Ask HN: I'm an idea guy. Apparently I'm worth nothing? - <AUTHOR>

Execution is everything. Ideas are a dime a dozen.
I have seen from a lot of places that it's not ideas that count, but the execution. This leaves me in a quandary. I have ideas, all the time, every second of every day. Every piece of information I come across, whether it be an article here on HN, my rss feed or on the web, gives me ideas. Walking down the street I see something, it gives me an idea. I sit at home, drinking and watching the fire, I have ideas. They never stop coming. Never.
I have worked, consulted and taught and mentored people, and been successful (meaning made them be successful), because I have ideas. But as I look around me, I see no way to "monetize" (how I hate that misused word) my skill.
Now it's not that I don't know that execution is king. Part of my success with helping people, companies etc, is due to the fact that I believe in (and enforce) disciplined execution. Take an idea and do it. Do it, do it, do it. But my strength is in ideas. I hear something from someone and immediately come up with ideas about it. It's what I do. It's what I'm excellent at.
The latest idea I have come up with to solve my problem is to follow through on the premise that "information wants to be free". I will be shortly putting up a website where I will put all my ideas out there (I'm thinking under a creative commons license) for anyone to take and use and execute. I really hope some people from here will find something on it that they can run with and make the big "exit". Or have fun with. Or ridicule in a constructive manner (I'm a big fan of iteration). Most of all I hope someone will chat with me about the ideas. My forte is improvising and exploring ideas with another person. I'm a real jack-of-all-trades so I'm held back on a lot of things because I don't have the in depth knowledge. (Especially math related ideas, I have a crap load of stuff I want to explore in the math world but my abilities are sorely lacking due to an extended period in my life when I was a child and missed out on school. But I really want to explore them) But I seem to have a skill in bringing out that knowledge from people who do know. And I am always learning as I go.
But I would like to know some of your thoughts about what kind of place there is in this world for for a person such as I, whose ideas take him into places that are far out of his depth, ability and means, but who knows he can make a contribution, and change the world. Please, don't hold back, I am pretty thick skinned, critism only makes me more informed. One thing to keep in mind: I don't want to go the way of the guru. I don't want to be the best in a field. I have to keep a beginners mind. It is the only thing that keeps the ideas coming. <comment><USER3> > I hear something from someone and immediately come up with ideas about it. > It's what I do. It's what I'm excellent at.

That's not a rare skill. Lots of people do it. Many of them are also good at execution.

The latter limits your market somewhat. You're competing for the attention of good executers who don't have good ideas with all of the folks with lame ideas, not just folks like yourself. There are some very natural reactions to that situation that drive them to prefer working with executers who have ideas instead of going with "an idea guy".

The other problem is that there "we" have more good ideas than we can ever hope to implement.

Perhaps you need a story that isn't about you or your ideas in the abstract. Most people prefer stories about them.

<comment><AUTHOR> I disagree with your first statement. I would say that many people do it. A few are also good at execution. I think these few are the ones ,for example, who start successful startups. I think _many_ people, when they hear something from someone, judge. "That's cool." or "That's dumb"

As for the market, I am trying to discover if there even is a market for what I am good at. I don't care if it is limited, I am just wondering if the fact that someone can have original ideas that are important may well go the way of the dodo. Is inventiveness becoming a commodity? If you look back hundreds of years ago, a lot of major discoveries were arrived at independently in a fairly close time frame. That was with fewer people in the world, and even fewer of them educated (comparing to modern times). Nowadays I am pretty sure that every idea I may have is being thought up by 500 other people at the same time. Will there be any value in me trying to refine myself as an idea maker? To make better ideas? Or will something like YC eventually be a place for a team to apply with their skills then pick an interesting idea from the twittersphere and execute it to phenomenal success?

By the way, I am not shy of execution (I have been self employed most of my life) and I have seen plans through to fulfillment. I just feel that when I am managing the details, making every point of an idea go through, I am not doing what I am best at. You are completely right about having more ideas than we can implement. I just don't like this status quo, and I'm trying to find a way to change it. I am sorry, but I completely didn't understand your last sentence. I should make a story about who?

<comment><USER3> > I am sorry, but I completely didn't understand your last sentence. I should > make a story about who?

Sorry - I switched gears and started responding to your presentation.

<comment><AUTHOR> Gotcha. I actually teach presenting to people, and I am a big fan of the "Beyond Bullet Points" method of creating a story format and centering it around the audience. But I wanted to cut through any "tricks* so to say, and just put the pertinent info out there, because I wanted to get peoples gut reactions. You are right, maybe if I had taken the time to make people connect to my issue, I may have gotten more responses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Didn't Edison say that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration? I think he's right.

I get cool ideas for things to do every day, probably enough to fill a few man years. I've got to filter that stream down to a very small list that fits my available time and resources. Since I've got a long backlog of my own ideas, I'm not all that interested in develop other people's ideas -- unless they're writing me a good paycheck.

People's time in evaluating your ideas isn't free; turning one of your ideas into a rough estimate of the resources needed to execute it, and of potential market prospects, can be hours or days of work.

One of my big complaints about X-Forge and X-Hub open source sites is that they encourage people to put out huge volumes of software out there without documentation, marketing materials, or even an elevator pitch that explains what the software does. I suppose some of that software could save me a lot of development time, but I know I could spend hours a day downloading, compiling and testing software that I'll never use... So I don't, not unless the people put some effort into marketing the project and explaining why I should care.

The 'math deficiency' particularly concerns me, largely because of what I experienced when I used to teach Physics. One of the most common things I'd hear from the C-and-under students was "I understand the concepts, but I can't solve the problems." Well, helping the student was a process much like debugging an expert system: and inevitably, along the way, I'd discover what the student had in his 'knowledge base' and find that he didn't understand the concepts at all.

I've got a superpower which may be similar to what you've got: I can research a topic for a shockingly little amount of time (sometimes even 20 minutes) and impersonate an expert.

I've given talks at conferences on all sorts of subjects -- if I had 3 days to prepare, I could be a stand-in for any speaker at TED and pretty much get away with it. That's despite being (historically) two standard deviations below the mean on appearance and many other skills related to presentation. I'm just really good at attacking a body of literature, building a knowledge base, and telling stories about it.

That's a skill that kept me out of academia, despite my PhD, because it calls the whole system into question: why do you need to give people tenure and put them through so much training when this guy can come in and 'pass' for one of them.

What am I doing about it? First, I'm targeting those areas where my interpersonal skills are weak. Second, I'm working on breaking down my narrative reprocessing skills into something a computer can do, to create something like an 'amateur system.'

Now excuse me while I go execute my idea...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the in depth reply. As for Edison: what if I spend my perspiration (all 99% of it) on working on the idea? I agree wholeheartedly with his eval of genius in that only 1% of the work is inspired. The rest comes from knowledge and hard work and experience.

I want people to evaluate my ideas (maybe) but I don't want them to do the shit-work. Most of my ideas are formed enough that I know the resources that will be needed, and I've been in business long enough to do the market research and think about whether or not the idea could be viable. But some of the ideas are "pure" ideas. Not products, or software or services. (BTW I am with you on all the forge-hub syndrome)

The math deficiency for me is a problem in that I have missed out on some basics somewhere, and I have been forever trying to catch up to them. I think maybe I am the opposite of what you described, because I couldn't really get the concepts of math, but I could solve the problems, but only through my own convoluted, invented version of math I devised. This has hurt me a more than a few ways: one through school, where i would get the right answer on tests, but in showing my workings, the teacher would be thinking "WTF?!?" secondly, when trying to work through something like Knuth's TAOCP, the math would hold me back, because I can't understand what he _wants_ me to understand. And I know that it is important not to just solve the problems, but to understand why they are solved that way. It's a shame your 'skill' kept you out of academia. Maybe someone can _pass_ for them, but no 'faker' can contribute what the good PhDs have to knowledge. (And no fake PhD has contributed what smart 'uneducated' people have over the millenia) Now get back to making your idea real, and thanks for the input.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Schizophrenics are also ideas guys. An idea is just a fragment of thought. It's one step above the sparkles you see when you rub your eyes. Having lots of ideas isn't a skill as far as I'm concerned, just and indication that you have an inflated sense of your own importance and ability.

Knowledge and experience are humbling, they teach you just how hard people had to work to get us to where we are now. I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that if you did have a sound base of mathematical knowledge, you wouldn't have many ideas because you'd realise just how hard it is to create a novel proof.

Ideas aren't worth squat because the overwhelming majority of them are complete bunk. Ideas are like a big pile of dirt - the value comes from the digging and sifting and smashing and polishing that gets you the gems. Action is what creates value.

<comment><AUTHOR> I can agree with your first point, sometimes I do wonder if I am slightly schizoid. But as I responded to someone below, I actually have a slightly more disciplined approach to my idea making. What you refer to as an idea, is the first of 7 stages an idea goes through with me. I call them sparks, or seeds. Some of these make it through all the stages, ending up as a physical prototype, or even a piece of beta software, some of them get shot down early in the process due to them being crap, or due to the fact that I don't have enough knowledge of the specific field to take it any further without knowing if I'm heading into "complete bunk" territory. That's why I have a few ideas which are math based that are stuck in limbo: I am currently trying to research what work had been done on the problems, and then how to teach myself the relevant skills to see if I can move with the ideas themselves. (But it's such a huge field I lose faith as I wade through the texts available) But math is just one of many areas I work in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm a "doer", but I'm always looking for good ideas. I'll take your ideas, and you can have 1% of the profits afterward if I implement them.

Find enough guys like me, and you could actually make a comfortable living.

Not sure how you'd actually implement something like that, though. No way to prove an idea was originally yours (because, realistically, somebody has probably thought of most of it before).

I do like the idea of an ideas website, though. Maybe with a mechanism so other people can post theirs? Maybe with a donation mechanism... Entrepreneurs have lots of extra ideas, and the ones they don't have time to implement they post on the ideas site. If I make a million dollars off an idea there, I donate a couple grand to the original author.

<comment><AUTHOR> The idea is for "doers" like you to take something and run with it. If you profit from it, that is good enough for me, as it validates the strength of my ideas. I don't want to receive anything from the people who do the hard work to make money from it. That is the reason for the CC license, so that someone can take an idea, profit from it, and not have to worry about lawsuits down the way. I am still trying to see if there is a better option to reassure people that they won't need to worry about me coming along and saying "Hey, my idea, throw me some cash!!!" This is especially important if someone takes an idea and has to look for finance later. You have hit the nail on the head regarding the website. In researching other websites on ideas out there, there are a crap load of sites where people put up one-line ideas, with no thought of implementation. Due to the years of work I've done creating CMS, CRM and ERP software, behind the site will be an IMS (idea management system) that hopefully will force people to take their idea through my system from "spark" to implementation. I am a strong believer in competition making us stronger. So I want to put my ideas out there to see if someone can beat me to implementation. I think that could give me extra impetus to solidly push my ideas out. The end goal (maybe) is instead of you making a million and giving 1%, is to work with me later on down the line and make 2 million together.

<comment><USER6> I like the sound of that... I guess the challenge is to give people an incentive to post idea to the site without guarantee of remuneration.

Future partnership is a strong incentive... but that implies that the "idea" guy can give added value beyond the initial idea, which may or may not be true.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Seems like you are answering your own question. You know ideas are only the seed. Execution, iteration, and persistence is what makes things tangible.

So make your idea engine tangible. The website thing sounds like a fine idea to try - mostly because you will foster connections with other people.

 _"I will be shortly putting up a website where I will put all my ideas out there (I'm thinking under a creative commons license) for anyone to take and use and execute."_

Do it! And then share the link with us here on HN. Looking forward to it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Don't worry, HN will be the first place that gets a link to the site. Now based on your reply: ideas are only the seed. That is true, but what about if ideas are your product? If the value of an idea is in its execution, how are we to judge an idea itself? Is an idea worth no intrinsic value? (besides interesting/boring challenging/easy) How (or where rather) do we stop the inherent recursion that comes about by looking at an idea, looking at the barriers to it, having ideas about those barriers, looking at the barriers to _those_ ideas and so on and so forth. I am very interested in viewpoints from some of the people here (i.e. pg) whose job is to evaluate ideas for funding purposes. From what I can see, they _don't_ evaluate the idea per se, they look at the surrounding facts: team, track record, traction, willingness and passion to succeed. I see lots of advice on here about YC entries and interviews, but nothing seems to touch upon the idea itself so much. I can understand why, as I recently read something (paraphrased) "a bad idea with good execution will succeed, and great idea with bad execution will fail." It seems we know how to evaluate execution quite well nowadays. How to objectively evaluate ideas?

<comment><USER8> I think your confusion comes from the transition the world is undergoing WRT communication.

Currently, there are so many ideas out there that the issue is to filter the ideas, rather than generate them. Perhaps when communication was much more difficult, the problem was generation of ideas (this makes sense to me: people had less diverse knowledge. I believe diversity of experience/knowledge is crucial to idea generation). But now? There are too many ideas -- and good ones -- out there for me to pay attention to others' ideas.

Also, there's the sexiness factor. Fact is, it's fun to generate ideas. You get to estimate, assume, project, modify, and change. Actual execution? That's the boring part, or at least the less-sexy cousin. I'd love to just sell ideas, but the fact remains that there's much more of a supply than of demand.

<comment><AUTHOR> I know what you mean regarding communication. And I also agree that one of the biggest problems is filtering. This is something I have looked into quite a lot in the last couple of years, as I have been trying to improve upon my own ideas. I think that filtering gets easier if you have better quality ideas coming into your filter, so that's what I have focused on more in the last year or so. But "quality" is a hard quality to define, especially when it comes to ideas. As for the sexiness factor: Fun to generate, boring to execute, but shit, nothing is as satisfying as an idea that's done, successful or not, its great to sit back and look at a finished piece of work. As for selling ideas, I would also love to sell them. I think that is going to be a no go for most of the reasons you state above, hence the idea to give away the ideas. Also, some of my ideas aren't products so to say, but thoughts and explorations, meant to be expanded upon by others. I hope to inspire people and be inspired back. Which is why I put this question to HN. There are a lot of smart people here who always trump execution over ideas. But they also realise that ideas are necessary too. I wanted to hear how you guys would argue for or against being the idea guy. Hopefully it will give me an idea how to overcome this problem.

<comment><USER7> At the risk you of you never seeing this ...

Put your email in your profile!

The thing about ideas is that you can't really test how they will perform in the reality because they are not _real_. For example as a programmer I have tons of ideas about how to execute a given task. In my head it's very easy (and fun) to see my implementation play out. But it's only when you actually start to make the idea real that unforseen problems come into existence - <USER2> is a good thing, it's iteration. But without making the idea tangible, I would argue you cannot realistically measure an idea right?

Put another way ideas can only be iterated in your mind. That's great if you are a philosopher (hey you should really be a philosopher). But I think most things that yield empirical data need to exist in reality and therefore you need execution.

This is of course taking nothing away from philosophy. Maybe that's what you've been looking for? Or perhaps a futurist or something. You can "sell ideas" via books right? But then again writing a book is creating something tangible =)

\--

Reading some of your other responses I can see that you take idea iteration quite seriously. This very well puts you leagues above guys that want to "make twitter better" or what not. But I think you need to accept that idea guys are more akin to starving artists. You should create ideas because you love to create ideas, not because you want to monetize them (that's what action is for). This also analogs nicely with philosophers, and other academics. They have to risk "some other guy" ultimately getting credit for work they've also explored. Also academics don't _necessarily_ get paid to "think", they get paid to _teach_ and think.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for adding your input to this thread. I think that the way I am eventually going to go is the "starving artist" route. I do love creating ideas, but I hope "some other guy" can monetize them via action. I think I will just have to face the fact that like other people here (I've seen a number of threads on the topic) I will have to do some triage, filter out my best idea for execution, do it, make money, then maybe return to this problem.

I think people are willing to pay for ideas (or even a book) from someone who has proved that at least one of their ideas has had value.

Well off to finish creating my "Customer Evolution System" a piece of software that is a hybrid of the Customer Development process monitoring and a CRM I hope I can get a beta version done by the end of March and have some people here try it out, as it is especially designed with startups in mind. Then maybe pg will overlook the single founder problem and I can enter it into the next YC.

Thanks everyone on here for their time, and btw, I have added my email into my profile if anyone else has any more comments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Upgrade your Idea skill into Design and you'll be worth something.

Anybody can come up with an idea, many less can design how that idea will be executed.

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually spend a lot of time on the design of how the idea should be executed. The one thing I always seem to run into is the "one founder" problem. Too many things, with too many skillsets (at a high level) need to be done at once. I don't just write a one sentence idea and leave it be, I iterate through brainstorming, re-evaluation, sorting, and putting it into a project management logframe. I experience the 1-founder dilemma on a day to day basis, but I refuse to be beaten by it. (Side note, this is not for any egoistic reasons, just that I am in a place and situation where I can't find co-founders)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I know of a company that makes a living for about two dozen people selling (or better developing) ideas.

Maybe you find some inspiration on their website: <http://www.brainstore.com>

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. Here is a list of some other resources:

<http://www.innovationtools.com/Products/ideamanagement.asp>

I looked through a bunch of these when I was approached to make an enterprise level IMS for a large chemical company (30,000+ employees). The software is not complicated, but because of the use of the word "innovation" it becomes rather pricey, very quickly especially when you charge by the seat. I put together a prototype for them, but lost the tender in the end. But its this prototype which I am adapting to put on my website.</comment></comment>


Matrix list of web forums? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> Anyone know of any matrix lists of web boards?

<comment><USER2> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Internet_forum_software>

Also look at the forums section at <http://www.opensourcecms.com/.> No matrix here, but you can play with the various packages and read others' comments.</comment></comment>


Google's Eric Schmidt says he "screwed up" on social networking - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2011/06/googles-eric-schmidt-says-he-screwed-up-on-social-networking.ars <comment><USER2> I'm a big fan of anyone who's blatantly honest, and CEOs especially, since they have their (future) careers on the line. Admit your faults? What a novel idea!

I agree with the sentiments made by Schmitty, except for this line:

> Schmidt called cloud services "the death of IT as we know it."

Then who's going to take care of our devices that connect to the cloud? It's not death, it's downsizing. Agree that it's inevitable, disagree on the magnitude.</comment>


Full TrustZone exploit for MSM8974 - <AUTHOR> http://bits-please.blogspot.com/2015/08/full-trustzone-exploit-for-msm8974.html

<comment><AUTHOR> (Disclaimer: I'm the author of this blog) In this post I cover the development of a full TrustZone exploit in MSM8974 (Snapdragon 800) SoCs, resulting in arbitrary code execution in the "Secure World". I've also provided the full source code!

Please let me know if you have any questions/comments.

<comment><USER2> Have you been through some sort of responsible disclosure? I don't know enough to tell if this is an immediately usable vulnerability.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, see the first part of the blog post, under "Responsible Disclosure"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Great job!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! More to follow soon :)</comment></comment>


Straightforward Functional JavaScript: Building the Yome Widget - <AUTHOR> http://rigsomelight.com/2015/06/09/straightforward-live-functional-javascript-building-the-yome-widget.html

<comment><USER2> I've written lots of React code, but usually by following the conventions set forth by Facebook. I've never considered dynamically generating every component in an app.

Thanks for sharing your technique!

<comment><AUTHOR> Your welcome! Glad it was helpful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Bruce is the kind of in-the-dome thinker that america needs right now. More domes and more Bruces!

</comment><comment><USER4> Man, Bruce is consistently dwelling on the fundamentals, pushing on the boundaries, and questioning how we do things. Well worth a read!</comment>


Ask IBM's Watson Research Team Anything - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/fnfg3/by_request_we_are_the_ibm_research_team_that/

<comment><USER2> This is either a question or a suggestion but.. is there (or can there be) a more technical AMA-type site for engineers and scientists? I like Reddit but I can't help but feel the right person could curate the questions better for technical and scientific stuff rather than relying on the sort of voting patterns Reddit is susceptible to.

Frequent intelligently curated but publicly driven (i.e. not just "interviews") AMAs with scientists and teams working on cool stuff would make for great reading. Even AMAs with the tech teams of the startups we all know and love on HN would be a great start.

I'd do it (the "if you're gunna complain.." approach) but I'm not well enough connected. Imagine someone like Andrew Warner or pg (who could pretty much get anyone at the table) curating a site like that. It'd be a must-visit to both ask questions _and_ read the answers.

UPDATE: Or is this essentially Quora I've reinvented?

<comment><USER3> Reddit's solution to that is to create your own subreddit and effectively become elitist about what's allowed. Hence a lot of comments as to Reddit demographic issues is met with "remove default subreddits".

Quora is similar but catered to a smaller audience I assume. Both places have moderators but I don't know if either can control the answers (On reddit, only moderators can).

<comment><USER4> That solution doesn't work for AMAs which will (like this one) inevitably attract much attention.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was rather disappointed that a lot of the top rated questions were knee-jerk or obvious.

<comment><USER6> I am under the impression that the actual IBM has not responded to any of the questions yet. Any knee-jerk or obvious answers would be from your typical Reddit user.

<comment><USER7> They will answer the ten most popular questions next tuesday.

As much as I love Reddit sometimes, a good number of the upvoted questions are disappointing although not unexpected.

<comment><USER8> >They will answer

or Watson?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'd rather play "Ask Watson Anything"

<comment><USER10> I wish they would put him up as a webapp. It may not be economical to have a supercomputer online that can only answer one question at a time -- but they might find enough overlap that he could start caching frequent requests or even queuing requests as necessary. Or better yet, scale slowly by invite only.

<comment><USER11> Why do you assume he can only answer one question at a time?

<comment><USER12> It would have been better phrased as: how many questions per second can watson handle.

And I think the answer is, not a whole lot, maybe even less than 1.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Did this competition hurt Jeopardy in general because it is now obvious that the winner is mostly decided by buzzer skills among top players?

<comment><USER14> Landmark AI event, and you guys are worrying about buzzer speed. *sigh

<comment><USER15> That's because the _buzzer competition_ confounds the _knowledge competition_. It's a shame, really.

But I'm sure IBM is happy.

<comment><USER16> Can you explain why it is you think that the knowledge part is confounded? If Watson is fast but incorrect, it's a failure.

<comment><USER17> A Watson that knows 70% of the answers will beat a human who knows 90% of the answers, purely due to better reflexes. Of course, buzzer skill is partly how KenJen won so many games, so I'm not complaining. Just not AS impressed by Watson as some people.

<comment><USER16> Except that it's not just reflexes. Watson has to compute the answer before the humans. That's no small task. This video is a great technical explanation of how it works:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G2H3DZ8rNc&feature=youtu...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G2H3DZ8rNc&feature=youtube_gdata_player)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Barbie Computer Engineer - <AUTHOR> http://shop.mattel.com/product/index.jsp?productId=4032107&cp=3719989.3748552

<comment><USER2> If I ever get a female child that is smitten by the scourge called Barbie (oh please, O [Insert Deity Here], make her a Lego child), I'll at least give her one like these so she can have an Engineer Barbie (oh, the bragging potential, "My Mum is a computer engineer just like Barbie!"). Not that my grandmother's misguided attempts at girlifying me with Pink Mermaid Barbie ever worked, anyway.

<comment><USER3> O, Thor? :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow. It's amazing, she looks just like every women engineer I've ever worked with. Especially the Bluetooth headset.

Seriously, does this do anything to advance the position of women in software engineering?

<comment><USER5> Nothing would do more for women in engineering than having more well known female engineers. Social proof is a strong thing.

But until we have more of that, cultural items like Barbie might help to bootstrap the process.

I agree that it's a distant second, but it's better than nothing at all.

<comment><USER4> _I agree that it's a distant second, but it's better than nothing at all._

I'm not sure. Suppose the situation was reversed and there were few men software engineers. I'm not sure having a super handsome, muscle ripped man wearing designer clothing would have been an inspiration to me.

<comment><USER6> > I'm not sure having a super handsome, muscle ripped man wearing designer > clothing would have been an inspiration to me.

I don't know about you but I wanted to be Action Man as a young child.

<comment><USER7> I wanted to be a lumberjack.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The bytes on the screen spell out: "BarbieBarbieBarbie" :-)

</comment><comment><USER9> Being a computer engineer is a choking hazard?

<comment><USER10> Last time I saw the 40 something pages of specs/requirements docs I had to fill to write a 50 LOC program in a big corp, I almost choked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Was this not the product of some sort of poll where people voted for the next barbie? I remember seeing it on HN.

<comment><USER12> Yes. Remember Eric Sink's post about how geeks (like himself) are over- represented on the internet? He pointed out how he had a higher google rank than Eric Clapton, and the number one hit for "Joel" is a well-known developer in New York rather than Billy Joel - <http://www.ericsink.com/articles/Boundaries.html>

That poll was Dugg, Slashdotted, and Reddited. It was a foregone conclusion - Barbie would be a "computer engineer", dammit. The only careers that would have gotten more votes would have been "Ship's mechanic on a Firefly class spaceship" or "vampire slayer".

<comment><USER13> If only we were not limited to one up-vote; you sir, would be a very karma rich man.

<comment><USER14> Go back to reddit, please.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I must be hallucinating, an article about barbies as the top submission on HN.

</comment><comment><USER16> Very interesting, although I'm not sure what to make of her glasses; are they, like, so geek-chic-coolacious?

<comment><USER17> Its strange, they need to strike a balance. On one side, they need to use enough stereotypes to ensure that everyone gets the idea they are going for. On the other hand, if they use too many stereotypes they will get angry letters.

I'm not sure they have struck the balance correctly, but my guess is that is what they are going for.

<comment><USER15> So, what exactly is it that is stereotypically computer engineer about this doll?

I've known and know quite a few females that program (and some of them are extremely good) but none would be caught dead in an outfit like that, or would think they are 'computer engineers' because they can hold a netbook in one hand without dropping it.

It's just plain silly to associate this doll with the computer engineer / programming profession.

When trade shows were still in fashion though, you could meet any number of women on the various stands that would come pretty close, but they weren't there for their computer skills.

Just about the only interesting thing about this is that there was some build- up to the release using polls, but surprise, surprise, lets hope they were not as rigged as the customer reviews of items that aren't shipping yet.

<comment><USER17> Sure, anyone in the know wouldn't associate this with computer engineers. Hell, most adults probably wouldn't either.

Kids, however, are far more likely to associate glasses with geeky/interested in geeky stuff. You can't use your position both as an adult and someone in the tech industry and apply it here. It just doesn't fit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Only ships to US. Damn I hate that ... anyone willing to receive and forward some barbies?

</comment><comment><USER19> And Ken is renamed Paul?

<comment><USER20> No, he gets "Thompson" as a last name.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> What does "computer engineer" even mean?

<comment><USER17> <http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=Computer+Engineer>

<comment><USER21> Wikipedia tells me she could be doing virtually anything involving electronics or computers.

The BBC seems to think it's tech support: <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8517097.stm></comment></comment></comment>


Introducing Sense – A Next-Generation Platform for Data Science - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sense.io/introducing-sense-a-platform-for-data-science/

<comment><USER3> Why does every data science infrastructure provider want to be full stack? I really don't want to use an online IDE, I really don't want to be locked into one particular way of distributing workloads, I really don't want to move my code from GitHub. All of the individual components look great, but the all-or- nothing proposition is really off-putting.

<comment><USER4> When approaching a beachhead market, it's best to try to deliver a whole product rather than to spread one's self thin specializing for disparate consumers. Clearly users will appreciate some features of their offering more than others; shooting for full-stack at launch both gets the company more feedback and allows them the most control over the initial relationship.

I totally agree that the full-stack offering can be rather off-putting, but the business side of DS still doesn't understand how to reliably make money from this market. Cloudera (and friends) have made money from a full-stack offering, so it's easy try to imitate this success.

IMO the online IDE is very useful for expositions and small projects, but indeed a limiting playground for larger projects. I'd love to see SAAS/PAAS do better at co-locating their offerings so that, e.g., I could run part of the stack on my own hardware (which is where the data lives). Perhaps Docker would help facilitate this business model.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> We were just looking at it. It's a nice interface -- it's logical and someone gave it a thought. They also have some of the features we (at SageMathCloud) were talking about with regards to socializing: e.g. following a user and in reverse having followers, etc. Also nice is that they have project templates (for python, julia and R, basically), where you get some explanatory *.md files to read. (I.e. not an empty project). You can also start a project from a git/github source and so on.

It seems to be heavily broken right now, or heavily unstable. Hmpf... I'm trying to start the ipython notebook (you have to do this on demand), then you can start editing the files ... but it is stuck. Now it's completely broken.

The terminal works fine now, and a project is running in some kind of isolated container in beefy linux ubuntu 14.04, running under a common "sense" user (which is the only user). They are also running some node.js client and their "butterfly" server.

Ok, well, I tried to test it further or add a collaborator, but the website just says "502 application not responding".

It didn't seem like they have real-time editing or LaTeX.

few more details. ... now it runs fine again. two screenshots attached. ... one is the project view, the other one the "workbench".

They run a plain "R" terminal, but with a neat HTML output. It's a vertically split editor, where the .r file is on the left, and you can select lines of text which are then executed via "ctrl+return". That's exactly how those R people work (instead of having cells like ipython or sagews)

The same for python files: one or all lines are fed into the "ipython terminal", not the notebook (!), and then translated to some html output on the right. plots work fine, etc.

So, on the right of the screenshots, you can see the copies of the input lines.

By default, they add a .gitconfig file with the username and email address. That's cool, and I guess this could be done for SMC as well.

There is no auto-save for files, just lost the content.

\-- William Stein and Harald Schilly

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about that! We just got a huge spike in traffic from HN and VentureBeat so are trying to handle the demand.

<comment><USER5> Thanks -- it started working, and I've updated the comment above.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I took a look - registered for the free personal version to try it out. I like the ideas and a nice working demo that sucked me in. I fiddled around with modifying the R code and running it again.

It was a little confusing in places. Eventually I figured out that I need to save the modifications, before running it again. I think I ended up starting up a couple console sessions that I didn't really need. Eventually figured out they were open and that just navigating away from a session didn't shut that session down. I went back in and manually stopped them.

Things that resonate with me. Running on a server in the cloud - <USER2> instances that are substantially more powerful than my laptop Dead easy deployment (being a sysadmin or devops type admin is low on my priority list of things to learn) Interesting demo for me to play with Online collaboration - even though I mostly work solo Encouragement to practice version control with research code Scheduled jobs and automating pipelines

I will certainly keep an eye on how it develops and create a project of my own on there in order to better understand the features, what works and what is missing

Thanks for the hard work to get to this point

I suspect that I will continue to play around with it and post some of my own code

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the feedback. We're always thinking about how to improve the workflow and will take your comments into account when we next revise. Please ping us on intercom with any other thoughts!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey all.

We just opened up Sense to the public. Happy to answer any questions you may have about Sense and building a modern data science platform.

Tristan

<comment><USER8> Who do you think is your biggest competitor right now? Do you think that you'll be fighting with Microsoft's Azure Machine Learning offering for the same audience ? How do the two platform compare?

<comment><AUTHOR> SAS is the huge incumbent, but open source tools like R and Spark and cloud- centric platforms are going to win, no question. We're already well into this transition and tools like Sense should accelerate it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nice. I like it. I just replied to you too. I couldn't see any error messages when I ran a modified example with errors.

</comment><comment><USER10> Just signed up to test things out. Really nice interface and great job with having the onboarding process although I did get slightly lost when it came to editing the R file. Will continue to test it out a little bit later.

Excited to see if this takes off - working on a startup where an integration could be beneficial to both sides. Just curious who you feel your target customer is?

</comment><comment><USER11> Looks interesting. Seems like they're attempting to solve similar problems as Project Jupyter[1] & ScienceBox[2].

[1] [http://jupyter.org/](http://jupyter.org/) [2] [https://yhathq.com/products/sciencebox](https://yhathq.com/products/sciencebox)

<comment><USER5> Here's an incomplete list of some related web-based coding/data analysis/Python services:

\- [https://wakari.io/](https://wakari.io/) \-- closed source, IPython, freemium/enterprise

\- [https://cloud.sagemath.com](https://cloud.sagemath.com) \-- open source; more academia oriented; completely free (right now) [disclaimer: I founded this]

\- [https://c9.io/](https://c9.io/) \-- open source, freemium

\- [http://runnable.com/](http://runnable.com/) \-- closed source, no business model

\- [https://www.pythonanywhere.com/](https://www.pythonanywhere.com/) \-- closed source, freemium

\- [https://www.terminal.com/](https://www.terminal.com/) \-- closed source; freemium

\- [https://www.nitrous.io/](https://www.nitrous.io/) \-- closed source; freemium

\- [https://codio.com/](https://codio.com/) \-- closed source; freemium (free for public)

\- [https://codenvy.com/](https://codenvy.com/) \-- closed source; freemium/enterprise

\- [https://koding.com/](https://koding.com/) \-- closed source; freemium

\- [http://www.wolframcloud.com/](http://www.wolframcloud.com/) \-- closed source; expensive

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The interface looks nice. How do you get data into the platform? The field I work in (genomics) usually uses a bunch of flat text/binary files instead of databases. How would this platform interface with that kind of data?

<comment><AUTHOR> You can upload small to medium files directly into your project, which lives on a distributed filesystem. For larger data, we typically recommend pulling data directly from S3 or production databases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Freaked out for a second there, because I thought that this was announcing that Hello.is pivoted before I got my Sense Sleep Monitor.

</comment><comment><USER14> Good Saas, but obviously not graph stylish friendly

</comment><comment><USER15> This is fantastic!

</comment><comment><USER16> nice. good work!

</comment><comment><USER17> sense.io gives... a blank page

</comment><comment><USER18> Nice work.</comment>


The Correct US Poverty Rate Is Around And About Zero - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/09/21/the-correct-us-poverty-rate-is-around-and-about-zero/

<comment><USER2> "Around and about zero" means that 1 in 20 people is in poverty, at least to the author.

That means in the average classroom, you'd have 1.5 kids in poverty (if classroom population reflected the general population; there are reasons to think it doesn't).

I'm glad that kid-per-class is a non-issue to the author.

</comment><comment><USER3> Food stamps and medicare do not make a person less poor.</comment>


Show HN: FastDom – Lightweight replacement of React and MobX - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/PxyUp/FastDom <comment><USER2> This looks neat but was React itself ever the problem with slow web apps? I haven't looked into this so correct me if I'm wrong but from my impression, slow libraries are the biggest problem with slow performance in SPAs.

<comment><USER3> This might provide an answer for your question: [https://medium.com/reloading/javascript-start-up- performance...](https://medium.com/reloading/javascript-start-up- performance-69200f43b201)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "going to guarantee 60fps."

Tongue in cheek, I'm going to hold you to that ;)

<comment><USER5> I think there's some misunderstanding of performance in the browser here. This library might make smooth animations when its observer system is used (doing it in parallel to the main update flow is best), but only while complexity is kept low.

Looking at the code, all it does is queue each observer listeners using RAF, the moment the component tree takes longer than 16ms to render, or a single component does a bit more work than expected, you'll get dropped frames. To actually ensure 60FPS it would need a more sophisticated scheduling system that is able to time-slice the updates (== asynchronous rendering) and possibly interrupt updates.

<comment><AUTHOR> Render 100 node in browser it is less then 16ms, if you need hard logic, you can use reactive for that. Library first of all created all child deep, after that appendChild to DOM in memory, when all child and root ready and after that will be append in place on page.

<comment><USER5> > if you need hard logic, you can use reactive for that

What do you mean by that? Any logic still has to execute in the same 16ms budget. In any case, it's pointless to discuss in a vacuum, I suggest you implement something like the JS Framework Benchmark [1] or DBMonster to see where it stands in fact, and then optimize from there.

[1] [https://rawgit.com/krausest/js-framework- benchmark/master/we...](https://rawgit.com/krausest/js-framework- benchmark/master/webdriver-ts-results/table.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for link, i 3rd week try found it. Yes of course optimisation always in progress. I tested render 500 nodes node(simple div) and every 10ms updating 50y from them, fps was 60.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Startup to Open-Source Parallel CPU - <AUTHOR> http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1324759

<comment><USER2> First of all, good luck for you guys.

I've worked in a start-up company similar to your company.

We developed a 256-cores RISC processor, only shared memory was used between all the cores instead of a mash-up of a memory block for each core and DMA for transactions.

How do you intend to synchronize work between the different cores? How a compiler will abstract away the memory synchronizations? Which programming language is going to be used? So many questions as this is such a complex area in computing...

From my personal experience of over 5 years developing such chip in a start-up company, the cost of production will probably be a huge obstacle. Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! If you don't mind me asking, what was the name of the company?

Technically, you don't need to synchronize the cores... it's a MIMD/MPMD system that is not in lockstep. It is up to the programmer (with help from the compiler) to make sure you don't do anything too stupid ;) As for the programming languages, C and Fortran are the big ones to us. We hope once our LLVM backend is improved, you'll be able to run anything you like on the cores themselves. As for the programming model, the three we like the best are CSP (Go), Actor (Erlang), and PGAS (C, Fortran, Chapel, a few other research ones). If you're familiar with SHMEM, that's the closest thing we can think of currently.

When it comes to cost, we're trying to develop as much ourselves to reduce licensing costs. We've been able to do a pretty good job (if I do say so myself) as just two people so far with no capital. Fabrication costs are the killer, with it being about ~$500k per shuttle run, and $5m-$7m for a mask set when we actually go to full production.

<comment><USER2> [http://plurality.com/](http://plurality.com/) \- website is not very good and the company is dead. You can read more information in wikipedia: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plurality_%28company%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plurality_%28company%29)

All our cores shared the same memory for both data and instruction and we based our synchronization of work-load on a hardware instead of software. It yielded such a huge speedup for execution time that most of the companies simply ignored our results as fake. :)

Choosing a programming language is crucial - we went with C and a declaration language for tasks. Today (4 years after we closed the company) I am not sure whether it was the best decision. The simpler the parallel definition in code the better. Programmers as getting confused easily.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm the founder and CEO of REX... Check out our website for a brief overview ([http://rexcomputing.com](http://rexcomputing.com)) and feel free to ask questions here!

<comment><USER3> Impressive for your age. But how is this any different from the millions of identical proposals that never got anywhere? Packing plenty of alus with some sort of basic network hasn't really worked out in real life. The first block diagram in the article is so basic it's concerning.

Apologies for being critical, I wish you the best.

<comment><AUTHOR> The article is incorrect in saying that the (very simplistic...it's supposed to just show the basic components per core, not how it is actually functioning) diagram for a single core is the whole chip... our chip design has 256 of those cores (So in total, 256 64 bit ALUs and 256 64 bit FPUs). We have a custom mesh network that allows for atomic operations on from any core to any adjacent core, and DMA operations that allow for a read or write to any core's local scratchpad memory from any other scratchpad memory.

In comparison to other architectures, we have chose to stick to RISC, instead of some crazy VLIW or very long pipeline scheme. In doing this, we limit compiler complexity while still having very simple/efficient core design, and thus hopefully keeping every core's pipeline full and without hazards. The idea is that we just want to have a bunch of very simple and focused SPMD cores, so that we can have a MIMD/MPMD chip.

We are currently fixing the bugs on our single core FPGA demo, and hope to have our full 256 core cycle accurate simulator done by ~January/February. We want to release that (and our currently very early compilers) to the public ASAP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Also wish you good luck and recommend change focus: First figure out, what kind of real world problems this architecture can handle and how to do it best. The architecture will perform very well, if the number of operations, which can do done on a set of data fitting into the scratchpad memory is large, so that communication overhead is small or if the problem can be mapped to the grid in a way that they only require communication with the neighbours. However I would assume that typical real world big data problems don't fulfill these requirements and problems fulfilling them also run well on classical architectures. As soon as you start to need a lot of data transfer, only the cores close to the border of the grid will be able to work, as they get data, the ones at the border are busy with forwarding data to the memory and the innermost just wait ... Therefore before investing a lot of effort, money and time into a hardware, which many others also do in very similar ways and ask the community to find out, how to use it, spend the energy in innovative ideas to actually efficiently use such architectures. I.e. languages, profiling and debug tools, ... That's where the real innovation is needed and where there is a lot of room for improvement. And if you want to stay with hardware it is probably much easier to convince investors, if you can show in a simulation of FPGA prototype that 2 or 3 real world applications showing a very bad performance on classical machines can achieve a substantive boost on your architecture ...

</comment><comment><USER5> _Unlike GPUs and other SIMD accelerators, Neo 's MIMD processor design leverages independent program counters and instruction registers in each core to allow different operations to be performed in parallel on separate pieces of data._[1]

Other than the grid interconnect, how does the architecture differ from Xeon Phi? In particular, what allows it to get such dramatically higher power efficiency? I'd have guessed that Intel's smaller process would make it difficult to match.

[1] It feels awkward that this sentence is included twice on such a short page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for that... didn't notice that we had a repeated section (I just updated it with the proper text for that section)

As for comparison to the Phi... it is the fact that our actual core size (and thus the whole chip) is MUCH smaller. The Phi's cores are actually based on the original Pentium architecture (they are just downsized P54Cs) with added AVX instructions. Contrary to popular belief, they are not full x86-64 cores.

Intel has not released the official die size for the Phi, but has said it is about ~5 billion transistors (at a 22nm process), and independent "guesstimates" have pegged the die at 600-700mm2 (there is one place that says 350mm2, but that is false). For the top of the line 61 core Xeon Phi, it uses 300W, with a theoretical peak performance of 1.2TFLOP of double precision performance. That gets you to about 4GFLOP/Watt.

In comparison, our entire will be under 100 million gates, with each core (excluding memory) being around 100k gates. At a 28nm process, our core size (without memory) is a little under 0.1mm2. Our theoretical peak performance per compute chip is 256 GFLOPs double precision, while it should be using around 3 Watts, giving us a performance per watt ratio of ~85GFLOPs/Watt.

Intel has even said that their next generation Xeon Phi, made at their 14nm process, will be at 14 to 16GFLOPs/Watt. At SC14 last week, they made a soft announcement for the following generation at 10nm process will be in the ~2018 timeframe, and that is estimated at only being around 25GFLOPs/Watt.

The bottom line is Intel is just following Moore's law, and is sticking to big and complex systems, which while retaining legacy compatibility, kill you when it comes to efficiency.

<comment><USER5> Interesting, and a great answer. The usual estimates I've seen put the power efficiency overhead of the legacy x86 layer to be small enough to not be a major factor ([http://research.cs.wisc.edu/vertical/papers/2013/hpca13-isa-...](http://research.cs.wisc.edu/vertical/papers/2013/hpca13-isa- power-struggles.pdf)). But I suppose as you shrink the core smaller and smaller, that small mostly-fixed difference becomes a greater and greater part of the total power budget.

<comment><AUTHOR> I discredit most people who continue the RISC/CISC debate to this day (As Intel forfeited in ~2006... all modern x86 processors are actually RISC processors. They are RISC at the lowest level, and just decode x86 instruction and translate them into Intel RISC microcode).

Then again, I don't think most popular "RISC" CPUs are very RISC like (Does that make me a RISC hipster?). While making things general purpose, there is no reason for ARM processors to be OoO, do branch prediction/speculative execution, or any more of these crazy things... it reduces efficiency in the long run.

Take a look at this for instance: [http://chip- architect.com/news/2013_core_sizes_768.jpg](http://chip- architect.com/news/2013_core_sizes_768.jpg) ... an AMD CPU and ARM chip are virtually the same size at the same process node. I find it insane that one of our cores is a bit less than 1/5th of the size of a cortex A7, and can do more FLOPs than it. Then again, we have focused on doing that, but still.

<comment><USER5> Your .1 mm^2 was without memory, right? I don't know the exact numbers, but to be fair, the ratio does become somewhat closer when you discount the area on the A7 used for memory: [http://www.arm.com/images/Single_Cortex-A7_core_layout_image...](http://www.arm.com/images/Single_Cortex-A7_core_layout_image.jpg)

<comment><AUTHOR> That is correct, but even with memory we should only be around .2mm^2 to .3mm^2, while having 4x the SRAM as the Cortex-A7.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My first thought was how this compares to Adapteva's Epiphany architecture (best known for it's use in their crowd-funded Parallela boards), so I was happy to see this project was inspired by that one. Andreas Olofsson from Adapteva has tweeted often about how difficult it is to get funding as a silicon start up, though. I think the statement "it's a tough sell" will prove to be a colossal understatement. But these are impressive kids and it's a great concept - I wish them luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was working on the Parallela boards for a long time... but there are fundamental flaws in the architecture (missing instructions, it is only 32 bit, not IEEE754-2008 compliant, etc) that makes the Epiphany architecture not really suitable for the markets we are trying to address. When we decided to go out and make our own, we knew there was going to be a lot of difficulties, but the idea is that if we are going to do a startup and give it our all, why not try to do something big?

The fact that we are using mostly open source tools for our development (such as Chisel: chisel.eecs.berkeley.edu), our development time has decreased and productivity has had a huge boost compared to if we were just writing in Verilog. We also made the decision to not use off the shelf IP, which while difficult to verify, we think we make a much better system. Compare this to the Epiphany implementations, which while having a custom ISA and basic core components, used off the shelf ARM interconnect, off the shelf ARM memory compiler, and many other things that were used to minimize development time and verification. While this is a bit more difficult upfront, since we are keeping our components very simple, our verification is no where near as complex as a "normal" processor. Plus we don't have to pay $500k-$1m+ in upfront licensing fees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Does anyone know what the actual CPUs are? It mentions it has 64 registers? My guess is ARM / MIPS, based upon: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Processor_register](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Processor_register)

How much scratch memory is there? Is it SRAM?

Are they licensing anyone's IP for the interconnect, or CPU? What's the bandwidth of the interconnect? Is is packet-oriented? How does fair-routing work?

<comment><AUTHOR> Custom ISA that we have developed... we developed it in parallel to RISCV (before they released their public 2.0 ISA), but we have diverged a bit... we are a static 64 bit ISA, have no options to have VLIW expandability, our FPU (and thus its instructions) are able to do two single precision IEEE754-2008 FLOPs per cycle, and one double precision per cycle. We have also added a set of DMA instructions.

We currently have 128KByte dual-ported SRAM per core (which is physically part of the core, and not a giant array somewhere else on die). It has single cycle latency to the core's registers and to the Network on Chip router.

The on chip mesh network is custom 128 bit wide going core to core. The router can do a read or write to SRAM per cycle AND allows a passthrough to another core in the same cycle.

Our chip-to-chip interconnect is a custom 64 bit (72 lane) parallel interface allowing 48GB/s. There are two of these (unidirectional) interfaces per side, giving you a total of 8 of these interfaces per chip.

<comment><AUTHOR> I realized I didn't fully answer the chip-to-chip interconnect questions... it is an extremely simple parallel interface (that I would not even call a "bus", as that is assuming it has a lot more control logic than it has). Instead of having a full serdes per lane, our solution is to use a very simple latch and buffer, along with PLLs on each chip to have a MUCH (50-70%) smaller and more power effecient point-to-point connection between chips. As such, it is not packet based, and we are really just focusing on moving a 64 bit word per cycle.

<comment><USER8> I asked this previously without seeing that you had answered it here. So you're claiming to have a parallel interface without a SERDES running at 64-bits at 6 Gb/s? How are you maintaining bit alignment between lanes? Do you have any in-line signal conditioning or anything (CTLE, DFE, etc.)? Parallel interfaces are rarely run faster than 1 Gb/s, so 6 Gb/s sounds unlikely.

<comment><AUTHOR> Relevant paper (by Intel Research, actually)... there are quite a few differences (we are keeping it a lot simpler on the tx and rx ends, but that is some of our secret sauce... I can talk about it offline if you are really interested)

[http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=648778...](http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6487788&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fxpls%2Fabs_all.jsp%3Farnumber%3D6487788)

<comment><USER8> Getting anything approximating Intel's work, assuming you are rolling all your own IP, is pretty ambitious (and probably a good deal more work than your Core design). Even at _only_ 6 Gbit/s (faster than PCIe Gen2, btw). Just curious - have you ever taped out a chip on a modern process before?

<comment><AUTHOR> We aren't trying to reach their 128GB/s number as listed in that paper, only 48GB/s... in addition to our design being much simpler than that. Our design is having each pin is simply a buffer and a latch that is synchronized with all the other pins part of the interface by a PLL... much easier to implement and run than a serializer for even just a single pin.

I myself have not taped out something on a modern process, but have advisors who have. My co founder and I do have nanofab experience, so we do understand the physical complexities of fabrication first hand.

<comment><USER8> Ah, so the idea is to have 64 parallel bits coming in at 6 Gbits/s, along with a slower clock that you multiply up to 6 GHz and use to sample the inputs? That will be quite tricky to get working 1) without any analog signal conditioning on the inputs (or outputs), and 2) without inter-bit skew making it impossible to meet timing on your inputs. Best of luck to you, but the interface alone sounds likely to be problematic.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's the basic idea, but we can run it at 3GHz if we do DDR, or 1.5GHz doing QDR. There is some extra magic there which I don't want to talk publicly about just yet ;)

The biggest problem (even with our solutions for skew and crosstalk) is just the number of pins/traces on the board, but that's not unsolvable... nothing a ~10 layer PCB can't solve.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder what kind of penalties there are for transmitting data to neighboring nodes. Same for receiving. If every node does for example receives data from a neighboring node, does a single fused multiply-add and transmits the result to a neighboring node, how many FLOPS you get out of the whole thing?

How big chunks of computation you need to do in a node for this to be effective?

<comment><AUTHOR> Our theoretical double precision FLOPs (based on running at 1GHz) per core is 1GFLOP per second, but that is based on doing an add or a multiply. In the case of just doing FMAs, you would be doing 1.5GFLOP. This gives you (theoretical peak) 256 to 384 double precision GFLOPs per chip. Our bandwidth between cores is 16GB/s, while the required bandwidth for doing 1GFLOP is 8GB/s.

Our single precision numbers are actually double that of double precision (compared to a GPU or most other SIMD systems, which have independent FP32 and FP64 FPUs, we have a single combined unit). While our ISA is pure 64 bit, we have packed 32 bit FPU instructions for doing two single precision FLOPs per cycle.

<comment><USER9> So how many I can do if for each FMA I also receive 16 bytes of data from a neighboring node and send 16 bytes of data to a neighboring node? Or is the data transfer free, is the neighboring node memory mapped? If so, how does synchronization work?

Edit: didn't notice same was asked before too. Regardless, how many FMAs can be executed in the scenario I gave, also sending 16 bytes and receiving 16 bytes for each FMA?

<comment><AUTHOR> The superscalar design means Load/Store unit can operate independently from FMA and DMA units, i.e. FMA operation on register operands will not interfere with other operations elsewhere on the chip.

Synchronization should be handled in a dataflow-driven program design. Any sort of mutex/semaphore/etc. will have to be software defined or interrupt- driven.

In regards to neighboring node being memory mapped... are you asking about another compute chip or another node (with the 16 compute chips + GaMMU)? All of the compute chips in a grid are part of the same flat global memory map, and have DMA capabilities between each other. Once you get out of the compute grid (that is managed by the GaMMU), then that is a separate memory space, but can be accessed through some other layer through something like MPI, for instance.

<comment><USER9> I guess this is one of those cases where you just need to get your hands dirty to really understand it.

Can you do reasonably efficient [arbitrary size] fixed point arithmetic on your hardware? Do you have 64-bit add with carry and 64-bit multiply with 128 bit results? I'm interested in 64.64 and 128.128. Needed operations are add, sub and multiply.

I think compute grids like these could very well be an important part of computing in the future, maybe even the most important part. Ever since when I first saw an article about transputer. Grids or VLIWs, sadly software is always the pain point. I wish you luck, please get this working and right.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask: Sugar is bad for cancer, is it also bad for other growths like psoriasis? - <AUTHOR> Sugar is bad for cancer, is it also bad for other growths like psoriasis? From what I understand cancer cells use sugar as their fuel for rapid division. With psoriasis skin cells rapidly divide and grow out of control (1000X times more than with healthy people). Can reducing sugar from one's diet somehow improve the state of the illness?<p>I couldn't find any evidence or research in this field, though I'm not a professional. <comment><USER2> Sugar is a pretty broad term (fructose, galactose, lactose, sucrose, glucose are all different types of sugar). In a really over simplified way almost everything you eat gets converted to glucose at some point. That glucose is then used to create ATP via cellular respiration (the Krebs cycle) to power your cells. There is "sugar" in everything you eat. There are stores of glycogen, a stored version of glucose, in the muscles of the animals you eat. So yes, there is "sugar" in steak, chicken, pork etc.

So cutting down on sugar likely wouldn't have an effect. Once again in an over simplified way all your cells are powered by sugar, cancerous cells aren't unique in this way. I'm not a biologist though so I could be wrong.

</comment><comment><USER3> Check out (by which I mean 'have a read and maybe contact') Irene Prantalos's website [http://www.ireneprantalos.com](http://www.ireneprantalos.com) \- I'm no expert, but when it comes to focus and expertise she's the most dedicated I've come across.</comment>


Why isn't the external link symbol in Unicode? (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://dafoster.net/articles/2018/11/24/why-isnt-the-external-link-symbol-in-unicode/ <comment><USER2> I find myself agreeing with the rejection. As much as I dislike the ridiculous amount of emojis in Unicode, and their increasingly widespread use, they do fit plain text communication, whereas an "external link" symbol does not. My heuristic is something I'll call _SMS sniff test_ : would it make sense to type that symbol into a text message? If it wouldn't, then it doesn't belong in Unicode.

"External link" symbol tells you, "that last bit of differently-formatted text is an active element in this application, leading to an outside resource". It's not something that makes sense in plain text, because any external link in a plain text message is both visible and obviously a link.

Elsewhere in the thread someone mentioned the play/pause/stop symbols from cassette recorders/VCRs. But those have been used culturally as symbols denoting starting, pausing and stopping for decades now, so they're an idea communication tool that makes sense in plain text, and thus pass the SMS sniff test.

(Note that I'm not sure if all symbols in Unicode actually pass the SMS sniff test. I suppose the best option for those wanting "external link" symbol to be included would be to resubmit it as the DOUBLE ARROW POINTING TOP RIGHT OUT OF SQUARE symbol, or something like that.)

<comment> joatmon-snoo This made me stop and think because I've never really wondered about what belongs and doesn't belong in Unicode, and then I went looking at what strange corners Unicode has and _wow_ the "Miscellaneous Technical" code block is such a strange thing.

* It has APL symbols (checking the Wiki article on APL syntax and the APL standard, it seems that APL programs can be represented entirely in Unicode - which makes sense, but is still a little surprising).

* There's a benzene code point: ⌬

* "ERASE TO THE LEFT", better known as backspace, is a thing: ⌫

...and a little more bizarro: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscellaneous_Technical](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscellaneous_Technical)

<comment><USER3> The backspace symbol makes perfect sense. You may very well want to say "Press ⌫ to delete the selected object".

<comment><USER4> But you may also say "Next to the link you will see [EXTERNAL LINK] which indicates that the link leads to another website."

<comment><USER5> That reasoning would make every conceivable icon a valid target for inclusion.

To actually get the character included, you can't just reason that it might be used in a certain way, you will have to demonstrate it with actual and authentic use in the wild. The accepted proposal for the inclusion of the power symbol is a nice example of how this works.

If you can find a bunch of printed manuals or books or websites that actually use this icon in this manner you might be able to submit a successful proposal.

<comment><USER4> The web is full of those symbols, so I'm sure there are books (or online resources) explaining them. And if not, someone should do something about that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > It is unclear that the entity in question is actually an element of plain > text, given the inevitable connection to its function in linking to other > documents, and thus its coexistence with markup for links. Furthermore, the > existing widespread practice of representing this sign on web pages using > images (often specified via CSS styles) would be unlikely to benefit from > attempting to encode a character for this image.

I don't really have a horse in this race, but... isn't the existing widespread practice of representing the sign using images attributable to the fact there is not a character available? What else do they want people to do? The point of adding the character is so that in the _future_ people can use text instead of an image.

<comment><USER7> I think that the point is, unlike emojis which have been integrated in end products by some vendors, forcing Unicode comity to integrate them due to the Unicode consortium goal of backward compatibility, this icon is enforced in any vendor charset out there.

</comment></comment><comment> dan-robertson I think an issue with the arguments here is that each side is making its arguments based around quite different standards. Unicode have two standards for inclusion of symbols, one for adding new symbols and one for merging in characters from other character sets.

The rejection is based on the first standard for adding new characters.

The arguments against it seem to be based on taking the second standard as precedent. But I think as far as the Unicode committees are concerned, arguments based on the precedent of whatever random crap was grandfathered in from preexisting character sets do not apply to characters that are not from preexisting character sets. I think any argument that relies on "you already allow all this other random crap" must also argue that this symbol exists in some other character set which ought to be merged into Unicode, or that the standard for new characters should be more precedent-based/different, but I don't see any such arguments other than some implied "common sense guess as to how one expects Unicode to work"

<comment><USER8> So the smartest way to go about this is to create a whole new character set for external link symbols? That seems like a really roundabout way to get this thing accepted.

<comment><USER9> The word you're looking for is "script". And, no.

One has to make a better argument for the external link symbol getting a codepoint assignment. TFA, for example, makes an argument based on emojis -- certainly that's strong enough to blunt the UTC's rejection rationale, but perhaps not enough to win approval outright.

Addressing all the arguments used in the rejection is important, of course. The fact that currently images are used is hardly dispositive: that's business as usual for missing Unicode assignments!!

But there are probably stronger arguments for rejection than adoption than the UTC made that it could make the next time this comes up.

The best argument for rejection that I can think of has to do with layering. An external link character isn't very useful without the _actual_ external link, but the link belongs a layer up: not in the text, but in the markup. Well, if the _link_ belongs a layer up, why not also the symbol? Alternatively, more markup can move into Unicode. There has been and will continue to be some pressure to move more semantics from markup to text, but it's probably best to resist that pressure.

On the other hand, a solid argument for adoption may involve text rendering of HTML. Think of lynx/elinks and other such browsers, which can't use images. An external link character could prove useful in distinguishing the rendering of linked text from, say, underlined non-linked text.

I'm surprised these arguments didn't come up. Or maybe they did -- I've not gone down the rabbit hole on this one, and probably I won't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think that most people find this hard to digest. The committee approves a ton of emojis with a dozen variations each, a gazillion characters that make it possible to make some weird word soup that breaks sane layout, but including one of the most commonly used symbols is somehow out of the question.

<comment><USER3> Because all of those symbols are used as part of text, while the external link symbol isn't. It is not part of the text itself. If you copied that text, you would not really expect the link symbol to be copied along with it.

<comment><USER11> >If you copied that text, you would not really expect the link symbol to be copied along with it.

Because it's not in Unicode it can't be copied. If it was in unicode symbol I would expect it.

<comment><USER3> But it's not part of the text, it is a decoration. Even if it was in Unicode, I would not expect it to be part of the copied text.

<comment><USER12> Isn't this something like a stylistic editorial decision? Basically it could be either way depending on what the author/publisher/editor wants.

On a lot of pages links are hidden as plain text and only show up if someone hovers over them. (Great? Confusing? Bad UX? Sure, but still a choice.)

At the same time someone else might just use underlining, but no different color. And someone might just want to use a symbol.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The reason for rejection, for better or worse, is that this is a functional element, like a button, rather than part of running text.

<comment><USER14> Like the play/pause symbols then, which are already in there?

And since when was a smiling poop an 'element of plain text'

<comment><USER15> not that I agree with the final decision, but I can imagine "Play"/"Pause" to show up in a device manual and Smiling Poop as part of a chat message.

Neither applies to the "external link" symbol.

<comment><USER16> Why couldn't the external link icon appear in technical documentation as it so often does?

<comment><USER17> Can you imagine it in paper documents or anywhere that is not hypertext?

<comment><USER18> Yes, I've seen it used as a way to steer the reader to open their browser for further information with URL written in plain text. Like hyper footnote

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> U+1F517 [https://emojipedia.org/link/](https://emojipedia.org/link/) might do this job

Anyway I think we can avoid target="_blank" most of the time, you can have a [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/WindowEvent...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/WindowEventHandlers/onbeforeunload) event listener if something needs to be saved before the page location changes

<comment><USER20> I generally see that one used as "permalink/create share link to the current page".

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The closest I can think of is U+2b00 (north east white arrow) followed by U+20de (combining enclosing square).

I suspect HN will eat the character: ⬀⃞ although they sometimes pass through if there's enough other text in the comment.

<comment><USER22> Hacker News lets some emoji and Unicode through, but I'm not sure how it's chosen. Here's some I copied from Wikipedia's page on emoji: ℹ ⌛🀄🈚

<comment><USER23> Weird, I've never seen any before this thread, I thought they were all stripped. Bug or feature, I wonder?

<comment><USER22> I'll ask tomorrow if I can remember and get back to you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > Furthermore, the existing widespread practice of representing this sign on > web pages using images (often specified via CSS styles) would be unlikely to > benefit from attempting to encode a character for this image.

Obviously enough text-mode browsers would be likely to benefit.

<comment><USER25> This made my head spin. It's like saying people already using the JIS text encoding would be unlikely to benefit from adding Japanese to Unicode. Absolutely mind blowing.

<comment><USER3> No, it is saying that Unicode is used to encode what people think of as plain text, and that UI symbols that are not part of the text content are outside the scope of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > It is unclear that the entity in question is actually an element of plain > text...

As the author pointed out, emojis seem to clearly violate this excuse. What possible justification do they give for emojis? There is no way [I originally inserted the poop emoji here, but it was stripped out. That kind of reinforces my point.] is an element of plain text.

<comment><USER27> The pile of poop would not ever get accepted as a character in unicode on its own. It's there because of including an existing character encoding set (IIRC from Japanese featurephone messaging standards), which had a pile of poop character and other emoji, so for purposes of compatibility all the characters of that set must get Unicode mappings.

So there's a situation of dual standards - all the weird characters that were included in any pre-Unicode text encodings for whatever arbitrary reasons are in Unicode and are always going to be there; but all the _new_ weird characters need appropriate justification for inclusion and are likely to be denied.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> > The UTC rejected the proposals to add "external link sign", most recently in > L2/12-169. It is unclear that the entity in question is actually an element > of plain text

Nor is Pile of Poo, and that's in Unicode.

If external Link was added to Unicode, I expect it would be more used than 1000s of characters that are in it.

<comment><USER29> > Nor is Pile of Poo

I really really don't understand this point. We have evidence that people use pile of poo in plaintext today in instant messaging all the time. Isn't this enough evidence that pile of poo belongs to plaintext? I'm not trying to be facetious; it's really puzzling to me. Since every single comment in this thread is about pile of poo, whereas it seems to me the worst possible example since it's such a widely used emoji.

<comment><USER30> It's only possible to use it in a text message because it's a unicode character. If external link was a character, would people use it? I don't know. Do you?

<comment><USER29> Maybe, maybe not, we don't know. What I know is that even my mom and grandma use pile of poo on facebook. Will they use "external link" symbol? I would guess not, but maybe.

<comment><USER30> > Will they use "external link" symbol? I would guess not.

In that way, it would be no different from 99% of unicode characters then.

<comment><USER29> Exactly, my point is pile of poo is such a bad example since recently it's probably in 1%-th percentile of most used unicode symbols in plaintext. It's similar to arguing something like ∆ or é does not belong to unicode.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> yoz-y I'd like the condition on the plain text to be relaxed. I would love to be able to use Unicode for creating basic interfaces. I would love to have basic interface elements such as a magnifying glass, "save" icons and external link to be part of the standard. Maybe they don't strictly find their use but for one people would find the use if they were there, and two, there are already (granted, grandfathered) elements that were used exactly for this purpose back in the era of plain text window interfaces.

<comment><USER31> There's the PUA. And I mean, it's not like it doesn't happen. See font awesome for instance.

<comment> yoz-y I use the awesome versions of fonts in terminal for power line and stuff. But that's kind of the thing, it can't be ubiquitous and easily reused. If every system had it's interface font it would make a lot of stuff easier. An example would be glyphs on buttons that are almost always the same.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This would make copying links harder as you would need to avoid copying the link symbol, unless the link symbol was part of the URL.

<comment><USER33> A typical implementation would use a generated pseudo-element that doesn't get copied.

<comment><USER34> So, not a unicode character, then - a presentation element that is rendered _on_ unicode.

<comment><USER33> No, e.g.:

      a::after {
        content: "↗";
      }

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> For this stuff we have fontawesome and ttf generators from svg's. Just grab svg icons on thenounproject and make your way own font!

I happen to disagree with the unicode decision because there should be a section for basic commands so they can be rendered in diff fonts. But whatever — as I say don't wait for standards if they don't exist, make your own!

</comment><comment><USER36> How many new characters are proposed each year? What's the rejection rate? Maybe it's a healthy process to reject when uncertain and then reconsider after popular appeals, especially if they are inundated with (mostly) questionable applications. It's premature to judge the process without more context

</comment><comment><USER37> We removed it from GOV.UK in 2016:

[https://designnotes.blog.gov.uk/2016/11/28/removing-the- exte...](https://designnotes.blog.gov.uk/2016/11/28/removing-the-external- link-icon-from-gov-uk/)

</comment><comment><USER38> After getting an emoji accepted I submitted a proposal for the external link symbol in 2018, trying to address the committee's concerns from the several earlier proposals. [https://doubly.so/pub/External- Link-2018.pdf](https://doubly.so/pub/External-Link-2018.pdf)

It was summarily rejected with the nonsense statement (in full):

> Thank you for your submission. This was discussed during last week's UTC > meeting. I was directed to let you know UTC feels that, as submitted, the > proposal does not sufficiently demonstrate a plain text need for such a > symbol. The context for usage is mark-up with links by default.

<comment><USER39> At this point I think a submission of 8 generic "arrow exiting square from top, top-right, etc." might have a better chance of being accepted as it holds a general meaning of exiting something and is not specific to hypertext as seems to be their objection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> > Its main rationale appears to be that the external link icon is not an > element of plain text. I would agree that is the case. However I would like > to point out that emoji and other similar useful symbols are not plain text > either yet they have been accepted and continue to be accepted.

The author seems to be using a very limited definition of "plain text". Emoji are clearly used in the same way as latin-character text in communication, so they are effectively plain text.

I think a more effective argument may be that the external-link symbol should be allowed for the same reasons that the power on/off/toggle and eject symbols were allowed.

</comment><comment><USER41> One of most peculiar tourist attractions in the Wieliczka salt mine near Krakow are signs with a shaft symbol that is not in Unicode. It looks like a # with a · in the middle and appears in texts instead of the word "shaft".

</comment><comment><USER42> It is simply factuly incorrect to say that a commonly used sysmbol would not benifit from being included in fonts. How can a committee working in this field posibly fail to understand that?

<comment><USER25> It is not incorrect, and they do understand but they don't care. They have esoteric philosophical justifications that exclude some commonly used symbols while inventing never before seen ones. This is the problem with putting a tiny number of otherwise powerless people in charge things.

They _clap_ become _clap_ petty _clap_ tyrants.

<comment><USER43> What is the significance of clap?

<comment><USER25> I'm mocking the overuse of the clapping hands emoji. Here is the first result from Bing for the search "clap emoji overuse":

[https://www.reddit.com/r/justlegbeardthings/comments/6rl6mu/...](https://www.reddit.com/r/justlegbeardthings/comments/6rl6mu/whats_with_the_overuse_of_the_clap_emoji/)

Which is something no one asked for, but Unicode gave us anyway and now everyone is annoyed by.

<comment><USER31> Maybe a few people on twitter? I've never seen it elsewhere and I barely use twitter so saying "everyone" is an exaggeration. Also, if everyone were annoyed by it, then it wouldn't be overused any more almost by definition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> This kind of reminded me of this I was reading this morning [http://seancubitt.blogspot.com/2020/04/allonomy-autonomy- and...](http://seancubitt.blogspot.com/2020/04/allonomy-autonomy-and- after.html) "a poem cannot 'contain in itself the reasons why it is so and not otherwise' (Coleridge) since it must be written on top of the infrastructure of a language and orthography that the poet rarely originates"

</comment><comment><USER45> What's the code point for uppercase superscript Z?

j/k there isnt one.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_subscripts_and_supersc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_subscripts_and_superscripts#Latin_and_Greek_tables)

No doubt those emoji's are more important and historically common than superscript uppercase C F Q S X Y and Z.

[https://github.com/jakeogh/unicodehaz](https://github.com/jakeogh/unicodehaz)

<comment><USER22> I'm actually fairly annoyed that a lot of obvious superscripts, subscripts, and strikethroughs are missing.

<comment><USER46> I'm actually more annoyed that they are there in the first place. Unicode can't seem to decide whether it's about just encoding text or also doing presentation/formatting (and now piles of poo and colorful emoji, what next, animations?), so now it's a bit of both, what a mess. It's making life hard and breaking things for applications that assume text is just text, and the presentational features are not enough to avoid having to implement your own presentational features in a program that needs to do presentation..

now you have applications where you can't find a string because it was written in Unicode bold letters instead of the letters' normal ASCII counterparts. And then you have applications that are confused about those bold letters because they are not actually surrounded by bold markup.

The worst part is that you can't criticize unicode without attracting a crowd of bullies who handwave about human languages being complicated (no, that does not justify poor design) or say it has to be this way because ugh shift-jis (or whatever nasty old encoding you can come up with) is not nice.

Well designed technology makes complex things simple. People defending poorly designed technology blame the problem for being complex.

𝔽𝕦𝕔𝕜 𝕦𝕟𝕚𝕔𝕠𝕕𝕖!

(Why don't you try search for "fuck" in Firefox?)

<comment><USER47> You're so right... Unicode is making things too complex, and intruding on various formatting issues. Case in point: The skin tone modifiers. Or this stuff: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero- width_joiner](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-width_joiner)

There doesn't exist any parser that does it 100% correct. And parsing it is becoming so complex that it's causing bugs and vulnerabilities (it's not a coincidence that so many remote exploits use some kind of unicode to trigger it).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I think from the consortium's point of view it boils down to whether it makes sense to consider the link symbol separately from the text that makes up the link. They apparently decided it did not, but you could disagree. Of course, it does not really matter if you disagree, because they won't change their mind (unless you repropose it in a way that makes a different argument from the original proposal, which their rejection is basically saying could be considered).

</comment><comment> c-smile Agree with the rejection.

The same link in different contexts can be as either external or local. So that is a business of UA/renderer to mark it properly.

CSS is quite adequate for that ([https://davidwalsh.name/external-links- css](https://davidwalsh.name/external-links-css)) and the image (or whatever author/UA decided to use) can go inline in CSS itself.

</comment><comment><USER49> Talk about timing, I was just looking for this in unicode for my website yesterday. Didn't find anything that looked good so ended up going with Font Awesome: [https://fontawesome.com/icons/external-link- alt?style=solid](https://fontawesome.com/icons/external-link-alt?style=solid)

I think it's a missed opportunity for unicode.

<comment><USER50> try `\u2197`. You can see it used on external links here: [https://chadlavi.github.io/clear/#/link#examples](https://chadlavi.github.io/clear/#/link#examples)

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Emojis are definitely plain text, as they have meaning when I write them on a piece of paper

<comment><USER30> The external link symbol also has meaning when written on papaer, which is "external link".

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I want a tool that scans English 🗣 text for names of unicode symbols. Then I want the English language to move to that symbolic writing. You know, because it is fun to see cultures evolve.

</comment><comment><USER53> click h͟e͟r͟e to learn more about the decision

</comment><comment><USER54> Glad they say "no" sometimes

<comment><USER47> Didn't stop them from making Unicode an overcomplicated clusterfuck of combination codes though... Referring to things like this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero- width_joiner](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-width_joiner) . It's become almost impossible to build an accurate parser now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> "unicode was intended only for print media" doesn't bleed with irony already?

</comment><comment><USER56>
        a::after {
          content: url(my_external_link_symbol.gif);
        }

</comment><comment><USER50> I usually just use `\u2197` or similar.

</comment><comment><USER57> This article sums up my encounter of the Unicode committee pretty well. They have stopped long ago making sane decisions.

</comment><comment><USER58> Why do you need to know that a link is an external link?

<comment><USER59> I see it often in intranets, wikis, and PDF documentation. It's an additional context clue that you're leaving a closed website. The most egregious examples give you a separate click-through screen when leaving the website. Government web pages seem to do this the most.

It would be nice if we could all use a standard icon or some other constant UI element--like a single underline for internal references and double underline for external? I imagine unique colors would be too difficult to standardize.

<comment><USER58> Yeah but why?

What do people do with the information that a link is external? Do people think 'I'll follow this link - oh no wait a minute it's external I won't'?

<comment><USER59> Specifically in those circumstances it's more important than normal; intranet, government, and PDF documents.

Intranet: bespoke documentation to internal processes verses generic documents used for reference.

Government: external references can be hijacked (asking for personal information) or may not represent the government but still have relevant info.

PDF documents: jumping around a PDF document (from a table of contents) is different than going to an external website. Especially if you don't have Internet access at that moment.

I think all of this is significantly more important since browser have been hiding more URLs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> ...and U+1F4A9 is!

</comment><comment><USER61> God, they spend so much time on emoji which is much the same. They are becoming a bit of a joke!

<comment><USER62> You don't expect to be able to click emoji, and they don't lose their meaning when printed out on paper.

<comment><USER63> If you print a web page the links are still there. The icon tells you "this here was a link" and you can go to the computer and look it up. If the link wasn't underlined and had a different colour but you printed in b&w it might be the only way to know that was a link, so I would argue that the icon is more useful in paper than on a live web, actually.

<comment><USER64> It's not for all links. It's for external links, meaning a different domain than what's currently in your address bar.</comment></comment></comment></comment>