Hacker News Reader

News, the software behind HN, doesn't, no. The filter for emojis is deliberate.

I can attest MySQL 8.0 eats up emoji characters with no fuss.

mysql `utf8` is only 3 byte -- you have to specify something different that `utf8` to get full utf8 https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/charset-unicode-sets...

HN doesn't even use a database.

MySQL has multiple Unicode character sets. The one named "utf8" doesn't support all of utf8, but utf8mb4 supports it all.