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Comment by jemfinch | Hacker News Reader

No, the sarcasm is obvious. It's just not very funny, and doesn't positively contribute to the level of discourse here.

Of course it positively contributes. It's the first comment to say that it's a silly way of encoding the form as utf-8 when utf8="✘" will also do the same thing, even though it's counterintuitive.

That is actually what I was going for; the humor attempt was a bonus.

ConstructiveHumour=✓

Wait, true...true

It is only counterintuitive because you arbitrarily assigned a different type (boolean, with members you made up) instead respecting that any utf8 character fits the utf8 type.

X is used variously as true and false in Different languages, so why would you assume it means false in a language you have never used?

Well i didn't make it up, but yeah i get your point. I didn't mean that i'd assume it means false, but it's still clearly counterintuitive to use a tick to encode as utf-8 when any character at all will do. A tick has an opposite, an X, a snowman (as in the Rails case) doesn't.

I have already seen a website which use "ie=☠" in the URL.

I laughed.

Could you explain it then? I'm really confused!

That would spoil the joke.

˙ɔıuoɹı sı ʇɹoddns ǝpoɔıun ou s,ǝɹǝɥʇ ʇɐɥʇ ǝʇɐɔıpuı oʇ ʇı buısn os 'ɹǝʇɔɐɹɐɥɔ ǝpoɔıun ɐ ɟןǝsʇı uı sı ssoɹɔ ʇɐɥʇ

Clear enough then! But why upside down? ;-)

More important to me, HOW upside down? How did you do that?

http://www.fliptext.org/

Unicode is fun. ;)

Haven't you ever tried to solve puzzles in comic books?

Because he can.

pedant-mode on

All characters -- including every one in this post -- are unicode characters. The definingly-useful characteristic of the cross (or checkmark) is that it can't be represented in latin1.

Ok - I cannot reply to your child post @aviraldg but I really want to know what utf-8 construct turned your text upside down.

no special construct at all, just a bunch of characters that are (or merely look like) upside-down versions of regular latin letters. For example, the "upside-down" u is actually an normal n...

Do you have a mapping available? Presumably a script?

Edit: Please :-)

http://www.fliptext.org/

which has this javascript code to convert:

http://www.fliptext.org/flip.js?c=2

Check google: https://www.google.com/search?q=type+upside+down

It's because there's a false semantic implied with the checkmark (that it's true instead of false), where instead the only thing that reallly matters is the encoding of the character. So it's not the most elegant solution (but it is pretty cool).

I think you are right. Maybe something like force_utf8=✓ would be more clear?

That would be more misleading.

SampleUtf8Char= would be more clear.

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