I think this title needs an exemption from HN's no-emoji rule
Edits:
⭕ that post was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25237688
⭕ The rules seem pretty arbitrary. Recycling symbol U+2672 ♲ is allowed but recycled paper symbol U+267C is not. Chess kings ♔ are allowed but checkers kings aren't.
⭕ is allowed (for now).
⭕ I think the right thing to do would be to strip anything with emoji presentation http://unicode.org/reports/tr51/#Presentation_Style
Maybe it's some kind of bias?
With that mindset, emojis (and emoticon) can actually add context to interactions, considering how much context is lost when communicating over text. A simple smiley face at the end of a sentence can go a long way in my experience :)
HN however handles all of unicode just fine, it just chose to specifically exclude emojis (and a bunch of other symbols)
However, I don't like the rabbit hole it started to go into with gendered and colored emojis. There's never going to be enough. I wish we had stuck to color-neutral and gender-neutral, like original smileys :)
I find it also conveys too much meaning. I am generally not interested in knowing a person's gender or ethnic group when discussing over text... but I digress.
Eventually, Unicode will allow you to combine flag modifiers with human emojis. So you can have a black South Korean man facepalming.
This will trigger a war which ends industrial civilization, and is the leading candidate for the Great Filter.
What’s left is things like the max length for a title (not too problematic to count that in code points or bytes, I think)
The big risk, I think, is in users (mis)using rendering direction, multiple levels of accents, zero-width characters and weird code points to mess up the resulting page. Some Unicode symbols and emojis typically look a lot larger and heavier than ‘normal’ characters, switching writing direction may change visual indentation of a comment, etc.
Worse, Unicode rendering being hard, text rendering bugs that crash browsers or even entire devices are discovered every now and then. If somebody entered one in a HN message, that could crash millions of devices.
You can play mahjong, domino or cards (🀕, 🁓, 🃅) but not chess, you can show some random glyphs like ⏱ or ⤪ but not others, you can use box-drawing characters (┐) but not block elements, you can use byzantine musical notation (𝈙) but only western musical symbols (𝅗𝅥) and the notes are banned, you can Z̸̠̽a̷͍̟̱͔͛͘̚ĺ̸͎̌̄̌g̷͓͈̗̓͌̏̉o̴̢̺̹̕ just fine.
˙ǝsnqɐ ƃuıpıoʌɐ ʇɐ qoɾ pooƃ ɐ ɥɔns sǝop sɹǝʇɔɐɹɐɥɔ ɟo ɥɔunq ɐ ƃuıuuɐq ʎʃıɹɐɹʇıqɹɐ ǝsnɐɔǝ𐐒
It isn't the only arbitrary convention enforced here, and the sum of those conventions are what attracts the audience.