The actual title is supposed to be "馃ズ: the best sudo replacement", but I'm not surprised that Hacker News stripped the emoji.
HN is plain-text-obsessive by design but occasional exceptions make life interesting.
plain-text-obsessive
^^^^^^(actually, i thoroughly approve of quibbling.)
"Plain text" is a technical term, which generally means raw unicode (or some other character encoding) without additional markup. Emojis are unicode, and can exist in plain text files.
"Text" does not necessarily mean unicode, nor any type of character encoding. The books on my bookshelf are filled with text. If any of those books contain emoji, I would consider the emoji to be an illustration, not text.
(This is a silly discussion but also the sort of thing I have fun thinking about.)
: the best sudo replacement