Unicode is all about encoding text in a universal standard that is more or less agnostic to each language (is universally painful to work with), and yet they talk about the rollout in terms that only make sense to the northern hemisphere (seasons).
Distorted Face getting in means that Open Eye Crying Laughing Face still has a chance. Maybe we could get some Deep Fried Variation Selectors with it too.
As much as I want HN to finally support markdown, I really want them to end the baffling anti-emoji stance. They’re adorable, versatile, fun, and useful - the only reason to ban them from forum comments is banal distaste for the new.
Personally speaking, I consider it anti-zoomer discrimination of the highest order!! ;) XD <3
More on topic: the new emoji range from “finally!!” (Sasquatch) to “huh?” (Landslide), as usual. The skin tone improvements are welcome, of course! If we’re gonna abandon the Simpsons monotone aesthetic, we should go all the way. Props to the (unpaid…?) people who made this happen.
I think HN should allow emojis but strip all colors out of them. Colors are what often makes emojis so annoying---without them they are just another characters.
I use emojis like a fiend, but I actually like that HN is just raw text. Something minimal about it. You can always go full kaomoji if you feel sad ; (◞‸◟)
Are there any more heart emojis? I'm not sure we have enough with Beating Heart, Broken Heart, Two Hearts, Sparkling Heart, Growing Heart, Heart with arrow, Blue Heart, Green Heart, Yellow Heart, Purple Heart, Heart with Ribbon, Revolving Hearts, Heart Decoration.
The original emojis were (AIUI) there to support Japanese carrier characters. They've now grown to including seemingly 'everything' for some value of everything.
What is the process for adding them? Are there examples of emojis being rejected?
I love using emojis but can't stand what it has turned into.
I have a Boomer opinion when it comes to emojis: there are just too many.
At some point we need to cut a lot of emojis or come up with a better way to insert them into conversations.
We are at nearly 4,000 emojis. Scrolling through a list is bad UX, remembering or trying to think of keywords to pull one up is bad UX.
I think we could cut it down to 2,000 easily, no one would notice. I would venture to guess that 98% of all emoji usage is contained to 200 emojis with these very esoteric emojis getting no usage outside of accidental or emoji spam/copy-pasta.
Here's _my_ proposal: We have a list of deletions. Every year, if an emoji is not used above a certain threshold, it's deleted permanently and the concept of the emoji is banned for 5 years.
2000 vs 4000 makes no difference for the UI of a picker, and you can have your recently used/favorites with your 200 in the picker to avoid the long scroll
Really wish skintone+gender emoji variants weren't an option in Slack.
It's awkwardly personal in a way I don't want to think about at work.
It's inappropriate to broadcast my skintone so i can confirm "taco bell sounds good" in a thumbs up, or announce gender to say I'm investigating something with the manly/girly detective emoji, which then others click on, scowl, unclick, then must manually go find the other one if they want to join in...
When in professional settings (like Slack), "everyone's just a bright yellow smiley face" is much more professional and cohesive. (As professional as emojis can be, I suppose.)
We announce gender and race a million ways. It's inescapable and undesirable to avoid doing. Our background and gender are relevant to our life experiences and who we are as people. That context is important when interacting with people at work or elsewhere.
Cohesive is a funny and frankly telling word to use here as well. Can you not be cohesive as a group while acknowledging that you are not all the same gender or race?
If I'm honest, this is giving "I don't mind gay people as long as it's not too in my face" vibes and I don't like it.
I just use the wrong emojis for my gender and skin tone. If anyone is truly offended by something as petty and insignificant as an emoji, it's like a scarlet letter warning me to not associate with them.
Another aspect is contrast. We put such a lot of effort into getting adequate contrast between background and foreground, and then emoji skin tones destroy it.
On a light background, light skin tones are bad, lacking contrast between background and skin.
Dark skin tones are bad because they lack contrast between skin tone and other details in the emoji; and if on a dark background, dark contrast.
Yellow works well on near-white and near-black backgrounds.
Skin tones for emojis shouldn't be a thing at all.
There is something weirdly dystopian about a consortium and ultimately mega corporations deciding what aspects of you are important to distinguish yourself from others, what options for those should be available or what concepts you may use to express yourself. But this is also a wider problem with emojis beyond just skin tones - the selection of foods for example is best described as what a California hipster would think of and hardly representative of what someone around the world would want to communicate.
And then there is now the problem that instead of defining building blocks for communicating concepts, Unicode now feels the need to enumerate all concepts individually. This is not just extremely limiting in what you can communicate but also horribly inefficient where with each new version fully compliant implementations need to add thousands of additional glyphs.
I see emojis as purely semiotic. I don't expect to find personalisation or see myself reflected in them at all. Perhaps this is because of my age and use of emoticons in the BBS days of the late 1980s. Perhaps it's also because when i press for one on a screen, I still conceptualise that action as pressing a mechanical/physical button, where no customisation would be possible.
This is why I hate this kind of stuff. Another reason that text-based emoticons like in the old times were far better. Why does anybody need to render ":(" into "U+1F641"? Nobody would ever think of debating race because of ":(". Unicode is not just technically confusing but spread sociopolitical confusion as well, like a contemporary babel tower. We could survive just fine in ASCII times, and on fewer bytes too, even if we had to be creative in how to represent languages with different alphabets.
Really? I just pick colors at random. The skin color of an emoji is so utterly irrelevant, I don't see how one can break into a sweat over it... or why it is an option in the first place really.
If it's there, you might as well have some fun with it.
It is sad to see the limited Unicode character space go to waste with these silly additions. The unallocated space should be reserved for future civilizations, AI intercommunication languages that are yet to come, extraterrestrial languages that will emerge, etc. Filling up the space with garbage dooms it.
The thing about emoji that gives me anxiety is that different OS/browser renders them differently, so I can only guess about whether what I'm trying to convey will translate.
A while back I made a small browser game using emoji for all graphics. I was delighted to see so many different sets of emoji in screenshots people posted.
Killer whales have a particular significance to Portuguese sailors.
There's a group of whales off the coast of Portugal who have a lot of fun fucking up boats. They'll knock the rudder off a boat, potentially sinking it, for sport.
I would be more receptive to endless emojis if Unicode bothered to accept archaic and historical forms of characters as well as deprecating Han unification. It’s rather odd that they reject actual useful things while accepting endless objects that have never been found in any text prior.
Eh, Han unification was an one-off decision. Now many (but not all) characters have been disunified as needed, like the infamous Biang character [1] which received two different code points. Of course common characters are much less likely to be disunified, because at this point many decades have been passed after the initial encoding and any disunification would cause compatibility issues.
I still don't understand what's wrong with Han unification now that we have variation selectors, as well as... those characters that describe ways of laying out CJK character components relative to each other (I know I've seen these, but I have absolutely no idea what they're called and can't for the life of me figure out how to search for them).
(I think they should have unified Latin/Greek/Cyrillic, too, with variation selectors to disambiguate the overlaps. Yes, including special cases like the Greek question mark and Cyrillic multiocular O.)
It is so amazing that the CJK Unified Ideographs block is still being extended to this day, even though I do know many intricacies of encoding those characters, like Z-variants and normalization rules and such. How many of these characters are left for encoding? I genuinely have no idea!
Not that its what should determine the ideal length, computing power has gone up significantly faster than the number of characters in Unicode (chatGPT gives me characters ^ 7 = flops).
Hacker News will bias against emoji. Certainly there is a question of whether the consortium should keep adding emoji, which ones to add, whether emoji should be encoded in the first place, etc.
For perspective, this update also brings 4316 new CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) characters, which "pushes the number of CJK ideographs to over 100,000" (quoting from the release).
It does all seem utterly ridiculous. Both in terms of what's included and in terms of what isn't included. Pictographic-language-by-committee is probably the worst way of designing anything. ~4000 emoji, the choices range from infantile to offensive (to some).
We've had to rebuild multi-gigabyte database tables to change collations so people could use emojis in silly places. But hey, at least we'll be able to include a Hairy Creature emoji soon. Sigh.
I honestly don't understand why Unicode still doesn't have all subscript and superscript letters, which I personally need to use almost every day--and I imagine many people who write math/code as well--but has 8 different varieties of alien emoji to choose from. I still can't write something as trivially simple as $1_G$ which would mean the "1" of group "G" (which is like being unable to write the word "the" if math was a language) because unicode lacks subscript G (capital) but I can send my wife a slideshow made solely of emoji. It's unfortunate.
The general view of the Unicode people is that this is a formatting issue, rather than a character encoding issue.
While I agree it can be annoying at times, I somewhat tend to agree as there is tons of useful formatting that one could want. And if we do Latin alphabet, then should we also do Greek? Cyrillic? Arabic? CJK?
Indeed. Wouldn't the more universal solution to simply add a special unicode "prefix/suffix" combining code that would signal that the next symbol is sub/super? Than you wouldn't have to wait years for your favorite char to have an extra variatn while cursing at all the emoji proliferation?
Unicode with an emphasis on emoji is HN ragebait. Out of all the things, people get really upset that U+1F9B0 EMOJI COMPONENT RED HAIR is taking up codepoint space.
Very interesting. I did the treasure chest emoji proposal back in 2018.
Back then the committee was very determined not to let in more emojis – for the treasure the official response was that Unicode already had money symbols and that this should be more than enough for all use cases.
Looks like they caved in now and just adding more clobbers left and right. Half of me is happy to finally have the treasure chest, but the other half is sad, that somehow now they added it, when we could have had it 8 years ago!
So when Unicode releases a bunch of emojis, is it kinda like releasing a spec? Like Apple/android then has to have their designers go and actually draw all of the emojis from the spec?
Yes. They don't even release a baseline font themselves, it's all up to the people who create fonts to create the drawings. This is dissimilar to how for example the Alliance for Open Media works, where they create the spec, like AV1, and also release a reference version of the codec.
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[ 1.3 ms ] story [ 73.4 ms ] threadPersonally speaking, I consider it anti-zoomer discrimination of the highest order!! ;) XD <3
More on topic: the new emoji range from “finally!!” (Sasquatch) to “huh?” (Landslide), as usual. The skin tone improvements are welcome, of course! If we’re gonna abandon the Simpsons monotone aesthetic, we should go all the way. Props to the (unpaid…?) people who made this happen.
* https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/block/U+1F300
The original emojis were (AIUI) there to support Japanese carrier characters. They've now grown to including seemingly 'everything' for some value of everything.
What is the process for adding them? Are there examples of emojis being rejected?
It was common in Facebook messenger, but Whatsapp doesn't have it ...
Sad, because it was quite apt in many circumstances.
I have a Boomer opinion when it comes to emojis: there are just too many.
At some point we need to cut a lot of emojis or come up with a better way to insert them into conversations.
We are at nearly 4,000 emojis. Scrolling through a list is bad UX, remembering or trying to think of keywords to pull one up is bad UX.
I think we could cut it down to 2,000 easily, no one would notice. I would venture to guess that 98% of all emoji usage is contained to 200 emojis with these very esoteric emojis getting no usage outside of accidental or emoji spam/copy-pasta.
Here's _my_ proposal: We have a list of deletions. Every year, if an emoji is not used above a certain threshold, it's deleted permanently and the concept of the emoji is banned for 5 years.
It's awkwardly personal in a way I don't want to think about at work.
It's inappropriate to broadcast my skintone so i can confirm "taco bell sounds good" in a thumbs up, or announce gender to say I'm investigating something with the manly/girly detective emoji, which then others click on, scowl, unclick, then must manually go find the other one if they want to join in...
When in professional settings (like Slack), "everyone's just a bright yellow smiley face" is much more professional and cohesive. (As professional as emojis can be, I suppose.)
You're also continuously broadcasting your skintone and gender in the office simply by existing. Is that inappropriate and unprofessional too?
We announce gender and race a million ways. It's inescapable and undesirable to avoid doing. Our background and gender are relevant to our life experiences and who we are as people. That context is important when interacting with people at work or elsewhere.
Cohesive is a funny and frankly telling word to use here as well. Can you not be cohesive as a group while acknowledging that you are not all the same gender or race?
If I'm honest, this is giving "I don't mind gay people as long as it's not too in my face" vibes and I don't like it.
Very strange comment.
Are you against headshots with actual faces as icons as well?
On a light background, light skin tones are bad, lacking contrast between background and skin.
Dark skin tones are bad because they lack contrast between skin tone and other details in the emoji; and if on a dark background, dark contrast.
Yellow works well on near-white and near-black backgrounds.
Being over 40, I just don't give a crap about those things.
There is something weirdly dystopian about a consortium and ultimately mega corporations deciding what aspects of you are important to distinguish yourself from others, what options for those should be available or what concepts you may use to express yourself. But this is also a wider problem with emojis beyond just skin tones - the selection of foods for example is best described as what a California hipster would think of and hardly representative of what someone around the world would want to communicate.
And then there is now the problem that instead of defining building blocks for communicating concepts, Unicode now feels the need to enumerate all concepts individually. This is not just extremely limiting in what you can communicate but also horribly inefficient where with each new version fully compliant implementations need to add thousands of additional glyphs.
If it's there, you might as well have some fun with it.
https://emojipedia.org/guard
There's a group of whales off the coast of Portugal who have a lot of fun fucking up boats. They'll knock the rudder off a boat, potentially sinking it, for sport.
https://www.orcas.pt/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biangbiang_noodles#Unicode
(I think they should have unified Latin/Greek/Cyrillic, too, with variation selectors to disambiguate the overlaps. Yes, including special cases like the Greek question mark and Cyrillic multiocular O.)
* https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode17.0.0/
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45187274
There are some charts with the new characters available at:
* https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/Unicode-17.0/
"CJK Unified Ideographs Extension J" has 4298 entries.
For perspective, this update also brings 4316 new CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) characters, which "pushes the number of CJK ideographs to over 100,000" (quoting from the release).
We've had to rebuild multi-gigabyte database tables to change collations so people could use emojis in silly places. But hey, at least we'll be able to include a Hairy Creature emoji soon. Sigh.
https://www.unicode.org/emoji/emoji-proposals-status.html
Just pointless madness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_subscripts_and_supersc...
While I agree it can be annoying at times, I somewhat tend to agree as there is tons of useful formatting that one could want. And if we do Latin alphabet, then should we also do Greek? Cyrillic? Arabic? CJK?
Back then the committee was very determined not to let in more emojis – for the treasure the official response was that Unicode already had money symbols and that this should be more than enough for all use cases.
Looks like they caved in now and just adding more clobbers left and right. Half of me is happy to finally have the treasure chest, but the other half is sad, that somehow now they added it, when we could have had it 8 years ago!