyh is.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8)

<comment> c-smile Depends on what "space" means...

As of utf-8 encoding... It is a variable encoding that is capable to encode any 32-bit number: from 0 to 0xFFFFFFFF. Not just current set of 21-bit unicode code points.

As of "... indicates that it's part of a multi-byte glyph." You are mixing completely different entities here. Unicode has nothing with glyphs.

Glyph is an atomic component (image) of internal font structure. Single character (unicode code point here) can be composed on screen from multiple glyphs.

<comment><USER89> > As of utf-8 encoding... It is a variable encoding that is capable to encode > any 32-bit number: from 0 to 0xFFFFFFFF. Not just current set of 21-bit > unicode code points.

You're thinking of an older version of UTF-8 which allowed sequences of up to 6 bytes to be used to encode a single code point. UTF-8 is now defined to not allow code point values above 0x10FFFF and not allow code point values between 0xD800 to 0xDFFF (inclusive) to allow only the same values as possible in UTF-16.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8#Invalid_byte_sequences](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8#Invalid_byte_sequences)

[https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3629](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3629)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Please do not use these fonts directly from Google servers. This is an another attribute for Google to track the whole browsing traffic. This is too much power for one company.

<comment><USER90> Google's ToS state that they will not track them beyond simple aggregate numbers of downloads per [time], which they release in their analytics dashboard publicly.

Not only that but the cache headers are set to 1 year... That's a pretty shitty tracking system if I've ever seen one.

<comment><USER30> ToS are known to change in time. Are you suggesting that if millions of websites use this font then it will be removed when Google changes its ToS?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER91> So, did they actually handcrafted each of the 100k+ characters? Probably not, but if yes, then I call it BS.

</comment><comment><USER92> reminds me of natto. Gross.

edit: why the downvotes? They bring up tofu and then name the cure something close to natto, cured soy beans. And by cured, I mean fermented. And by fermented, I mean stringy at the molecular level, smells and tastes awful. And when I say awful, I mean, most of the people from the originating culture think it's awful.</comment>


The disappearing inventor - <AUTHOR> http://blog.kenperlin.com/?p=14708 <comment><USER3> I'd be more concerned about this if the complaint was coming from Bolas himself rather than someone else posting out of concern on behalf of someone else. It may be a press-release-style post, but it would be good to see what USC's MxR lab itself had to say about Oculus VR's success in the past:

[http://projects.ict.usc.edu/mxr/blog/it%E2%80%99s-alive/](http://projects.ict.usc.edu/mxr/blog/it%E2%80%99s-alive/)

>A goal of the MxR lab is to broadly disseminate its research. While the promise of personalized immersive virtual reality has been on the horizon for more than 20 years, the FOV2GO project has been publishing open source designs for ways to make it low cost and broadly available.

>Today, the bold actions of one entrepreneurial former member of the FOV2GO team - Palmer Luckey – is kicking this into high gear via this Kickstarter effort.

>We are impressed with Palmer's gumption to make the Oculus Rift happen and helping to provide a widely disseminated platform. We wish Palmer all the good Luck in the world.

</comment><comment><USER4> Wait. There's a huge gulf between Bolas' viewer ([http://projects.ict.usc.edu/mxr/diy/fov2go- viewer/](http://projects.ict.usc.edu/mxr/diy/fov2go-viewer/)) and the Oculus Rift. One's a cute little DIY project. The other is a substantial piece of technology -- one that seems to build more on virtual reality helmet concepts from the 1980s and 1990s than on Bolas' project. Bolas might have inspired them to go down this path and explore VR hardware, but isn't that what teachers are supposed to do?

<comment><USER5> Exactly! I've build that prototype and I can tell you it's not very useful. Palmer started working on his own HMD (occulus) because he saw how limiting that research prototype was. Impossibly poor FOV, poor response and poor head tracking. But beyond that, I was led to understand he has one of the largest personal collections of VR headsets and has been into it as a hobby for a long time. This whole article is garbage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The phrase "Oculus Rift, which added an orientation tracker" glosses-over the chief technical accomplishments of the team. The Rift is defined by the affordable very low latency head tracking. We've had head-mounted 3D displays at least since the invention of the stereoscope in the 1800s.

It's like writing that Alexander Graham Bell* should get Apple stock because "iPhone, which added a multi-touch computer" just made $56 billion dollars.

* or whoever

<comment><USER7> Antonio Meucci.

Bell stole the telephone from Meucci and the hydrofoil from Ferrarin.

The joke at my old uni was "Italians invent stuff, Chinese make stuff, Americans get the money". (And yes, I know Bell was Canadian)

<comment><USER8> Popov invented radio, but Marconi gets most credit outside of Russia. It's not just Italians.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Almost every important company I know anything about seems to have a "hidden" founder or vital mentor figure who gets left out of the story. Is it just greed (for money or personal fame) or is there some kind of legal reasoning why they can't even mention the other people in the story?

<comment><USER10> The courtesy of asking should've happened though.

Because it looks really bad to the public face person to not give credit where credit is due.

<comment><USER11> You're assuming there was no ask. We don't know. I'm also wondering if advisor shares would've been possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Agreed. Maybe oculus should give the professor a few shares. For example, Linus was given shares by RedHat (I am told that's how he became rich).

<comment><USER10> That's the honorable thing to do and it prevents sour grapes, bad press.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The Wire had a great summary of where things now stand in our culture.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ky5d4hH1CPQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ky5d4hH1CPQ)

I understand that ideas are not nearly as important as the action taken on them to bring them into reality. But the idea has to exist before any action can be taken, and good ideas don't simply think themselves. I'd prefer to live in a world in which inventors got more credit for their ideas than they do today in most places.

<comment><USER14> I have some ideas; I will sell them to you for 50,000 dollars and half your profits.

It's only fair; I'm an ideas guy and I deserve to be compensated for my work.

<comment> bjelkeman-again I used to see that more before than now. But having spent decades on actual implementation it is often quite easy to show that ideas are mostly cheap and plentiful. Implementation is hard and it I what matters, mostly. There are of course exceptions.

<comment><USER14> Exactly; ideas are only worth the work you put into them.

If I have a great idea, and somebody implements it and goes bankrupt, am I liable? Why do idea guys deserve to get compensation for the successes of their ideas without shouldering any of the risk of the failures?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The way this usually works is that the inventor would inform the university's technology licensing office of the invention. The licensing office would sample the industry and decide whether or not to file for a patent. The bar for filing a patent is often very low. Interested companies can then approach the licensing office to license the technology.

In some cases, one (or more) of the researchers may decide to start a company and license the tech. Often, the researcher is a student that worked on polishing the original invention; sometimes (rare) a professor takes a sabbatical to build a startup based on the invention. Many tech companies get started this way, including the likes of Google. It's also one of the ways Stanford gets filthy rich.

I'm surprised USC's office of tech licensing were unaware of the original invention and/or that they decided against filing a patent. Perhaps there's more to the story.

<comment><USER16> From the link provided by chasing above ([http://projects.ict.usc.edu/mxr/diy/fov2go- viewer/](http://projects.ict.usc.edu/mxr/diy/fov2go-viewer/)), it appears that the commercial potential of the original idea was recognized. If the patent was properly written, then almost certainly there would be royalties payable to the inventors. They may not be large, though, depending on which bits of fov2go were "obvious" and which innovative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I deeply respect Ken Perlin and what he's done for Computer Graphics. Perlin Noise is as ubiquitous as it is fascinating. He basically "gave" it to the world - and eventually received much recognition (in certain circles), including an Oscar for advancements in computer graphics (IIRC).

Perlin Noise embodies the best of "open source" in my mind; a simple, elegant solution with virtually no patent/copyright/trademark baggage. Source freely available - just google it.

While the algorithm Ken Perlin produced doesn't make a motion picture or a computer game - the contribution is not only "mentionable" \- it is admirable and down-right important for these media.

I hope the original creator of this VR tech gets some attention for what they helped spark.

</comment><comment><USER18> Thomas Edison didn't invent the Light Bulb

Marconi didn't invent wireless telegram

Watt did not invent the steam engine

\----

Also you now buy versions of the device:

[https://www.durovis.com/dive.html](https://www.durovis.com/dive.html)

and a review of it:

[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/03/31/review_durovis_dive_...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/03/31/review_durovis_dive_htc_oculus_facebook/)

</comment><comment><USER19> I agree, every car manufacturer should laud inventors of the wheel, combustion engine, glass, rubber, and electricity. My point is, there is nothing truly innovative about rift. What they did was mesh existing technology in a remarkable way.

<comment><USER20> Cars aren't a new thing. Given that the rift is the first VR rig with the potential of gaining mainstream traction, the story of the invention of its core tech is notable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> A cursory review of inventors throughout history suggests that generally credit goes to the businessmen and the popularizers, not the inventors.

Obnoxious, but oh well.

</comment><comment><USER22> Good points, he should definitely get credit and this blog post was a great start. Contains a link to construct your own FOV2GO Model D Viewer: [http://projects.ict.usc.edu/mxr/diy/fov2go- viewer/](http://projects.ict.usc.edu/mxr/diy/fov2go-viewer/)

</comment><comment><USER23> The inventor is disappearing in another context as well. The patent and trademark office considered first to invent as the rule of who gets Patents for decades in order to protect individual inventors. The US was the only country doing this and the burden of proof led to a ton of expensive litigation. With just 10% of patents claimed by individual investors lately, however, congress overturned the rule. First to file is now the only option and if there are individual inventors left, they have learn how to file quickly and cheaply before trolls and/or corporations take monopoly rights on their work for 20 years.

</comment><comment><USER24> Why don't professors make students sign IP agreements before bringing them in on research?

<comment><USER25> Professor here.

There are many reasons, but mine is that that is not what I signed up for. The goal of my research is not to make a huge pile of money. It is to advance human knowledge. So when I discover something, I give it away. That's the _goal_. This is how universities are traditionally set up. With a few high- profile exceptions, it's largely how they are still set up.

This means I am unlikely to get rich. OTOH, I don't have to limit my ideas to those likely to make money, which is hugely freeing. I get to work on nifty stuff for _decades_ without ever worrying about being even "Ramen profitable".

If I were in the position of Mark Bolas, I'd certainly be wistful about the billion dollars I might have had. I would probably be very unhappy that some work that built on mine did not even mention me. (In academia, we _always_ give credit to those whose work we build on. It's an unbreakable rule.[1])

However, I would not be indignant or -- except for the lack of credit -- feel mistreated or owed anything. As I said, that is not what I signed up for.

[1] I personally get very annoyed when, as often happens, companies break this rule. I used to get into arguments about this with people at booths at conferences. I've mellowed a bit since then, I think, but it still annoys me.

<comment><USER26> That's an excellent perspective. :).

At least in my field, in order to remain both functional and employed, we have to work on ideas that attract funding. For us to make effective use of our skills, there's a small but meaningful burn rate in hardware and machining costs.

An aside: It's totally possible for Oculus to make a substantial thank-you gift to Bolas.

<comment><USER27> One of the Linux distros (Red Hat, maybe?) did that to Linus when they went public.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> We don't celebrate inventors we celebrate money-makers because we ourselves want to be money makers. This is why the men that made the Internet, the MP3 player, the Television, will never be held up to the same level of worship as the men who made money off of the internet, mp3 player, and television.

Who invented the car? Dunno, I had to google it. Who is famous for making massive amounts of money off of the car? Mr. Ford.

This goes deeper. We celebrate in others what we want to have or "be" ourselves (beauty, money, power, tall, strong). We hate/dislike in others the characteristics that we ourselves don't want to have (ugly, short, bald, dumb, gay). This is where a lot of phobias and disliking of groups of people come from.

<comment><USER29> The car was incrementally "invented" by a huge number of people, while Ford created alone an entirely new kind of industry.

<comment><USER30> To be fair, if the innovation we are crediting Occulus is successfully popularizing VR, I think we are being premature.

There have been VR headsets available for years, at comparable prices. They were less immersive, but we will see the Occulus as unimmersive in a few years.

Whether it actually popularizes VR, or is just a fad will depend on whether comparable products are common in 5 or 10 years.

For instance Nintendo did not popularize power gloves. They were cool, but it turned out people didn't want to play games like that. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Glove](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Glove)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The original sounds more suitable for me, personally: in effect, a larger display, without larger/heavier/mAh device.

Bonuses: you don't have to hold it; get the angle right; block sunlight reflections; clean fingermarks. I'd use it with a bluetooth keyboard (maybe, problems if you can't see the keyboard, possibly?)

I don't want motion tracking VR (latency is a huge problem, incredibly challenging to fix, which I'm not convinced Occulus has - despite Carmack's support).

I don't film everyone all the time, freaking them out, nor speak to myself in public, nor look like a cyborg (i.e. Glass).

Apple will probably nail what works. Typical.

</comment><comment><USER32> Acknowledgement is one thing, but remuneration is another. Not sure if there's much you can do about the former, but the latter is the raison d'etre of the patent system, no?

<comment><USER7> The problem is that even acknowledgment is discouraged by CYA types in case it leads to litigation later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I will just repeat: "An idea is worth nothing. Execution is everything."

Oculus Rift has solved a huge pile of technical problems that makes the original idea actually _useful_.

If you think that an idea is worth anything, go sell someone the idea of time machine — without an implementation in sight.

<comment><USER34> But equally, credit costs nothing to give.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hmm. I wonder if one of Facebook's competitors would be interested in funding the professor that invented this tech to start a competing company? Or is it that the implemented tech, team and market awareness are the thing that's valuable?

</comment><comment><USER7> As arguably the person who first sold Android-based robots, I understand the gripe very well.

People just aren't interested.

They'll praise Tesla once they know who he was, but they still buy Edison.

</comment><comment><USER35> If the original idea for the Oculus Rift came from this man, then they should make sure he gets a share of the pie. It is unconscionable that someone would take his idea, run with it (regardless of how much more work they had to do) and then not give back after making the big time.

If this indeed proves to be the case then I have yet another good reason to avoid this product!

</comment><comment><USER36> I think the Patent Office and the people backing patents would disagree with that - we have more patents than we've ever had and the rate of new patents is _increasing_ \- therefore that must mean inventions are on the rise...

<comment><USER37> > therefore that must mean inventions are on the rise...

Or that the level of incompetence at the patent office is on the rise, or that people are getting better at gaming the system...

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Well, you could argue that the proper split of wealth between having the initial idea of "let's do X", and actually figuring out how X can be done and making it work _is_ 0% vs 100%.

The concept of VR goggles is decades old, but going from goggles that work in theory to goggles that work in practice takes a lot of real innovation - <USER2> whoever _implements_ that is able to patent the innovated concepts and earn money for it.

If the concept of "two really inexpensive lenses, put a SmartPhone screen a few inches away, and wrap the whole thing in an inexpensive housing" is novel and invented by prof. Bolas, then Oculus Rift will likely be paying him patent royalties. If that concept wasn't novel, or the implementation (i.e., actual invention) was performed by someone else, then nothing should be done.

<comment><USER39> I didn't read the article as being about wealth, but being more about credit.

I'm about to start work on an academic project that, if it goes spectacularly well, will make someone else a couple billion dollars. I'm not going to see any of that money and I know that going in. I just get the credit.

I'm okay with this arrangement. I don't want to run a billion dollar company. They get their money and I get my credit. However, I'll find it very unfair if they get the billion dollars and I get stiffed for my credit.

<comment><USER40> Just make sure you publish, and do it loudly.

I was part of a university group that designed and built the first real-time baseband processor for 802.11a wireless LANs. In the timeline, we were sandwiched between the patent holders (CSIRO) and the start-up (Radiata). We removed the risk, by figuring out that it was possible to actually build the idea that CSIRO proposed, and filling in the details, such as how one built a real-time FFT (in 1995) and how to do the error correction. The result of the research was a paper in IEEE Micro [1], so we got the "credit", but how many people mention the Macquarie University team in the same breath as CSIRO (Prime Minister's Award+$1b royalties) and Radiata ($560 million)? When money is involved, people don't like complicated structures, with too many names attached.

[1] [https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=624067](https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=624067)

<comment><USER41> Wow... Credit or not, you and your team built something huge and arguably far, far more valuable to humanity than $1.5bn+. Inspiring.

<comment><USER40> Thanks.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tenacity is a key attribute in successful entrepreneurs - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/12/tenacity.html

<comment><USER2> Put biologically: tenacity is permissive for success.

More pertinently, has anyone ever been both a failure and _labeled_ as tenacious? Tenacity seems like one of those words that we use to describe successful people, making the linkage almost embedded within the word and, therefore, uninteresting.

<comment><USER3> My first startup failed and yet I was labeled as tenacious with regards to it.

<comment><USER2> The startup may have been labeled a failure, but you were not labeled so (at least, not to my knowledge). The distinction is critical to my point.

If that first business were successful, people fond of the buzzword 'tenacious' might label you tenacious, for toughing out the hard times in order to 'win'. Since it failed, they could keep the buzzword alive by bumping it up a level and saying that you were tenacious in pursuing the entrepreneurial dream, wisely jettisoning that failed project and learning great lessons along the way. Neither of those uses of the word would surprise me.

What would be surprising is if the word 'tenacious' were to be decoupled from success. That is, if you never hit it big but were so renowned for your tenacity that you nevertheless got press or recognition for it. Perhaps Daniel Ruettiger (Rudy, from Notre Dame fame) is the best example of someone who is recognized for his tenacity despite not achieving canonical success.*

* = at least, not in football; he is making plenty as a motivational speaker.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is anyone surprised that "tenacity is a key attribute in successful entrepreneurs"? Has anyone _learned_ anything by reading this post?

In my view this submission is vapid to the point of being flag-worthy. Evidence: after two hours this piece has generated zero actual discussion.

<comment><USER5> Right. Is there any way to turn it into an interesting discussion? For example, is tenacity something that can be learned?

Here's an interesting obvservation I've had about tenacity. My company has inspired a small niche in the conference industry. There is one other company that launched at the same time as us and six more that are copycats. One thing I've noticed is that the copycats are full of bluster but light on tenacity. I think having the original idea gives you extra backbone because you are tied to the change you want to see in the world. Copycats just see a business opportunity and start to doubt themselves when they hit rough patches.

<comment><USER6> I believe tenacity can be "learned". I don't know if I'd call it learning though and don't think it's like learning to ride a bike.

Your environment can chisel an "edge" into your personality. Something like a chip on your shoulder. Doesn't this happen a lot in small teams? You against the world? Soldiers in small military units, startups, and again, sports see similar "effects".

Adversity or emotional abuse might produce a similar result. A parent telling a child that something isn't good enough or to not let them down on a task.

Isn't this loosely related to all those posts about not telling kids they're smart?

<comment><USER5> I read an interesting story about the family angle today:

[http://espn.go.com/blog/truehoop/post/_/id/11562/the- essenti...](http://espn.go.com/blog/truehoop/post/_/id/11562/the-essential- reggie-miller-documentary)

This is about probable NBA hall-of-famer Reggie Miller and how he turned into a renowned trash talker. Apparently a lot of the drive came from growing up under the thumb of his even more successful older sister. The day he scored 40 points in a high school game was the day she scored 105. He couldn't beat her one-on-one until he was an adult. Now trash-talking is not the same as success, but it takes some tenacity to keep challenging people no matter how the game is flowing.

How many of us wish our parents and siblings were meaner?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I believe that tenacity leads to luck, simply through more tries:

Chance II springs from your energetic, generalized motor activities... the freer they are, the better.

[Chance II] involves the kind of luck [Charles] Kettering... had in mind when he said, "Keep on going and chances are you will stumble on something, perhaps when you are least expecting it. I have never heard of anyone stumbling on something sitting down."

[http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/luck-and-the- entrepreneu...](http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/luck-and-the-entrepreneur- part-1-the-four-kin)

</comment><comment> n-named Having hands is a key attribute in successful basketball players.

</comment><comment><USER8> Summary: Tenacity is important. Others agree. I know some tenacious people. Yay for me.</comment>


Social conservatism on American campuses - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/united-states/2019/05/04/no-sex-please-were-millennials <comment><USER2> I wish they'd include the idea of "competition in the marketplace for orgasms" alongside these social and economic ideas.

People have limited time & energy, so some percent are conceivably putting less effort into the difficult ways of relieving sexual tension (relationships) while favoring the easier ways to do so (pornography).

Porn has been one of the first industries to take advantage of technology, and the change in accessibility of porn is unparalleled. It went from something one was forced to sneakily travel to shady locations and physically purchase to something that we are accidentally exposed to or even advertised to on omnipresent screens everywhere in our lives.

And that isn't even going into the way the market has selected for 'more potent' forms of pornography- like the way that just about every fetish can be explored to depths that would shock/offend someone who doesn't share it. (something that probably has an isolating effect on relationships)

And it also isn't accounting for the new-ish industry of 'relationship replacement' style streamers- another economic activity that I believe must be competing with traditional 1 on 1 relationships.

<comment><USER3> There has _always_ been porn. _IME_ , it served several roles, but generally did not replace the desire to be in a relationship or at least physically intimate with another person. Sure, porn is more available and more potent in a sense now, and it may be a factor, but I think at most it is a minor one. Something else is making kids introverted and isolated.

<comment><USER4> 40 years ago, when I started my interest in porn, it was... different. Both in availability and in "potentness".

Skip forward 40 years, I have a bunch of millennial kids. Their (for me discoverable) sexual encounters are extremely limited in comparison to mine and that of my wife, at that age.

Personally I do not think that the one (porn) has much to do with the other (limited). What I suspect is far more the lack of privacy and anonymity. Everyone in their age group seems afraid of the potential flack they will receive "when people find out I did X with Y". And with the current over connectivity that seems a real possibility.

Whereas we, between 15 and 25, could disappear for a couple of hours / days, and the lamest excuse would enable you to get away with anything.

I truly do not envy this generation. It seems growing up, as in establishing your own personality and experiences, is so much harder.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> mellow-lake-day > The economy is strong.

I'm not sure why the author ends on such an optimistic note. Economy isn't great especially for millennials. 80% of Americans as a whole live paycheck to paycheck. Furthermore there are some signs that there will be another recession coming up. If anything these statistics are going to get worse.

[https://www.npr.org/2018/11/30/672103209/why-arent- millennia...](https://www.npr.org/2018/11/30/672103209/why-arent-millennials- spending-more-they-re-poorer-than-their-parents-fed-says)

[https://www.cbsnews.com/news/millennials-are-much-poorer- tha...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/millennials-are-much-poorer-than-their- parents-data-show/)

[https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/09/shutdown-highlights- that-4-i...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/09/shutdown-highlights- that-4-in-5-us-workers-live-paycheck-to-paycheck.html)

[https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jan/05/global- econ...](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jan/05/global-economic- crash-2020-understand-why)

<comment><USER5> Well, we had a huge recession 10 years ago, and we've only recently recovered fully from it. We're at full employment now. There are more open jobs today than unemployed people in the US.

It's true that the value of unskilled and low-skilled labor has dropped, but the value of skilled labor has substantially increased. Case in point: software developers are _on average_ making $150k in salary alone in the Bay Area. Add bonuses, equity, and other cash and non-cash benefits: a good programmer can easily make over $200k. (I'm a millennial, and I find my own compensation incredible and unbelievable.)

Americans living paycheck to paycheck has more to do with spending habits than income. People in the United States continue to have the world's highest purchasing power. On a large scale, living paycheck to paycheck has more to do with culture and discipline than level of income. (Exceptions exist: living in a high cost-of-living area with low/minimum-wage income, only having part-time temporary like PhD graduates who have to be adjuncts and TAs forever, etc.)

<comment><USER6> > There are more open jobs today than unemployed people

It also depends on your income source. People with low job quality end up with low living quality regardless how much they earn.

If it is coming from a busy job that for whatever reason feels pointless and or stressful, not having enough breaks, and long commute, etc..

That adds to all news about corruption, wars, conflicts, surveillance.. and people end up adopting pets more than willing to have children because they are seeking to have a free private time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It seems like millennials are avoiding partying in general. Alcohol is a factor in a lot of casual sex. Hell, my family got started because two otherwise unattractive people who previously hated each other realized they liked to get drunk on cheap wine and play with each others' naughty bits. A baby was conceived and a family was started out of guilt. Alcohol plays a big role in breaking down people's inhibitions and insecurities. Now that the combination of alcohol and sex are considered verboten, you lose one of the most effective aphrodisiacs and social lubricants.

I'm curious if whatever is behind our lowering sperm counts is also playing a role in this.

Given the experience of my fiancee, a millennial who gave up on guys her own age, it seems like the guys who are sexually active(i.e. the ones not stuck on video games and smoking weed), are creeps and philanderers. Hook-up apps and technologically fueled cheating have definitely reduced the mystique behind committed, monogamous relationships among kids these days.

Also, title is misspelled. Two n's in millennials.

<comment><USER7> Obviously there are many factors, those included but I wouldn't be as quick to discount ideological factors as many people are doing. The Metoo stuff...actually this has been bubbling long before as a general feature of puritanical 3rd wave feminism really has put a damper on things, not just through direct fear instilled into men but generally moving the overton window of sex in society's subconscious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> First off, I'm not making any judgments here -- every generation has its problems.

If I had to guess, I would say that a significant part of this phenomenon is tied to status concerns. Compared to Gen X, more people from the millennial generation appear to be openly obsessed with status. (Gen X cared about status, too, but from what I have seen it was considered "uncool" to care about status as an Xer, so you had to have some subtlety about how you obtained it.) Obsession with status is tolerated and even encouraged by peers, and is further reinforced by social networks and group dynamics.

* Flirt with someone who rejects you? You lose status.

* Seen by peers with someone of potentially lower status? You lose status.

* Hook up with someone when there are negative rumors about them? You lose status.

* Make out with someone who rejected a friend? You damage that relationship and either gain or lose status based on mysterious dynamics.

Status is felt as an invisible currency that affects your prospects for friendships, relationships, and your career. As such, losing it is seen as worse than an equivalent monetary loss. It's almost equivalent to "losing face" in East Asian countries, although the consequences are not quite as severe.

I would argue that there is actually an ongoing "status bubble" and that people are _overestimating_ the value of status -- surely it can't be worth all that. For single people, though, it can be hard to drop out of the status game. Who wants to be seen as a "loser"?

Edit: I didn't really account for the gender disparity here, I've got some vague ideas but this was already treading too deep into speculation. Anyway, I don't think this can be fully explained by #MeToo concerns.

<comment><USER4> Very interesting take on the situation. Thanks, I will keep that in mind and field test your hypothesis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It could also be due to the millennial generation being pickier about who we have sex with. Consider this graph [1] from Datacalysm. It displays the number of messages received by attractiveness. The more attractive an individual, the more messages they receive. There's also another graph [2] that splits this data by gender.

There is a pretty significant drop around the 85% mark for women. Which means that the bottom 80% of men are competing for the top 10% of women when meeting through online dating apps.

In a world where a more attractive individual is only a swipe away, it's much more likely that the less attractive individuals are getting far less sex.

This is just attractiveness. Consider other elements, like family pressures, possibilities of lawsuits / accusations (#MeToo), and other modern issues around sex. No wonder folks are spending less time hooking up.

[1]: [https://i1.wp.com/www.brainpickings.org/wp- content/uploads/2...](https://i1.wp.com/www.brainpickings.org/wp- content/uploads/2014/10/dataclysm3.jpg)

[2]: [https://i.redd.it/09d1ndzeki221.jpg](https://i.redd.it/09d1ndzeki221.jpg)

<comment><USER10> _Which means that the bottom 80% of men are competing for the top 10% of women when meeting through online dating apps._

How does this conclusion follow from the charts you've linked to?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Previously a person's mate selection was very geographically constrained. Everyone wanted to date the most attractive person in (school, town, neighborhood).

The internet has broadened the pool of potential mates beyond mere geography. Which makes finding a match easier, but makes all the matches nearby seem less desirable, and makes all the long-distance matches difficult. Particularly on a constrained budget.

<comment><USER12> Hard disagree, most people aren't looking outside of a pretty narrow radius on the apps.

<comment><USER13> Parent said "mates" rather than hookups.

<comment><USER14> I always cringe when I see people describe human relationships in biological terms, it hints at a feeling of reductiveness, or the applicability of all biological models to human behavior without taking into consideration massive societal differences and the change in attitudes and the emergence of new sexuality (see Japan's hikkikomori) even of the past few hundred years. It's the same sort of "analysis" that uses "breeding" to refer to when people have children. To top it off, the people using these terms to describe human phenomena are likely not even qualified in biological sciences, never mind anthropology, sociology or psychology.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> " The portion of Americans aged 18 to 29 who claim to have had no sex for 12 months has more than doubled in a decade—to 23% last year"

Can also be read as "The portion of Americans aged 18 to 29 who have sex has slightly decreased, from 89% to 77%".

<comment><USER16> A 15% decline is slight?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> There seems to be a lot of different explanations given below, but I can't help but think of:

It's all of them, more or less.

They've pretty much all come up as a consequence to the internet, whether it be better organisation leading more effective communication of how (some) men make unwanted advances, dissemination of pornography or the paradox of choice in dating. You could probably throw on top of that pile greater entertainment choices that are not pornography, making the payoff for sex just too low when you can get instant gratification now.

</comment><comment><USER18> >The portion of Americans aged 18 to 29 who _claim_ to have had no sex for 12 months has more than doubled in a decade

>almost a threefold rise in the share of men under the age of 30 who _claim_ to be having no sex

So are people actually having less sex, or are they just more willing to admit it?

</comment><comment><USER19> How about too many people think that they deserve somebody too much more attractive than they are?

Things like Facebook/Instagram/Tinder give the _illusion_ that there are lots of attractive people out there when, in reality, those attractive people are unavailable to _YOU_ because _YOU_ aren't attractive enough. If you hold out for someone too far above your level, you're going to be waiting a while.

This has been documented in college professors. Divorce rates are quite a bit higher among college professors because the abundance of attractive members of the opposite sex makes them less satisfied with their partners even though those youngsters really aren't available to them.

</comment><comment><USER20> There are a lot of people (such as myself) that grew up poor, so we invest most of our energy into our careers to avoid falling back into poverty. Unfortunately, families are expensive and a great way to ensure you raise another generation in poverty.

It's no surprise that people are putting off marriage and starting a family if you don't want to raise children in the same situation you were raised in. It's a similar problem across the pond in Japan where people grew up in practically single-parent households due to the rigors of work potentially leading to Karoshi. So you have people either completely checking out of society, or focusing entirely inwards to avoid a repeat of history.

<comment><USER21> In the past the ruling class could always count on the proletariat (literally "offspring producing") to reproduce itself no matter how abysmal its conditions. Yet today we find ourselves in a situation Malthus could not have expected: the proletariat is on reproductive strike! The ruling class response is to push an ideology of mass migration that no one dares question. Who will stand up and say they don't welcome immigrants? Not I. This solution seems to be working in the short term, but if birth rates decline in the developing world, there won't be anyone to mass migrate. Then what? Share the wealth?

<comment><USER22> Plenty of people speak up against mass immigration, especially amongst the proles. Not everyone is concerned with being seen as racist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> A WaPo, NYPost & Village Voice alum who was also crab fisherman mentioned... over time, values morph and almost invert entirely:

\- Upper-case Liberal Democrat become fascist, close-minded and exclusionary

\- The left becomes a circular firing squad

\- Republicans become more lower-case liberal

\- People become atomized from one-another and no longer "disagree without being disagreeable," i.e., it's insults, snark, rhetorical spin doctoring, dismissiveness, censorship and blocking. Oh and power to the most easily offended.

\- Victim hierarchy inverts power dynamics, rather than delivering equity for all, due to prevalence of mandatory equality of outcome.

In general, I think people have fashionablized and cargo-culted philosophical and political positions rather than maintained, mentored, practiced and restored them to their past meanings and values. Maybe it's partially due to the breakdown in social accountability because of mobile populations and partial anonymity/mostly unregulated nature of social media.

</comment><comment><USER24> Interesting read, but I wish that the writer would conjecture beyond the experience of a non-representative minority (kids who attend top 25 colleges). If you're trying to explain changes in the average of a binary valued distribution, you should focus on the middle 80% of the population.

</comment><comment><USER25> Less sex, and more porn most likely.

I think plenty of people fulfill their sexual needs through online means these days, which is a shame because real life experiences are much more emotionally enriching, with the added benefit that if you repeatedly engage sexually with a person you really like, it could form the basis of a relationship. Whereas in the digital space, one gets no long term return on the time invested/wasted.

<comment><USER19> > real life experiences are much more emotionally enriching

I would challenge this and probably flag it as the core problem.

Most interactions with the opposite sex are emotionally draining and insipid and our digital interactions are almost _always_ more rewarding.

The problem is that you have to wade through a ton of mud to get to the gold nugget that is someone you genuinely like to interact with.

<comment><USER25> > Most interactions with the opposite sex are emotionally draining ...

Indeed, but this can be successfully counteracted to some degree by proper socialization, and by participating in social activities alongside a group of friends, which by virtue of creating social contexts, will lower the barriers to social interactions.

People spend too much time indoors in the company of their screens, and without adequate social training, anxiety will surely present itself when one is placed in the company of real people, especially of the opposite sex.

> The problem is that you have to wade through a ton of mud to get to the gold > nugget that is someone you genuinely like to interact with.

Anything meaningful in life requires some level of effort. There's no way around it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Everything we do is wrong, so I really don't know what we are supposed to do.

</comment><comment><USER27> I find it fascinating to see see the cognitive dissonance between the writer's findings and conclusion.

</comment><comment><USER28> What is with the editorialized title?

</comment><comment><USER29> I think it's a number of things. For one, we have less free time to be social, we're under more stress, social media is warping expectations and self-esteem, dating costs more than for prior generations, STDs and awareness of them, partisanship and people actually not wanting to date people with differing political opinions, and on and on.

</comment><comment><USER30> > Many considered the prospect of chatting someone up in a bar not merely > daunting but possibly offensive. "Revealing that your intention in talking > to someone is sexual? That's hairy," shuddered one man.

When I read things like this, I can't understand whether american culture has gotten weirdly puritan or this is a wild exaggeration. There's such a huge distance between politely and respectfully expressing sexual interest in someone, especially in a BAR, and being creepy and offensive.

Edit: just to clarify, I've never lived in US or in countries in the similar #metoo zeitgest, so this is an uneducated view from the outside.

<comment><USER31> This is a wild exaggeration. Men used to be able to basically hit on women in all contexts with zero consequence (e.g. hitting on women at work was ok, let alone butting into a group at a bar). More recently, people have been pushing back on men who are inappropriate.

This leads to some men who don't understand the new boundaries having a very large overreaction and essentially saying that it's impossible or scary to 'chat someone up'. See also the men who won't work/game in mixed gender groups because it's "too difficult".

The new rules are essentially 'be respectful' and "there's a time a place" and 'politely accept no as an answer' and 'no one owes you shit'.

They aren't complicated rules.

<comment><USER32> Even easier, just be nice, friendly and maybe even charming. You shouldn't even start to flirt until all that is going well, and by then the flirting is probably fine.

<comment><USER33> Many people would consider being nice, friendly, and especially charming to be flirting.

<comment><USER32> I just mean in the same way that they are (or should be) nice, friendly and charming with their friends and family.

If you meet new people and you find them attractive, treat them like they are already a friend that you've known for years. Don't be weird, just tell them a funny story, embarrass yourself, show them that you're fun and human. Those are my rules, and I've dated way out of my league my entire life. I'm not saying it's easy, but it is simple (not to be confused).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I wonder if dating apps contribute to a "paradox of choice".

The book by Aziz Anzari "Modern Dating" suggests this may be a factor.

<comment><USER35> I really liked this book! I don't think I want to post spoilers (like really buy and read the book), but I think he established an inverse relationship between how free a society is towards sex and how much actual sex people have.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> 40% of romances used to be office romances. These days, asking a woman out at work will get you reprimanded by HR.

</comment><comment><USER37> Is there a non-paywall version anywhere?

<comment><USER38> [https://outline.com/xxTDbh](https://outline.com/xxTDbh)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Non Paywall Version: [https://outline.com/xxTDbh](https://outline.com/xxTDbh)

</comment><comment><USER40> You don't really need real physical sex with all the associated risks and overheads when quality porn has become so abundant and readily accessible.

A half hour spent on pornhub vs. dealing with other people while making a diceroll on your health and safety? One is clearly more convenient and costs less by a very wide margin.

Unless, of course, you want to make children.</comment>


TechCrunch Stories Now Appear On WashingtonPost.com - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/08/techcrunch-stories-now-appear-on-washingtonpostcom/ <comment><USER2> Oh boy, now people who don't give a crap about technology can enjoy Michael Arrington's idle speculation and ad hominem attacks.

</comment><comment><USER3> I am just afraid what he is doing is creating another tech bubble artificially or assisting creating a bubble. It reminds me all things happened in 10 years ago in dotCom bubble. And I would rather concentrate in making what people wants instead of flipping a startup.

</comment><comment><USER4> Wow its not only traffic, if you get on TC you now get an article on Washington Post thats PR7 without nofollows, big SEO boost.

Sounds good to me.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> now the power of getting techcrunched is even higher as people outside our little world will hear about your startup

</comment><comment><USER5> very good move for both companies, would love to know which way the money is being paid and also how much.</comment>


In 2019, there were only 13 PhDs in CS granted to African Americans in the U.S. [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://cra.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/2019-Taulbee-Survey.pdf <comment><USER2> According to Census Bureau (2019)[1], this is the racial/ethnic makeup of the US:

        White                                       60.4%
        Hispanic and Latino Americans (of any race) 18.3%
        Black or African American                   13.4%
        Asian                                       5.9%
        Native Americans and Alaska Natives         1.3%
        Native Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islander 0.2%
        Two or more races 2.7%

Below is the normalized 2019 CS Ph.D. count for what you'd expect if the US was 100% of each respective race/ethnicity:

        White                          608
        Hispanic...                    115
        Black or African/American      97
        Asian                          2,560
        Native Americans/Alaska Native 153
        Native Hawaiian/Pac Islander   500

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_Unit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_United_States)

</comment><comment><USER3>
        Nonresident Alien             906 61.7%
        Amer Indian or Alaska Native    2  0.1%
        Asian                         151 10.3%
        Black or African-American      13  0.9%
        Native Hawaiian/Pac Islander    1  0.1%
        White                         365 24.9%
        Multiracial, not Hispanic       9  0.6%
        Hispanic, any race             21  1.4%

<comment><USER4> And only 21 of hispanic background? That's low, too. Also, "Non-resident Alien" could include all manner of race/ethnicity. Does it break anything down beyond that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is terrible. More black people are struck by lightning, than earn a CS Phd?

"over the last 30 years (1989-2018) the U.S. has averaged 43 reported lightning fatalities per year. Only about 10% of people who are struck by lightning are killed, leaving 90% with various degrees of disability"

[https://www.weather.gov/safety/lightning- odds](https://www.weather.gov/safety/lightning-odds)

13.2% of the US population is black. [https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/IPE120218](https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/IPE120218)

So expected is about 6 black people killed by lighting, and 60 struck/year vs 13 who graduate with CS Phd if these stats are correct.

</comment><comment><USER6> And the Nonresident Aliens get 906 more times PHDs than native hawaian (also twice as many as all of US ethnicities combined)

Statistics could mean a lot of things and can be spun a lot of ways.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Ethnicity stats can be seen at page 6.

<comment><USER7> These don't seem ethnicity stats at all. These are "two or three groups we have problems with" plus the rest of humanity divided in "white" and "Asians".

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> using the word 'granted' is an odd phrasing here

<comment><USER9> How so? The terminology is centuries old.

See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_degree](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_degree) , which mentions things like "The Archbishop of Canterbury's right to grant degrees is derived from Peter's Pence Act of 1533 which empowered the Archbishop to grant dispensations previously granted by the Pope")

Or [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_degree#History_of...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_degree#History_of_professional_degrees_in_North_America) \- "The M.B. or Bachelor of Medicine was the first medical degree to be granted in the United States and Canada."

Or for a university, [http://catalog.yale.edu/gsas/degree-granting- departments-pro...](http://catalog.yale.edu/gsas/degree-granting-departments- programs/) \- "Degree-Granting Departments and Programs".

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> And? In 2020 America there is ample opportunity for anyone to attempt a CS Phd. I am a proponent of equality of opportunity, not of outcome.

<comment><USER11> This stat is clear evidence that there is not equality of opportunity.

<comment><USER12> Disparity of outcome does not prove disparity of opportunity.

<comment><USER11> Could you explain the logic that get you to that conclusion?

Everytime somebody has tried to argue that to me, it turns out that they believe that there are racial differences that are not based on evidence.

For example, I once had somebody say that the racial outcome differences were not like socioeconomic upbringing differences in outcome, and that though socioeconomic outcome differences were evidence of difference in opportunity, that racial differences were genetic, which is clearly abiological.

So if you are not positing racial differences in opportunity, what are you positing as the explanatory variable?

<comment><USER13> If it was all socioeconomics, you could see that in the data. You would control for parent's income and/or education, and you would see disparity disappear.

I don't know what is the primary cause of disparities but i wouldn't assume it's all socioeconomics without evidence.

Maybe different groups are valuing things differently? For example, an Indian may try to migrate to US using PHD as a gateway. So they may be more willing to sacrifice and work hard. Or maybe for some groups PHD (or education in general) brings more prestige compared to others.

<comment><USER11> My point is that socioeconomic differences resulting in different outcomes would be accepted as evidence of differences of opportunity. Because there's ample evidence of opportunities being different when growing up with fewer resources and more stresses.

There's also ample evidence of racial discrimination resulting in differences of opportunity, in all fields of science. But people are quick to assume that it doesn't exist, or are quick to point out any chance that it may even exist.

<comment><USER13> If a group has "fewer resources and more stresses" "when growing up", we should try to address that directly.

This doesn't mean universities doesn't present equal opportunity.

The reason someone is not as capable may be just bad luck (bad parents etc.). But still, society should give positions to most capable ones.

<comment><USER11> I would point out that the original claim was "equal opportunity," not merely "universities presenting equal opportunity."

And I agree that we should fix the systemic racism that causes unequal opportunity starting from early in in life.

And if we are to believe the stories that come from Black people that attempt degrees in CS, or STEM in general, they also face significant differences in opportunity at the university level as well. I'm inclined to believe these stories, as everytime I have spent some time investigating they have been true.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>