Gitmoji – Yay or Nay? - <AUTHOR> https://opensource.christmas/2019/11 <comment><USER2> That's a no from me. I am not a huge fan of emoji. _Especially_ not in the cli or editor.

Emoji are hard to type on non-mobile platforms, and are difficult to search for in logs or files. Often they don't render properly. They're near impossible to deal with from the command-line.

Not to mention the accessibility issues.

I see no reason why these cannot be accomplished with tags/flairs such as [critical], [bug], etc. These would also make sense to those not familiar with the Gitmoji system.

Don't make stuff harder than it needs to be. Emoji look flashy, but that's about it. Please use good ol' plaintext.

<comment><USER3> > Emoji are hard to type on non-mobile platforms

On Windows they are easy: <Windows key> \+ .

Finding the right emoji is easier than on my Android phone as Windows lets me type the emoji name. Why emoji search is missing on Android... who knows.

<comment><USER4> That still seems much harder to me. Instead of just adding "PERF" to my commit messages, and later grepping for "PERF", I have to pull up a separate window each time, and remember that performance changes are indicated by a lightning bolt.

<comment><USER5> >remember that performance changes are indicated by a lightning bolt.

Tbh that's a very weak consideration, as it's ingrained through standardization throughout the codebase. And if this is for codebases you're not familiar with, then PERF is hardly gauranteed to.produce useful results (it certainly isn't standard in my own codebases).

Much more dangerous is people expanding on emoji-tagging with things like COLOR and similar VARIANTS, or an explosion of tags like being suggested in this article, making it even harder to use/memorize the system

But worst of all is that emoji are ugly and ruin the aesthetic of anything they come in contact with

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why do people feel the need to standardize these things?

Emoji used occasionally are fun and refreshing and can draw attention to important commits. Emoji used by default become line noise.

To paraphrase Goodhart's Law, when a joke becomes a standard it ceases to be fun.

I also object to the details of the categorization. Some tags split up tasks that really should be done together (eg fixing bugs and updating tests, or adding features and writing docs) and some tags are duplicates (eg :art: and :recycle:).

<comment><USER7> >Why do people feel the need to standardize these things?

Really? Because standardization leads to automation.

<comment><USER6> I'm not against automation in principle, but in this case you don't actually need to standardize before you automate.

Observation: people are prefixing their commit messages with emoji!

Automation: let's group commit messages by emoji, with an "uncategorised" bucket for emoji-less commits. Job done, that's all you need.

The "standard" that defines which emoji to use and when can evolve completely separately. I'd argue that this standardization is actively bad, as it adds to the learning curve when contributing to a project, stifles creativity (you may only use these emoji in exactly these ways) and wastes time by encouraging bikeshedding (people adding new categories, or arguing over existing categories).

<comment><USER7> It only adds to the learning curve because some people are adamantly against it, causing unneeded stress for adopting the standard.

<comment><USER6> No, it adds to the learning curve because it adds new rules.

I also happen to think they are bad rules in this case, but that's a separate matter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > With gitmoji others or your future self can simply look at the associated > emoji and straightaway catch the intention.

Just like a word does.

> The [bug emoji] emoji is easily recognized as a bug by most people

The word "bug" works for me.

> but will [tulip emoji] immediately signalize that code is removed?

Nope. Besides, we already have commonly used symbols for that, "+" for a line added and "-" for a line deleted. I'm not sure what a tulip has to do with deleting code.

edit: hackernews removed the emoji from my post. (I put in the words for the images.) Another reason to not use emoji.

<comment><USER9> > [tulip emoji]

Is that what it looks like for you? For me it's a flame (which seems to make more sense for removing code).

<comment><USER8> Yeah, it looks like a black tulip.

As for a flame, I don't associate fire with removing things. Frankly, emoji and icons may work for _things_ but they don't and never have worked for _actions_. Apple, for example, never did come up with an icon for "print" that people didn't have to be told what it meant. Apple could have saved a lot of grief by using "print" instead of the icon. (The same for "delete".)

Back in my days at Symantec, the people making the IDE worked hard to come up with icons. They had a problem finding an icon to represent a CPU register, and finally settled on a picture of a cash register.

<comment><USER10> > Apple, for example, never did come up with an icon for "print" that people > didn't have to be told what it meant. Apple could have saved a lot of grief > by using "print" instead of the icon. (The same for "delete".)

Do you have any references for this? Every print icon I've seen Apple use looks like a printer, and every delete icon looks like a trash can. Is there an article or something saying these caused confusion?

<comment><USER8> My reference is when an Apple salesman came by my workplace around the time the Mac was released. He proudly showed off a sheet of icons, claiming they were all obvious, to a group of maybe 15 of us. One pointed to an icon, and said "what's that box of kleenex mean?" The salesman says "print, it looks like a printer". We all laughed and said it looks like a box of kleenex. The salesman didn't get much headway after that.

Printers come in all kinds of form factors. Besides, even if it was recognizable as a printer, a printer is a _thing_ , not an _action_. Why wouldn't it mean "configure the printer"?

<comment><USER9> You have to start somewhere. At this point if someone thought the printer icon meant anything but 'print' I think they'd be very surprised.

<comment><USER8> It isn't any harder to learn what "print" means.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nay, nay, nay.

I don't like text that looks differently for everyone depending on the platform they're on.

Emojis have shown us already that vendors are willing to change their appearance depending on current trends or political climate. Gun becomes water gun, salad becomes vegan salad. One day, if caterpillar becomes a butterfly because of some mundane idea, is it still going to be instantly recognizable as a bug?

We write code in formal languages rather than natural ones to stay away from ambiguity. Emojis are a straight downgrade.

<comment><USER12> > I don't like text that looks differently for everyone depending on the > platform they're on.

But we already have fonts that make the Latin alphabet look different on different platforms.

> if caterpillar becomes a butterfly because of some mundane idea, is it still > going to be instantly recognizable as a bug?

Yes? Didn't Hopper tape a moth 'bug' into her notebook?

<comment><USER13> > _But we already have fonts that make the Latin alphabet look different on > different platforms._

But the differences in appearance are abstracted away; the whole point of an alphabet is that it's a small fixed set of symbols. Conversely if you see 𓀪 on one platform and 𓀫 on another, you have no idea whether the difference is meaningful or decorative.

<comment><USER12> > the whole point of an alphabet is that it's a small fixed set of symbols

Emoji _is_ an alphabet. There's a fixed set. I know they look different on different platforms but it's the same Emoji. Just like how an A here looks different to an A on Twitter. A vomiting face emoji conveys the same thing however it's drawn.

<comment><USER13> Emoji aren't a fixed set; there are new ones added all the time: 230 this year, 157 last year, …. When I see an emoji, I can't tell whether it's an existing one drawn in a different style, or whether it got added since the last time I memorized the code chart.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've gotten into arguments over whether or not emoji belong in the unicode standard at all, and I'm not going to rehash them here.

What I am going to say is that _regardless_ of whether or not emoji are a good fit for unicode, they don't degrade gracefully for blind users (or for sighted users on older hardware) and they're prone to rendering issues between different fonts that can mask intent.[0]

Everything bad about icon fonts also applies to emoji. All of the articles you've ever read about how svg icons are preferred[1] -- all of them apply to emoji as well.

So in general, I only use unicode emoji[2] if two things are true

A) I'm in a closed conversation that won't be copied and pasted around or shared publicly.

B) I know the exact platform that my reader will be using to view my text.

I don't think Git falls into either of those categories.[3]

[0]: [https://blog.emojipedia.org/apple-and-the-gun- emoji/](https://blog.emojipedia.org/apple-and-the-gun-emoji/)

[1]: [https://cloudfour.com/thinks/seriously-dont-use-icon- fonts/](https://cloudfour.com/thinks/seriously-dont-use-icon-fonts/)

[2]: I do _heavily_ use emoji shorthands (:bug: :cat_eating_avacodo:) but these don't suffer from most of the same problems as emoji. They work as progressive enhancements for the platforms that render them, and fall back to readable text on the platforms that don't.

[3]: It's true that unicode fonts in general have issues when you get into non-English languages, but I don't advise people to avoid, say, Chinese characters, because: A) language glyphs don't change often enough to frighten me on accessibility, B) people who need to see them are likely already using devices that support their own languages, and C) we don't have a good alternative we could use instead.

<comment><USER15> > they don't degrade gracefully for blind users

why not? there is a canonical plain-text description for every unicode emoji. at least in theory, i see no reason why a screen reader shouldn't be able to handle emojis.

<comment><USER16> In theory, there's nothing stopping them.

But in reality, they don't work. They don't work today, and they probably won't work next year. Heck, half of UTF-8 tends not to work.

Should a segment of the population that are forced to rely on poor tools (I hate JAWS so very very much) be excluded today?

<comment><USER17> > forced to rely on poor tools (I hate JAWS so very very much)

Blind Windows users aren't forced to use JAWS, at least in the sort of context where they're likely to encounter emoji (i.e. I understand it may be forced in some job settings). NVDA is freely available and Narrator is built in, and both handle emoji well AFAIK.

Disclosure: I work at Microsoft on the Narrator team, but I'm just as happy if you use NVDA.

<comment><USER16> > NVDA is freely available and Narrator is built in, and both handle emoji > well AFAIK.

They may handle emoji, but they also regularly fail to handle other common screen-reader situations well.

I do understand the difficulty - most interfaces today are visually-oriented, and often don't include the necessary contexts for accessibility. This turns our screenreader programs into massive and complex programs that have to handle so many different formats and edge cases they become truly monolithic.

But I haven't found either of those to be up to a level of quality where I can put up with them on a daily basis. JAWS is simply the least-worst at the moment.

(Small examples: NVDA is similar to the sloths from Zootopia's DMV anytime you're doing anything on a network (whether not its the active window). Narrator's settings regularly get reset by updates, and will re-enable itself at random and unexpected times).

<comment><USER17> > NVDA is similar to the sloths from Zootopia's DMV anytime you're doing > anything on a network

Do I understand this reference correctly? Are you saying NVDA is really slow when you're doing anything on a network, even when that network activity is in the background? Can you give an example? I've never experienced this nor heard of it. But maybe I'm missing some specific detail of the Zootopia reference. I watched that movie once, or rather listened to it without audio description (with my family), and I don't remember the DMV scene that well.

> Narrator's settings regularly get reset by updates, and will re-enable > itself at random and unexpected times).

Have you reported this through Feedback Hub? I haven't experienced or heard of the problem with settings being reset by updates.

<comment><USER16> Yes, NVDA has some problems to do with network connectivity. It's a fairly well-known problem. It has been solved several times, and re-appeared several times, but getting the right trifecta of Windows version, network card and NVDA version means it can take somewhere in the range of a full minute just to say "Firefox".

\---

Windows isn't my daily driver, mostly because Windows 10 has at several points reset _all_ the system settings with some updates, not just accessibility. Again, this isn't an unknown problem. It may happen less often now the team seems more aware of it, but it only has to happen once to render my computer nearly useless. It's less of a problem with Narrator, and more the tightly couple nature of Windows components and the decided drop in update quality in recent years.

The part about Narrator randomly speaking is something has appeared since the XP days. Now and then a single word will squeak through when the whole thing is supposed to be on mute. It's completely unpredictable though, so I wouldn't expect it (as a programmer) to be solved at any point soon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Definetely a no for me. I also hate seeing commit message littering with emoji and feel like the author is too lazy to find correct words. I also disagree with the "visual cue" advantage, because the emoji looks different per machine/font/terminal/OS. Plain text looks consistent every where.

</comment><comment><USER19> > Forces you to make smaller and more specific commits

There's no forcing anyone to make smaller and specific commits. It may be used as a reminder, or tool, but certainly not going to prevent someone from committing junk behind whatever emoji they choose.

<comment><USER20> Not to mention that a non-emoji based tagging scheme (e.g. "[bug]", "[UI]", etc.) would likely have the same effect (if there is any) that the author purports.

<comment><USER21> Plus the benefit of not being ambiguous like a lipstick emoji :)

<comment><USER22> I'd actually interpret that as "lipstick on a pig", or just "[hack]". I'm honestly not sure what its intentions are.

Which I guess is one of the problems with this suggestion.

<comment><USER21> Depending on the screen I always see a Rotating police light in red at first.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Absolutely not. Keep your emojis out of my CLI and my face, even, as far as professional areas of life are concerned. I see READMEs full of emojis, the description of the project is full of emojis... I personally dislike it, and it actually makes me reconsider digging more into that project. I might have prejudices, but it is quite childish to me. The only place where I am fine with emojis is instant messaging applications (for casual conversations). You can even have stickers there if you want for all I care!

</comment><comment><USER24> Nay.

> A picture says more than words

Because it relies on a lot of cultural background. Which in the world of emoji changes fast. This won't be welcoming of new users when they have to learn 10 or more symbols for whatever you're doing.

:lipstick: for UI changes? Why? :computer: or :smartphone: as those are the usual interface used or :wheelchair: because you care about something accessible would feel better.

<comment><USER25> If we could have :pig: as well, we could at least do :lipstick::pig: for kludges on bad code...

I think you're right on the mark about the strong cultural context and arbitrariness of the symbols. The value I see in emoji for this sort of application (as others have also pointed out here) is for jokes and maybe (rarely) highlighting lines visually. Obviously the joke dies if the use gets standardized, and the practical disadvantages far outweigh the advantages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Nay! Emoji is slang that excludes a huge number of people, not just due to preference but also because the meaning keeps changing and can be confusing if not exhausting to keep up with. It skews young and/or Western and there's far more kinds of programmers than that.

<comment><USER27> > _It skews young and /or Western_

How does it skew Western when they were literally invented in Japan?

<comment><USER28> Yes, emoji is literally Japanese. 絵文字 meaning 'picture as words'. Invented for use in Japanese pagers, later proliferating to mobile phones long before smartphones even existed [0].

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> If we cannot describe in the subject what we are doing, we should not commit it.

Icons are perfect to define actions (fixing bugs, improving the layout, etc) however, the commit is important when you are doing releases, cherry-picks, maintaining patches, etc.

I'm not against changes and sure the icons look very cool on the front page of GitHub or in `git log`.

However, most of the maintainers, who actually do things with commits, they work looking at the content. Be useful in the future, to understand what was going on, is the main purpose of the commit message.

I agree that a bug, a rocket (and others) can be used to improve the subject of a commit, eventually, the problems are:

-by introducing icons, are we creating a perfect excuse to be lazy during the commit phase?

-Will the icons makes our history of change the poorest?

</comment><comment><USER30> I like it! I agree with many of the objections in other comments, but used wisely emojis in commit messages can definitely add value.

1\. They add easy noticeable visual cues that might otherwise require reading a full sentence (at that often will be omitted altogether).

2\. It's fun and informal, something that's often lacking in dev teams.

<comment><USER6> It's fun and informal until somebody tells you it's mandatory.

<comment><USER30> Huh, that's a good point!

<comment><USER30> Also: HN strips emojis >:~(

<comment><USER6> Informal fun is not allowed here!!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> That would require linux distros to distribute some kind of tool to display them properly and enter them easily in the CLI as well as IDEs.

This is what it looks like to me:

\- [CLI]([http://i.imgur.com/XMcXwvi.png](http://i.imgur.com/XMcXwvi.png))

\- [Pycharm]([http://i.imgur.com/HOXj2yg.png](http://i.imgur.com/HOXj2yg.png))

Even displaying that recycle emoji required me to install some font from a repo on github. Emojis seem to have very poor support on linux.

If [this method]([http://i.imgur.com/v5eqgSJ.png](http://i.imgur.com/v5eqgSJ.png)) of entry were standard then maybe it'd be interesting and I'd give it a try.

Given the current status of emoji support on linux, that's a big naw from me dawg

<comment><USER32> Apparently Ubuntu 18.04 introduced native emoji support through bundling Google's Noto Colour emoji font and an emoji picker ui built into Gnome. Looks very similar to MacOS's built in emoji picker that I'm used to.

<comment><USER31> I am on 18.04, so it's not working if something was done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm also not a fan of emoji here. Though, I do like some systematic prefixes for commits, such as the ones proposed by Conventional Commits: [https://www.conventionalcommits.org/en/v1.0.0-beta.2/](https://www.conventionalcommits.org/en/v1.0.0-beta.2/)

</comment><comment><USER34> I'd rather not but not because of the emoji but because atm I don't like categorizing commits in the first place. I've just tried doing it on a project and it felt pretty weird. Instead of just grouping single atomic changes like I'd usually do, I suddenly also have to think about what category fits a commit best and what to do if a commit satisfies multiple categories.

Thinking about it, emoji could actually help with this since it's easier to assign multiple categories to a commit without wasting a lot of character space. Still, what I'd rather want to see become a convention is an annotation in the commit's body that simply marks whether it's a major/minor/patch bump (or none). Plus optionally a line for the changelog. (Optionally because it allows commits to stay small while also not cluttering the changelog.)

Any thoughts/feedback/etc on this?

</comment><comment><USER35> > ... and last but not least it definitely adds joy and excitement .

Akin to the person with the boombox on public transport.

I could imagine wanting to highlight some keywords myself – for myself – but now my screen has turned into a colourful shouting competition.

</comment><comment><USER36> Absolutely not. Seriously if it comes to that, just add gifs and youtube videos while you're at it.

</comment><comment><USER37> I like this more then semantic git because:

\- same amount of chars to type

\- single char / img to read (way faster)

\- you can glance the commit log wall of text and still get a lot of info, not something you can do with other forms

I don't like textual representation tho (i.e. :zap: vs :feature: ) and if u watch log in systems that can't present images it might be actually harder to understand

That would be general yay

</comment><comment><USER38> My main concern are blind people, I'm not sure how well these emojis are accessible for them.

<comment><USER20> macOS VoiceOver reads one of the (but not necessarily the most useful in a given context) names of the emoji. For example, gets read as "caterpillar". However, importantly: there's no distinction that it's an emoji when read.

Caveats: I have no idea what JAWS does here. I'm not a visually impaired user, but have done a11y work in the past.

<comment><USER20> Too late to edit now, but just realized HN scrubbed the emoji. "…For example, <bug emoji used in OP> gets read…"

<comment><USER39> An object lesson in the problems of using emoji to actually convey meaning :)

<comment><USER40> It's a problem insofar as HN is, on purpose, stripping emoji. Which is a questionable choice...

<comment><USER41> It saves people from having to guess which subculture you come from, just so they can understand what a certain picture means for you. Emoji are very irritating for this reason: They are focused on the writer, and not the audience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I have tried to use Gitmoji and other standards before on a few projects but I have since stopped. The motivation behind it makes a lot of sense but I can count the number of instances where I have used the emojis as a cue to find problematic commits with one hand.

That being said, I never really thought about the point about forcing you to ensure your commit is atomic. I definitely have become better at it but the habit has stuck even after using Gitmoji.

</comment><comment><USER43> Off Topic question: What's up with all this .christmas blogs that I'm seeing lately? New trend?

<comment><USER44> No, it's all from the same guy, and every post seems to get linked here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Couldn't something text based ( like this[1] ) be standardized much easily?

1: [https://gist.github.com/abravalheri/34aeb7b18d61392251a2](https://gist.github.com/abravalheri/34aeb7b18d61392251a2)

ed. I see another comment points to the conventionalcommits proposal.

</comment><comment><USER46> I am glad I am not the only one against this. Especially iOS developers seem to love to put Emoji in their tooling and git repos, but that's just my experience.

</comment><comment><USER47> As long as there is a non-emoji description of what is happening in your commit, use whatever you want. It's not something that I would ever use on anything semi-serious but I'm not going to forbid people who want to express themselves that way.

The one thing that _I will_ forbid them to do though is use it in branch names - and especially in the beginning of the branch (if it's in the middle you can use tab completion). Your commit is something that I can read or I can use its hash, but branch names are something that I have to interact with directly and I don't want to have to copy/paste the name from github or trying to figure out how to type this emoji.

</comment><comment><USER22> Nay. I'm clearly against this, and I don't find this kind of addition to the git ecosystem productive.

And hopefully that won't translate into me being "hostile" towards women in tech, just because this was proposed by a woman.

<comment><USER48> It wouldn't have even occurred to me if you hadn't specifically mentioned it, which now makes me suspect it does have something to do with the fact a woman proposed it.

<comment><USER22> We have enough example of internet-outrage caused by tech-guys treating tech- women as peers.

That is outrage over "hostility towards tech-women" when what is actually happened was that guys criticized women equally as they would have criticized men. Even seemingly respectable organizations like the Linux Foundations have fallen prey to such nonsense fronted by (racist!) twitter lynch-mobs[1].

You'd think this be a pretty clear-cut case when considered objectively, but it has proven controversial, even here on HN.

In such a climate, it is only reasonable to pro-actively guard against such accusations. The troublesome part is that it's seemingly needed.

[1] [https://twitter.com/hashtag/LinuxFoundationKangarooCourt](https://twitter.com/hashtag/LinuxFoundationKangarooCourt)

<comment><USER48> That hashtag definitely does not change my mind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> As someone who had the pleasure to work with text rendering and wonders of Unicode - hell no. I want my tools resilient, not fancy.

</comment><comment><USER21> I had a short discussion about them just yesterday. It's not a yay for me but also not a nay. I use icons for change lists in pull requests and release notes. But I use my own set of svg icons to have better control over the icons themselves.

I don't like these icons in commit message subject lines because they're too ambiguous. If you adopt the imperative subject line style (Add class X, Fix issue XYZ, etc.) you have all the same benefits plus a clearer meaning. Also using a emoji plus a description like ':bug: fixes issue' makes the whole benefit of short one character icons go away.

</comment><comment><USER50> Looking at [https://gitmoji.carloscuesta.me/](https://gitmoji.carloscuesta.me/)

As the article says, I can see that the emojis align with the intended meaning, but I'm pretty sure I'd not be able to guess the intended meaning from the emoji of many of these.

I'd think prefixing a commit message with [linux] or [hotfix] or [refector] provides the same at-a-glance benefit with less cognitive load when reading the commits.

</comment><comment><USER51> Small note: it's spelled 'Yea' and not 'Yay'.

</comment><comment><USER52> I was about to go in fully to this style at most ~2 weeks ago.

It's another forcing function to be cognizant of what exactly you're working on at a given time. (Speaking from JavaScript land,) don't update the packages, fix two bugs, add a couple features, refactor some code all in the same commit. When things go wrong in a few months, your bisect will land right on that big blob of things. In the vein of focusing on things it's also nice when reviewing code. Ideally reducing the amount of times someone sneaks in a random 'bug fix' that eventually needs to be tracked down and added to the spec.

Also, the idea of being able to categorize all commits into their respective buckets between releases. A similar idea from the other commit message prepend style out there, but with emojis. Grep for all :sparkles: and :bugs: and you have your patch notes.

But, as I started with, I couldn't commit, (heh). Terminal + `zsh` on MacOS Catalina seems to refuse to format emojis properly, often resulting in console frustrations as spaces disappear and emojis overlap text. If anyone knows a fix, let me know!

<comment><USER21> Instead of grep for :sparkles: etc you can also just grep for any other prefix style. The biggest turn down for me is the fact that these emojis render differently on each platform. It's hard to transpose meaning for an icon that is not static in its visual.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I've been consistently using it on my last 3 projects and I really like it. It brings a simple visual clue to the content of a commit, it's displayed correctly on all my git clients, and it's just fun. Also, you don't want to have more than one emoji so I agree it forces to have more atomic commits.

</comment><comment><USER54> Nay. Non standard rendering is a problem.

</comment><comment><USER55> I recently started using emoji to name tmux windows and I find it pretty useful. That being said this is probably pretty cool too. However, I could never see myself enforcing such a thing in my flow. Let alone trying to enforce it on others. It's a nice thing if people want to do it though.

</comment><comment><USER56> > A positive outcome of using gitmoji is the fact that it forces you to think > through the content and message of your commits to a larger extent.

It really doesn't. My personal experience with people using them is that the content and message of the commits is the same quality as they are without them, but now they also have a pretty picture on the front of them.

It can _encourage_ people to think more about their commits but I can't say I've seen a correlation.

I don't mind people wanting some "personality" in their commit one-liners, but it's the message and not the icon that adds value.

</comment><comment><USER57> It may be useful, but only if you implement it consistently in the workflow. However, what will happen when someone new in the team comes along? I personally prefer to prefix my commit message with the issue number if useful.

In the example given on their website (the PR example), it makes no sense to me. It does not improve the quality of the titles. Did they remove animation, did they add it? Replacing the emoji with 'add' or 'remove', the title describes what happened inside that Pull Request.

Something does not have to be beautiful to be useful and readable.

</comment><comment><USER58> I think this is a highly regional preference even without meaning to be. Emoji are more popular in Asia than in the Americas as part of normal conversation.

Probably because the entire generation of internet users right now _grew up_ on smartphones before laptops.

Secondly, we already struggle using international keyboards to find things like rupee symbol (₹) vs the $, etc. Emojis are just next door to the effort.

</comment><comment><USER34> Oh hey I just noticed this company has produced all of the recent "christmas" posts and sites on HN. Thanks for that!

</comment><comment><USER59> I heard some ops willing them to have a clearer vision of what's commited but I don't like being dependend on them. I ended up looking what kind of emoji I had to use on every commit and it felt like a waste of my time

</comment><comment><USER60> We're considering it for our design system right now, but we're not sure how well it'll work with conventional commits and commitizen.

<comment><USER6> Are you sure you're not bikeshedding?

It sounds like you have several people discussing a change that's going to have a limited impact on outcomes, if any at all. Another warning sign is if people are having more fun arguing over the change than they would do actually using the new system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> "Yay or Nay"?

Hell nay.

</comment><comment><USER62> No

</comment><comment><USER63> coming soon: emojis completely replace ASCII text in source code.

</comment><comment><USER64> No.

</comment><comment><USER65> pls no

</comment><comment><USER66> Feels like a zoomer thing. I wouldn't do it for personal projects, and I wouldn't allow it for teams I lead. They seem nice on the surface, but they just become noise.

Ever install a popular node package? It barfs up a ton of emojis in my terminal.

<comment><USER67> Sorry, zoomer? Not familiar with that term

<comment><USER68> It's a way of segregating people by age, then acting derisively about various groups in response to that. You identify bad character traits, call them out with the relevant "generation" phrase, and then sneakily imply that they have that character trait _because_ they're within that age range (even when they're not).

<comment><USER69> The worst part of it is that this obsession with "generations" is almost exclusively tied to the US. In most countries, this concept is not part of the memescape at all, so it's even more confusing.

<comment><USER70> When you think about it a bit, you realize there just cannot be "generations" in that sense. People are continuously being born in each and every year. In a family tree there are generations sure, based on the levels of the tree, but not in a population.

The exception is special baby boom periods and their echoes, which do create some more "lumping" or births.

The worst is when people try to apply American generational stereotypes to other countries. Like, no, Hungarian "boomers" didn't grow up in plenty. The 50s were a period of terror and deprivation, not the "good ole days" of prosperity.

<comment><USER68> Coming from a culture without this obsession, it took me a very long time to _learn_ the concept of generations. And I'm quite upset that I did; it's fairly deeply embedded in my mind, now, as I tied it to so many other concepts in a desperate attempt to make it make any sense. (Is a generation twenty years, or fifty? I still don't know.) It takes some effort to make that realisation now, but I remember thinking exactly those arguments when I was younger, trying to reject the concept.

<comment><USER70> > Is a generation twenty years, or fifty? I still don't know

Should be the same as the age gap between parents and children, so about 20-40 years, roughly speaking.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bonini's Paradox - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonini%27s_paradox <comment><USER2> I think the George Box aphorism linked at the bottom ("All models are wrong [but some are useful]") is closer to the right way to think about this.

With complexity comes additional explanatory power. Something with perfect explanatory power has infinite complexity. But the tradeoff is not linear in most problem domains; we can first add those concepts to our model that maximize the explanatory power relative to the complexity they introduce.

And much of the world, physical and social, can be explained in fairly simple models, which is excellent. For things that are less well captured with simple models, or for which precision is so important we wish to shrink the error term further, then great, pile on more complexity progressively.

</comment><comment><USER3> "a model that completely describes the system is about as useful as a map at 1:1 scale" — a quote from my advisor in grad school.

<comment><USER4> One of my profs was fond of the saying "with enough money, anyone can design a bridge that will stand up. Only an engineer can design a bridge that will _just_ stay up".

I think the same is true of simulation and modeling: it requires a domain expert to include the useful stuff in your model while skirting or abstracting away the extraneous bits.

<comment><USER5> The second year civil engineers at my university had a project where they had to design a bridge that could support 2 people, but would break under the weight of 3, to teach that exact lesson.

<comment><USER6> People vary in weight by more than 50%. I don't see that the spec is possible.

<comment><USER7> The three people are known to you in advance (it's your group). It was common to game this a little by saving the biggest person as the third one that had to break the bridge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > This paradox may be used by researchers to explain why complete models of > the human brain and thinking processes have not been created and will > undoubtedly remain difficult for years to come.

This assertion would only be justified if we knew enough to create complex models that we do not understand. The reality is that we don't know enough yet to create any sort of working model of the whole human brain and its thinking processes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting view. You write: _"The reality is that we don 't know enough yet to create any sort of working model of the whole human brain and its thinking processes."_

To me, this sentence seems to mean that it may be possible some time down the road to "know enough" and create a complex model of the human brain that's understandable. There are also some in philosophy who argue that humans may be cognitively closed off to understanding things like the human brain [0]. They note that humans have biological limits to understanding certain things just like an animal might. For instance, an ant, may have biological limits to its understanding of how certain things work.

What do you think of philosophers who argue of cognitive closure?

[0]: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_closure_(philosoph...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_closure_\(philosophy\)).

<comment><USER8> I actually phrased that statement that way to avoid and speculation about what might be possible, as it would be a distraction from the point I am making.

As it happens, I think it is probable that such a model is possible _in principle_ , and also that a complete model would not be understandable (in which case, Bonnini's paradox would apply, but it is not the reason why we currently don't have such a model).

With regard to cognitive closure, I think the first sentence of the article you link to is trivially true, but I have yet to find a good argument against physicalism in matters of the mind, and philosophers cannot agree among themselves. I think it is interesting how little attention is said about biology in these arguments (Paul Churchland is one exception.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> We don't necessarily create complex simulations to understand them, but to have those simulation available to then build for e.g reinforcement learning models.

To take a simple example, if you have a high-school wagon-rolling-down-a-slope Newton Physic exercise, then you can capture in your mind everything which explains the problem. But then take [https://youtu.be/a3jfyJ9JVeM](https://youtu.be/a3jfyJ9JVeM) , it's still Newton, but so many constrains that we cannot picture in our mind everything and we are not even solving the problem with a close form equation anymore. But we have modeled a simulation which enable us to make experiments and build locomotion algorithm. Actually, you don't even need to understand Newton or Physics to implement that paper, you can just see it as optimizing a black box.

In the future I could see that happen at larger scale. For eg we put everything we known about the brain or cells in a simulation, we can't picture what's really going on because the system is too complex, yet we can run simulations and optimize models to find for eg new cures, treatments, etc.

</comment><comment><USER10> A realistic model is hard for human to understand, but it didn't account for the case that human can leverage computing power to simulate and machine learn whatever is "realistic".

<comment><USER11> This is an interesting point - if I create a fully accurate model that allows me to quickly simulate the outcome of any input, then that becomes an oracle that I can query to better understand the problem. But this then leads me to think that my understanding would then be a simpler mental model of what the simulation does, which brings me back to the original paradox.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Abstraction, i.e. modelling, means leaving out details. Understanding then becomes knowing what details you can leave out for the given purpose. In this context, it is essential to remark that scientific abstractions, i.e. physical-world, empirical theories, need to be tested experimentally. Otherwise, they will simply lack legitimacy.

</comment><comment><USER13> Two points not mentionned:

1- The question of access: A theorical exhaustive map of the brain would be easier to access than an actual brain.

2- Tools: A map is not a piece of paper anymore. A 1:1 map of Earth doesn't seem absurd, as long as we can navigate it with levels of details

</comment><comment><USER14> A cycle accurate emulator is a 1:1 model of the observed behavior of the original hardware under normal operating conditions (it doesn't model probing it with an oscilloscope, or running it at the the wrong voltage or temperature etc.). It's more useful than the original hardware because its state can be saved and restored and examined, and you can set breakpoints and watchpoints, and easily interface it with other software, and it can run at different speeds to the original.

<comment><USER15> You are confusing between useful systems vs explainable systems vs understandable systems. All models, 1:1 or not are _useful_ in some sense. You might also be able to explain some event or behaviour of the system using a model. However, understanding requires building abstractions graph that can allow an arbitrary chain of reasoning and inference. As system becomes complex, such abstraction graph might result in similar complexity resulting in inability of a human to store in memory and execute inference/reasoning over it.

</comment></comment><comment> d--b The Paul Valéry statement's translation is fairly poor. It sounds more like:

"What is simple is always wrong. What is not is unusable"

<comment><USER16> And the most important bit is left out - you have to know when and how the model is inaccurate or even the simple one is useless.

Explanatory power is limited by explanation of errors.

<comment><USER11> Exactly - this seems to be the issue with many models in the social sciences, they often seem to do equally well at explaining opposite outcomes

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Having a complex model that describes a complex system is not unusable though. There is a reason we want to accurately simulate the Navier-Stokes equations with complex boundary conditions.

<comment> phoe-krk To quote the original article: "As a model of a complex system becomes more complete, it becomes less understandable. Alternatively, as a model grows more realistic, it also becomes just as difficult to understand as the real-world processes it represents"

If your model is simple enough to represent the original system accurately, then the original system is not complex.

<comment><USER17> If your model is simple enough to represent the original system accurately, then the original system is not complex.

My model can be complex enough to represent the original system and still be useful. I can iterate on design and make measurements without building the real thing.

<comment> phoe-krk > My model can be complex enough to represent the original system

This does not mean that your model is not complex. It means that the system is simple.

At least, it is simple enough to be represented fully in a model. I think this paradox refers mostly to systems that are too complex to be represented in any model at full accuracy, and must therefore be simplified.

<comment><USER16> The paradox invokes an absolute. How do you even know the system is "too complex"? Maybe it is too complex for humans but not for a galaxy brain?

<comment> phoe-krk See the comment at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20019426](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20019426) that refers another quote:

> I think the George Box aphorism linked at the bottom ("All models are wrong > [but some are useful]") is closer to the right way to think about this.

Also, see the original article:

> Bonini's Paradox, named after Stanford business professor Charles Bonini, > explains the difficulty in constructing models or simulations that fully > capture the workings of complex systems (such as the human brain).

A model is "too complex" by this definition if there can be no complete and accurate virtual representation of it, it can't be wrong by definition. If you emulate a CHIP-8, for instance, you are able to accurately represent the full state of the system inside the emulator; therefore, the emulator is capable of full accuracy. It's impossible to do the same with a human brain, as quoted in the article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This seems to be more of a tautology than a paradox.

</comment><comment><USER19> dang, thanks for stating the obvious professor Charles Bonini.

</comment><comment><USER20> I keep on saying this about the sociology research. They keep on using single variables to track complex systems and they end up failing. All of the lazy social justice fields end up causing immense damage.</comment>


The un-nerving lack of women in tech and how we can fix it - <AUTHOR> http://www.gavinelliott.co.uk/2011/10/the-un-nerving-lack-of-women-in-the-tech-industry-and-how-we-can-fix-it/

<comment><USER2> In my opinion, what's unnerving is the endless posts about the lack of women in tech.

Yeah, I know there is sexism and discrimination, and that should be fought. Women who want to work in tech should be treated equally as men.

But equal representation is not a goal to be attained. For whatever reasons, in most places (not all!) programming and computer science aren't that popular among women.

We never hear about the "unnerving lack of men in nursing". Curiously, I also never hear about the lack of [insert minority] men in tech, which is more likely to be an indicator of social problems and discrimination.

<comment><AUTHOR> Notice in the article I go on to talk about speaking to school-goers and people in college to hit a more diverse range of people in general.</comment></comment>


Ask YC: What do you use for automated testing? - <AUTHOR>

I found Sahi (http://www.sahi.co.in) for this purpose. I wonder if there is something better around... <comment><USER2> I've been using selenium. It lets you save your recorded web interactions in a variety of languages.

<http://selenium.openqa.org/>

<comment><USER3> Which langauge do you save them in, out of curiousity? I'd be interested in hearing that from others, too. I'm using the ruby driver, personally.

<comment><USER2> I mostly use the Java unit test format, but I also use the selenium IDE to automate a lot of repetitive setup/config stuff. And I've started using the Lisp API (<http://selenium.openqa.org/>) for hand written tests.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Watir (Ruby), or for a current project, WatiN (.NET port of Watir).

It's fun to watch.

</comment><comment><USER5> If you're into Python try Twill, Mechanize and use appropriate tools for Firefox(XPCom--GIYF) and IE (IECom--GIYF).

</comment><comment><USER6> twill so far ... selenium rc maybe soon

</comment><comment><USER7> Rspec

</comment><comment><USER8> end users.. why? kidding :)</comment>


Cheap way to make intro/how-to videos for a website? - <AUTHOR>

Where's a good place to get cheap how-to/intro videos made for websites? i.e. "Here's what our site is about", "Here's how to use our website".
Like the ones on Common Craft http://www.commoncraft.com
Ideally in the hundred dollar range rather than thousands. <comment><AUTHOR> Something like the twitter one: <http://www.commoncraft.com/twitter></comment>


Internet.org will finish internet the way we know it, hurt India's growth - <AUTHOR> http://www.sunday-guardian.com/investigation/internetorg-will-finish-internet-the-way-we-know-it-hurt-indias-growth-potential <comment><USER2> This will not end well for Facebook. Once you start competing like this, you quit competing with innovation and eventually end up losing to someone else.

<comment><USER3> FB (& Google) have reached a size where one of the ways to keep growing is to bring _more_ people onto the Internet. If they can do that in a way that puts their product front-and-centre for those 'new' users, they can capture more of the market. I'm not saying I _approve_ of this strategy, but I can see it as being a viable one for now (just as AOL was viable for its time).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Death of the net predicted!

But the Internet defeated walled gardens before, because people actively chose "the whole shebang" over AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, etcetera.

And, continuing improvements in networking keep making it easier, at the margin, to just offer everything.

Any fixed-menu-of-N-services, even if regularly updated, will be blatantly missing some emerging content or app that friends are talking about. That will drive people to upgrade to (or creatively tunnel!) to the real, full Internet as soon as they're technically or financially able. And that ability arrives fast, given whetted appetites, social pressures, and the rapid progress in networking tech.

Don't panic. Build. Any net barrier that's just a matter of puny business models will be temporary, and melt away from competition & Moore's Law.

Watch out, instead, for the net barriers enforced by ideologues with badges & guns. Those blockades can hold out against technological and economic forces much longer.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm Indian and I'm deeply frustrated and disappointed with this. My fear is that other mobile networks like Airtel will pick up dumb ass half-baked ideas like this and start charging for data from other non approved sources and for high cost paid wireless Internet to become the norm. I know Reliance is way too greedy, but this really is a new low. While wireless data costs in other countries are coming down, here we see the opposite trend. Fucking disgusting.

<comment><USER6> As a fellow Indian, I'd find that frustrating too.

Think of the alternative - suppose the government or judiciary finds this practice illegal and outlaws it. Imagine how unlikely this is and even if it does happen, how much bad press would be generated about "job-killing License Raj" etc.

<comment><USER7> >>how much bad press would be generated about "job-killing License Raj" etc.

I'm amazed many Indians still fall for this. The current day telecommunications companies came into being like knights in shining armor, to fight the decades of rot and stagnation in the ecosystem due to BSNL in the early 2000's.

Now their whole business is being disrupted in the same way, they disrupted BSNL's business. Price innovation, innovation in customer service and making services accessible to every one at affordable prices. Now when they are being given a dose of their own medicine, they want the government to come in and have regulations to save them.

Funny how capitalism works when you are at the receiving end.

If these people aren't stopped now they will let things stagnate and rot for the next half century. We all know how well that worked out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Also relevant:

internet.org (within India) redirects to 0.internet.org, which takes me to 0.internet.org/unavailable with the following message:

>You must be on the Reliance network to use Internet.org. If you'd like to access these websites for free, use a SIM card from Reliance.

This is really getting out of hand.

Screenshot: [http://i.imgur.com/2x1vWZr.png](http://i.imgur.com/2x1vWZr.png)

<comment><USER9> It's available from outside India, but not on a paid connection from within? Ridiculous, indeed...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Maybe I misunderstood. But I think the alarm bells are pre-mature. You HAVE to pay for internet access, what this announcements says is that if you visit some websites you will not be charged. How is it any bad? The websites are paying the telecom company to bear the cost of the traffic. The customer, like always, is bearing the cost of traffic to internet.

<comment><USER11> If you are a startup trying to compete with any of those 38 sites, thrn you start with a massive disadvantage. Zuckerberg is essentialy creating a massive walled garden where the walls are held in place by economic pressure.

<comment><USER10> It's not like people will stop getting an internet connection. They will still have it. They will open other websites as well. The traffic from a particular website is not significant anyway so I don't think they will go to/prefer websites with free access only. Facebook right now has no competition, they would have used it anyway and it something better comes along people won't care about the few MBs/month it costs them.

ISPs have already been giving free WhatsApp plans and all, nothing changed for telegram et al I suppose.

<comment><USER12> Just google "Net Nutrality" and see what's so wrong about this initiative. People smarter than me have talked about the matter, so better read what they have to say, but I'll just say that the reason the Internet is so successful in bringing all sorts of ideas to fruition is that it doesn't discriminate ideas, and lets all information flow equally. If there are companies whose ideas are worth more than others, or are cheaper to reach - you no longer have a free(as in free speach) internet.

<comment><USER10> I know(I think) about "Net Neutrality". There is a difference between discriminating between packets and charging more for particular traffic and providing access to some sites for free. They are not charging more for a particular kind of traffic and so I assume they are Net Neutral.

Did I miss something?

<comment><USER13> They are charging more for particular types of traffic! Anything other than a select few sites is being charged.

<comment><USER10> No, you are bending it. They are charging the same they were before and there is no change in that regard. They are still charging same regardless of what the packet contains. Some sites are paying to be subsidised. They are paying for a service, what's wrong? You want to compete? Get your site subsidise as well. Someone has to pay either the customer or the provider, customer doesn't have to pay more for particular traffic. Do you expect ISPs to provide all data for free?

<comment><USER14> > They are still charging same regardless of what the packet contains.

The issue here is that this is not internet. Facebook has partnered with a local ISP that decided that some packets (say, those from Wikipedia) can pass for free but others (say, those from GMail) cannot. Wikipedia is not (AFAIK) an AS; as such it doesn't have a deal with Reliance Communications at the internet level. And yet, there is now some business for Reliance to transport Wikipedia's packets. This is completely breaking the internet as it is designed (and as it works best)

All the chatter we've seen with ISPs and content providers is because AS interco is highly contentious. In this case we're not talking (only) about AS; we're talking about websites having to bend to an ISP for it to behave as expected. It's absolutely not ok.

> customer doesn't have to pay more for particular traffic

Of course he doesn't have to, because _he doesn 't even have access to it_, whether there is a route from website to ISP or not. That's the horrible part of it: now peering with an AS is not enough, you need some other arrangement.

> Do you expect ISPs to provide all data for free?

I expect users to pay for laying cables, then everyone peers with everyone else and traffic is free. But we're not there yet.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_system_%28Internet%...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_system_%28Internet%29)

<comment><USER15> While looking at this from the point of view of AS is helpful to understand the ISP industry, it does not help to understand why giving away things for free is bad.

Lets look at the first thing that springs to mind about giving stuff away for fee: humanitarian aid. If a larger food producer "dump" free food into a region, this will decrease the incentives for local grown food, while driving up prices of alternative source of nutrition. A "evil" organization could, I guess, use humanitarian aid as a method to destroy local industry and cement themselves as the only game in town. The question then becomes, is the concept of humanitarian aid wrong and could there be safeguards that will prevent misuse.

I would suggest that non-profit charity that gives out food, medicin and knowledge is an acceptable line in the sand, while commercial monopolies and for-profit price dumping is bad. This still enables the good aspects of "free", while preventing bad actors from exploiting the side effects of giving away things for free. In the context of Internet this would mean that Wikipedia and similar non-profit information sharing sites would be acceptable, but not for-profit companies like facebook and google.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This article is phrased very awkwardly.

It reads like giving away free access to certain sites, is the same as making premium internet access. Am I missing something? Facebook hate aside, this is a change meant to _give something away_. Right?

<comment><USER17> Yes, it gives away free access of 38 sites. But by doing so, they also encourage more people to forgo purchasing complete internet plans and hence accessing all of the other millions of websites out there. This indirectly drives traffic to this 38 sites that they've picked through a very skewed and opaque process, and undermines the concept of net neutrality.

<comment><USER18> There is no such thing as a free lunch. This is simply an example of this in effect.

If people want full internet access.. pay for it. There is no story here.

<comment><USER19> I think the worry is about the other direction. Want to offer something to people who only pay for this limited access? Then you better don't do anything these sites don't like, because you have to use them to communicate with your customers (unless you are already big and powerful enough to negotiate such deals yourself)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> What's wrong with this? They're not preventing you from paying for Internet access, they're offering some access for free. People in India are free to start competing ISPs.

<comment><USER21> See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_%28pricing_policy%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_%28pricing_policy%29) for one example of how giving something away for free can be net worse for the economy/world than charging a fair price for it.

Another issue is _what_ is given for free. If free access is given to something that is 80% of what they need, people will have reduced incentive to buy 100%, shrinking the market for the 100% solution, raising its price, and keeping it out of reach of most people. As an analogy, giving people free low quality food could discourage them from high quality food, and the lack of market for good food could drive up its price further.

<comment><USER4> If you're swayed by that logic, should perhaps Google be forced to charge users for web search, and Android, and their other "free" offerings that put smaller competitors at a disadvantage?

<comment><USER22> You won't get a response to that, for the same reason you won't get a response to: should all Linux vendors be forced to charge prices comparable to Windows, because otherwise they're dumping?

And of course OpenOffice should be made illegal under that same logic.

<comment><USER23> They also give you the source code. That makes the whole issue so different that I won't use Linux and OO as an analogy for this Indian case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Seems like we need a return of the BBS ethos, where anyone can put up some bandwidth and invite folks to join in the party for free.

Perhaps internet.org is only going to create a new market for Internet provision that will be 'easy' to enter. Let them get their chained masses, then roll out a normal ISP with wide open doors.

(Of course, this would depend on the ability to actually get Internet in the area .. and assumes they don't have peer licensing all wrapped up somehow.)

And then there is this age-old fact, which hasn't really gone away in spite of Zucks' efforts: The Internet perceives toll-booths as damage, and routes around them. Here's hoping there will be "peers on the ground" who will fight this battle from there, too.

</comment><comment><USER25> this will create a rat race, there will be big companies like flipkart paytm willing to offer money to Reliance to offer there sites for free. Internet.org is on a path to destroy net neutrality. Reliance has just found 1 way to earn more money without any ethics.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, flipkart came to my mind instantly as well. If internet.org really wants to help improve the state of internet, just subsidize internet as a utility.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Doesn't the culture of free web services actually create some of the perverse incentives at play in Google, Facebook and others today? The paying customers become advertisers and data miners and users are relegated to giving up their information (and potentially: future freedom). If people paid for these services, internet companies would see them as customers to serve rather than personal data to sell and exploit.

</comment><comment><USER27> And that is why we need dumb pipes.

</comment><comment><USER28> I must say this is very interesting pont of view - eye opener.

When we will get a company that will actually shove all those nasty corpo style companies under the rug and actually improve web?

</comment><comment><USER29> My interpretation is that the data count for the proposed sites would not be included in the internet plan that a consumer might have taken. It might have some impact on internet pack pricing, but competition should be able to correct it. I don't see any hit on the net neutrality; as of now, it simply appears like a freemium model.

</comment><comment><USER30> It's understandable that Facebook needs partners to execute their vision of connecting people. I'm rooting that they end up succeeding, but if its through restricting people with low incomes to services which the connected masses don't normally use (Bing) it sux.

</comment><comment><USER31> I think this is good. Actually if I don't remember wrong this kind of 0 plan is already available if Finland for Facebook on at least one operator. As far as I can see there are no downsides. Access to listed sites can save lives.

</comment><comment><USER32> i think the alarm bells are a little unfounded. The internet.org initiative is to connect people who are not in the internet grid. Take a moment and think about who those people are. Do they use Saas, would they care to read a critically analyzed piece written by a journalist? The ones taking Saas subscriptions, writing/reading blogs are already connected and in the internet ambit. I cant clearly see the relation between Reliance Jio and India's growth. And moreover, the idea of giving free internet will not be sustaiable. Hope it makes sense.

</comment><comment><USER33> i think its great for people who don't have access to the internet especially poorer sections but they should've included better sites for learning expanding their knowlege etc.

</comment><comment><USER34> This is the same as the net neutrality issue. Some of the animals are more equal than the others.

</comment><comment><USER35> An information oligarchy may be the single source of truth.

</comment><comment><USER36> People using this service will not consider it (or even call it) "internet", so it will not hurt the internet.

</comment><comment><USER37> HOF (HTTP over Facebook) when?

<comment><USER37> Thinking about it a bit more, if Facebook messages are themselves free, you can set up a fake facebook account and run a desktop client which acts on special messages, in effect achieving TCP over XMPP. This is probably no more than a week of work for one motivated developer.

Or, given that wikipedia is free, you could use a private talk page to transmit data too. That could be even faster for individual files. Post a message to the talk page which a daemon polls frequently, then replaces the talk page with a base-64 encoding of the content you requested.

Both of those require you to have a machine with unrestricted internet access, but I imagine unrestricted home internet access to be much cheaper than mobile internet.

<comment><USER14> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9203946](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9203946)

Unsurprisingly, the need was raised from the same "internet.org" bullshit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This is such a horrible idea, I don't even know where to start. I'm not even worried about the long term consequences of this service, it is going to fail gloriously. How do I know this? Because it has has happened so many times before. Anybody remember long distance? That is what this is - and it might be the funniest thing I've seen all week. Thanks for the laugh Zuckerberg.

</comment><comment><USER39> I don't get it, it is free, and worried about being charged to access it beyond the free version?

<comment><USER19> More "worried about what happens to those sites that can't be accessed for free". If a large number of your potential customers can only access a few sites or have financial incentive to only access them, you are now forced to conduct business through them (and good luck launching a competitor).

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Expected nothing less from our Zuckerberg. NSA at least makes the pretense of seeming hands off when fucking over people, Zuck just doesn't give a shit.

Anyway - what can we actually do to stop this? Anything? Clearly this is the beginning of something unthinkably bad, and we should do absolutely anything to stop this.</comment>


Hack wipes out data for 100,000 sites - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/08/webhost_attack/

<comment><AUTHOR> More information is available in my other post on the subject:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=646451></comment>


A New DeLorean DMC-12 Could Be Coming Soon - <AUTHOR> https://robbreport.com/motors/cars/new-delorean-dmc-12-models-coming-soon-2894768/ <comment><USER2> Interesting. If it uses the same manufacturing techniques as the Tesla Cybertruck for the steel bodywork, it could be incredibly light, and tough.

They'll want to make sure those windows can survive time travel and speeds of up to 88mph though</comment>


Apple clobbers the competition: The carnage of Apple's spectacular success - <AUTHOR> http://www.marketwatch.com/story/apples-destructive-power-2010-09-24

<comment><USER2> Kind of meta but I thought the stock quotes (which are just text in the article) changing in real time was both distracting and oddly intriguing.</comment>


Tesla hit by class action sueball over autopilot software updates - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/20/tesla_class_action_lawsuit_autopilot_updates/ <comment><AUTHOR> I haven't seen it yet at HN. Possible other sources:

[https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2017/04/19/teslas-...](https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2017/04/19/teslas- autopilot-self-driving-system-slammed-lawsuit/100670104/)

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-20/tesla- sue...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-20/tesla-sued-over- dangerously-defective-autopilot-software-j1qp271l)

[http://fortune.com/2017/04/20/tesla-lawsuit- autopilot/](http://fortune.com/2017/04/20/tesla-lawsuit-autopilot/)

[http://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-class-action-lawsuit- au...](http://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-class-action-lawsuit- autopilot-2-2017-4)

Class action complaint itself (pdf):

[https://www.hbsslaw.com/uploads/case_downloads/tesla_ap2/tes...](https://www.hbsslaw.com/uploads/case_downloads/tesla_ap2/teslaclassactioncomplaint.pdf)</comment>


Blocksteam teaser suggests Bitcoin transactions from low-Earth orbit - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbx7NAnVeGc <comment><AUTHOR> Here is an interesting exchange on twitter between two insiders: [https://twitter.com/TheBlueMatt/status/896931182369099777](https://twitter.com/TheBlueMatt/status/896931182369099777)</comment>


Ask HN: How difficult was it to move from Coder to Manager? - <AUTHOR> When I was promoted from Coder to Team Lead, I found the change really difficult to make.  In fact, I have yet to find anyone who found the transition easy.
I would like to know how difficult (or easy) this transition was for others.  What factors helped / hindered the transition?
In addition to anecdotal stories, a simple rating of your experience of 1 (very hard) to 5 (very easy) is appreciated. <comment><USER2> You may find [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10395046](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10395046) relevant.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, that's what spawned my question. It's a great thread.</comment></comment>