Two strangers turned a Hacker News comment into Unicode 9.0's power symbols

In December 2013, Terence Eden was writing something technical and wanted the electrical standby symbol — IEC 5009 / IEEE 1621, the circle with a line through it printed on virtually every piece of electronic equipment since the mid-1970s. It was not in Unicode. He could type a snowman or a reversed rotated floral bullet, but not the one symbol whose meaning almost everyone on earth recognizes.

The obvious responses — complain, shrug, or paste a picture — put nothing into text, where a symbol can be searched, copied, and rendered on any device. And Unicode accepts proposals, not grievances: the reviewers asked whether these were the right symbols, whether there was clear evidence of use, whether they were free of copyright restrictions, and whether the consortium found them useful.

Eden's Hacker News question got exactly one reply: Joe Loughry, who said let's do this, started a GitHub project, and together they wrote an open proposal and created a reference font. Nordman, involved in the original IEEE 1621 standard, helped. After much form filling and technical debate — did the sleep symbol really differ from existing moons, and did 'on' deserve its own character? — the proposal was submitted in January 2014, and ISO's working group approved the symbols the following month.

Then came two and a half years of waiting: answering questions, trying to convince open-source fonts to prepare for the new characters, prodding Wikipedia. On a rainy morning in June 2016, Unicode 9.0 was published — four new symbols, plus a fifth achieved by re-purposing the existing heavy circle rather than adding yet another one.

Don't lobby the standard; write the proposal it requires

Unicode accepts evidence-backed proposals, not complaints: documented use, copyright clearance, and a font were exactly what the review demanded, and the pair supplied all of it

Working openly on GitHub produced reusable assets — an open guide and reference fonts — so font designers and future proposers could build on the work instead of starting over

An ally from the original IEEE 1621 standard gave the proposal authoritative grounding on what the symbols mean and how they are actually used

Accepting the repurposed heavy circle as 'off' avoided adding a near-duplicate character, lowering committee resistance to a compromise everyone could vote for

Persistence through two and a half years of waiting, prodding fonts and Wikipedia, carried the approved symbols through to actual publication

Changing a standard takes filing, not demanding: documented use, a reference font, answers to objections, and an ally from the original spec — plus patience through ratification.

Unicode 9.0 was released on June 21, 2016, and Eden marked the moment with a tweet about stopping dancing; his post announcing the result drew 1,181 points and 413 comments on Hacker News. The pair published their proposal, fonts, and lessons as an open-source guide so anyone could repeat the process, and asked operating-system and font vendors to add support for the characters. The actual work, Eden noted in a comment, was 'at least several days' of effort spread across months.