6 ms·

It’s not wrong that (for HN) “[facepalm emoji]”.length == 36

34 points by program 1y ago

merelysounds 1y ago
Perhaps the title should be changed to: It’s Not Wrong that (for HN) “[facepalm emoji]”.length == 36 Or some alternative if the above is too long, like: “[facepalm emoji]”.length == 36 Both seem more accurate than the current: It’s Not Wrong that (for HN) “ ”.length == 36
- johnisgood 1y ago
  Or use "[facepalm emoji]" instead of the emoji itself or something.
- chuckadams 1y ago
  That's kind of the whole joke.
- franky47 1y ago
  "[man with blue shirt facepalm emoji]".length == 36 Checks out.
  - chrismorgan 1y ago
    Only trouble is, he may not be wearing a blue shirt. In my fonts, it’s more teal, and maybe not a shirt. But I was definitely going to hunt for a description that made it 36 characters long.
    - mattigames 1y ago
      It could be worse, in Windows 11 the hand does not seem to be from the same person than the face, see https://em-content.zobj.net/source/microsoft/407/person-facepalming_1f926.png https://em-content.zobj.net/source/microsoft/407/person-face...
Joker_vD 1y ago
> " ".length == 36 Heh. In my code, I always (idiosyncratically, I admit) spell '\x20' as '\x20' (or even just as 0x20, if it's C), unless it's a part of a multicharacter string e.g. "Hello world!": it just feels wrong to have an empty space inside single quotes. Is it really just U+0020 in there? Is it supposed to be U+0020 there? Silly worries, I know, but I just don't like the way ' ' looks.
- zenethian 1y ago
  You should read the article...
  - Joker_vD 1y ago
    Is the article about HN stripping emojis (and some other Unicode code points) from the title of another HN submission?
    - eterm 1y ago
      Yes, it is.
      - Joker_vD 1y ago
        Amazing! So if I ever were to write a blog post e.g. "Why ' ' != ' '", I guess I better title it "Why '\u2744\ufe0f' != '\x20'" to avoid confusion on HN. Edit: as demonstrated by this very comment.
- criddell 1y ago
  If you are on Chrome, hover your mouse over the link to the article and look at the URL displayed in the bottom left corner (at least that's where Chrome puts it on my machine).
- Retr0id 1y ago
  A good text editor will make all whitespace variants visually distinct.
monkeyelite 1y ago
I don’t want emojis in the headlines please. It makes it difficult to read and becomes an arms race for attention. Also I’m not even sure it was a good idea to put them in text. Emojis are a special case that breaks a lot. Now you have to worry about multiple colors, etc.
- kps 1y ago
  It pisses me off that Unicode retroactively changed the meaning of existing text by turning some symbols into emoji. So much for stability guarantees.
- mbb70 1y ago
  A huge and growing percent of all realtime communication is happening via text. It is reasonable and worthwhile to encode some nonverbal information in it, and emojis have won the day.
- dcminter 1y ago
  I emailed the site to see what the policy is. Generally I agree with you, but in rare cases like the article that this one is meta-commentary to it might perhaps have been justifiable to allow it? I see the "slippery slope" risk though.
- 65 1y ago
  These articles are about emojis and how they work, I don't see how having one in the title is a problem.
- bigstrat2003 1y ago
  It definitely wasn't a good idea. Emojis aren't text, they don't belong in Unicode at all. It would be one thing to encode, say, Egyptian hieroglyphics. That would be legitimate. But putting emojis into Unicode was against the purpose of the standard and a huge mistake.
  - ThrowawayTestr 1y ago
    If you hate emojis blame the Japanese telecoms that created it. Unicode strives to digitally encoded all human communication and the Japanese were using pictograms for communication before Unicode.
mitsu_at 1y ago
Example YouTube videos that have "no title": - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K93zcgFsynk&ab_channel=Vsauce https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K93zcgFsynk&ab_channel=Vsauc... - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrHTI04i9yk&ab_channel=%E2%80%8C https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrHTI04i9yk&ab_channel=%E2%8... This is done by using invisible characters such as ZWNJ to get around the title filter.
MangoToupe 1y ago
Only if you're counting bytes
stickfigure 1y ago
Grumpy old guy: Can we just stop with new unicode characters? We don't need to be able to capture every human thought or concept in a character. Feels like the Unicode Consortium is chaired by Funes the Memorious.
- deepsun 1y ago
  The main pain for me is that most tools now sexualize the emojis: they force me to choose between :man-facepalm:, :woman-facepalm: and just :facepalm:. For. Every. Single. Emoji. I don't remember a case when I really wanted a sexualized version, I always want to express just an emotion. Just remove all the prefixed versions, and leave the pure one.
  - mattigames 1y ago
    In everyday speak "sexualize" means to make it sexy, so unless you are finding the emojis sexy you probably meant "genderize" or something alike.
    - deepsun 1y ago
      Yep, I meant "genderize", thank you.
  - maratc 1y ago
    Since we now have :man-pregnant: emoji, in six skin colors no less, I fully expect all the animal emojis to also be gender-ized first, and pregnant-ized later.
    - lwkl 1y ago
      Thank you I think I will use that the next time I had a really filling meal.
    - mattigames 1y ago
      That one is vastly more frequently used to mean "I'm so full after eating", just like the peach emoji is more used to mean butt than the fruit.
program 1y ago
Thanks for fixing the title of this post! [U+1F642 slightly smiling face emoji] (I wrote the post)
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
myfonj 1y ago
I see delightful unintended layer of irony in a fact that what the page really uses for the Emoji display are in fact image elements: JavaScript on that page replaces Unicode text with them. So the main heading content It’s Not Wrong that “[that formidable facepalm]”.length == 36 (sic syntactically wrong quotes) is in reality (for JS-capable and enabled clients) presented as <h1 class="wp-block-post-title">It’s Not Wrong tha t (for HN) “<img draggable="false" role="img" class="emoji" alt="[that formidable facepalm]" sr c="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/16.0.1/svg/1f 926-1f3fc-200d-2642-fe0f.svg">”.length == 36</h1> (arbitrary line breaks added for convenience). Here the "true" `.length` of the (scare)quoted content is: 144. --- This comment is brought to you thanks: "View Selection Source" context menu entry in Firefox.
subarctic 1y ago
Great introduction, where's the rest of the article?
chrismorgan 1y ago
> “[facepalm emoji]”.length Are there any even mildly-popular languages that use, or allow, curly quotes for strings? I’d kinda like there to be at least one.
- dragonwriter 1y ago
  Like as delimiters? Ruby kind of does, in that: %{hello, world!} is one way to write a string literal.
- tremon 1y ago
  Perl has quote operators which come close, but they start with a letter followed by your choice of delimiter: my $string1 = q{for example}; my $string2 = q<angle brackets>; my $string3 = q/or any other symbol/;
dang 1y ago
Recent and related: It’s not wrong that "\u{1F926}\u{1F3FC}\u200D\u2642\uFE0F".length == 7 (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44981525 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44981525 - Aug 2025 (274 comments) (btw the title edit on that one was for fun, and came about this way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44981808 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44981808) Also related: It’s not wrong that "🤦🏼‍♂️".length == 7 (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36159443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36159443 - June 2023 (303 comments) String length functions for single emoji characters evaluate to greater than 1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26591373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26591373 - March 2021 (127 comments) String Lengths in Unicode - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20914184 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20914184 - Sept 2019 (140 comments) (as you can see, we've taken quite a few different whacks at that piñata of a title over the years)

34 points by program 1y ago

Perhaps the title should be changed to: It’s Not Wrong that (for HN) “[facepalm emoji]”.length == 36 Or some alternative if the above is too long, like: “[facepalm emoji]”.length == 36 Both seem more accurate than the current: It’s Not Wrong that (for HN) “ ”.length == 36

johnisgood 1y ago
Or use "[facepalm emoji]" instead of the emoji itself or something.
chuckadams 1y ago
That's kind of the whole joke.
franky47 1y ago
"[man with blue shirt facepalm emoji]".length == 36 Checks out.
- chrismorgan 1y ago
  Only trouble is, he may not be wearing a blue shirt. In my fonts, it’s more teal, and maybe not a shirt. But I was definitely going to hunt for a description that made it 36 characters long.
  - mattigames 1y ago
    It could be worse, in Windows 11 the hand does not seem to be from the same person than the face, see https://em-content.zobj.net/source/microsoft/407/person-facepalming_1f926.png https://em-content.zobj.net/source/microsoft/407/person-face...

Joker_vD 1y ago

> " ".length == 36 Heh. In my code, I always (idiosyncratically, I admit) spell '\x20' as '\x20' (or even just as 0x20, if it's C), unless it's a part of a multicharacter string e.g. "Hello world!": it just feels wrong to have an empty space inside single quotes. Is it really just U+0020 in there? Is it supposed to be U+0020 there? Silly worries, I know, but I just don't like the way ' ' looks.

zenethian 1y ago
You should read the article...
- Joker_vD 1y ago
  Is the article about HN stripping emojis (and some other Unicode code points) from the title of another HN submission?
  - eterm 1y ago
    Yes, it is.
    - Joker_vD 1y ago
      Amazing! So if I ever were to write a blog post e.g. "Why ' ' != ' '", I guess I better title it "Why '\u2744\ufe0f' != '\x20'" to avoid confusion on HN. Edit: as demonstrated by this very comment.
criddell 1y ago
If you are on Chrome, hover your mouse over the link to the article and look at the URL displayed in the bottom left corner (at least that's where Chrome puts it on my machine).
Retr0id 1y ago
A good text editor will make all whitespace variants visually distinct.

monkeyelite 1y ago

I don’t want emojis in the headlines please. It makes it difficult to read and becomes an arms race for attention. Also I’m not even sure it was a good idea to put them in text. Emojis are a special case that breaks a lot. Now you have to worry about multiple colors, etc.

kps 1y ago
It pisses me off that Unicode retroactively changed the meaning of existing text by turning some symbols into emoji. So much for stability guarantees.
mbb70 1y ago
A huge and growing percent of all realtime communication is happening via text. It is reasonable and worthwhile to encode some nonverbal information in it, and emojis have won the day.
dcminter 1y ago
I emailed the site to see what the policy is. Generally I agree with you, but in rare cases like the article that this one is meta-commentary to it might perhaps have been justifiable to allow it? I see the "slippery slope" risk though.
65 1y ago
These articles are about emojis and how they work, I don't see how having one in the title is a problem.
bigstrat2003 1y ago
It definitely wasn't a good idea. Emojis aren't text, they don't belong in Unicode at all. It would be one thing to encode, say, Egyptian hieroglyphics. That would be legitimate. But putting emojis into Unicode was against the purpose of the standard and a huge mistake.
- ThrowawayTestr 1y ago
  If you hate emojis blame the Japanese telecoms that created it. Unicode strives to digitally encoded all human communication and the Japanese were using pictograms for communication before Unicode.

mitsu_at 1y ago

Example YouTube videos that have "no title": - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K93zcgFsynk&ab_channel=Vsauce https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K93zcgFsynk&ab_channel=Vsauc... - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrHTI04i9yk&ab_channel=%E2%80%8C https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrHTI04i9yk&ab_channel=%E2%8... This is done by using invisible characters such as ZWNJ to get around the title filter.

MangoToupe 1y ago

Only if you're counting bytes

stickfigure 1y ago

Grumpy old guy: Can we just stop with new unicode characters? We don't need to be able to capture every human thought or concept in a character. Feels like the Unicode Consortium is chaired by Funes the Memorious.

deepsun 1y ago
The main pain for me is that most tools now sexualize the emojis: they force me to choose between :man-facepalm:, :woman-facepalm: and just :facepalm:. For. Every. Single. Emoji. I don't remember a case when I really wanted a sexualized version, I always want to express just an emotion. Just remove all the prefixed versions, and leave the pure one.
- mattigames 1y ago
  In everyday speak "sexualize" means to make it sexy, so unless you are finding the emojis sexy you probably meant "genderize" or something alike.
  - deepsun 1y ago
    Yep, I meant "genderize", thank you.
- maratc 1y ago
  Since we now have :man-pregnant: emoji, in six skin colors no less, I fully expect all the animal emojis to also be gender-ized first, and pregnant-ized later.
  - lwkl 1y ago
    Thank you I think I will use that the next time I had a really filling meal.
  - mattigames 1y ago
    That one is vastly more frequently used to mean "I'm so full after eating", just like the peach emoji is more used to mean butt than the fruit.

program 1y ago

Thanks for fixing the title of this post! [U+1F642 slightly smiling face emoji] (I wrote the post)

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

myfonj 1y ago

I see delightful unintended layer of irony in a fact that what the page really uses for the Emoji display are in fact image elements: JavaScript on that page replaces Unicode text with them. So the main heading content It’s Not Wrong that “[that formidable facepalm]”.length == 36 (sic syntactically wrong quotes) is in reality (for JS-capable and enabled clients) presented as <h1 class="wp-block-post-title">It’s Not Wrong tha t (for HN) “<img draggable="false" role="img" class="emoji" alt="[that formidable facepalm]" sr c="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/16.0.1/svg/1f 926-1f3fc-200d-2642-fe0f.svg">”.length == 36</h1> (arbitrary line breaks added for convenience). Here the "true" `.length` of the (scare)quoted content is: 144. --- This comment is brought to you thanks: "View Selection Source" context menu entry in Firefox.

subarctic 1y ago

Great introduction, where's the rest of the article?

chrismorgan 1y ago

> “[facepalm emoji]”.length Are there any even mildly-popular languages that use, or allow, curly quotes for strings? I’d kinda like there to be at least one.

dragonwriter 1y ago
Like as delimiters? Ruby kind of does, in that: %{hello, world!} is one way to write a string literal.
tremon 1y ago
Perl has quote operators which come close, but they start with a letter followed by your choice of delimiter: my $string1 = q{for example}; my $string2 = q<angle brackets>; my $string3 = q/or any other symbol/;

dang 1y ago

Recent and related: It’s not wrong that "\u{1F926}\u{1F3FC}\u200D\u2642\uFE0F".length == 7 (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44981525 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44981525 - Aug 2025 (274 comments) (btw the title edit on that one was for fun, and came about this way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44981808 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44981808) Also related: It’s not wrong that "🤦🏼‍♂️".length == 7 (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36159443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36159443 - June 2023 (303 comments) String length functions for single emoji characters evaluate to greater than 1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26591373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26591373 - March 2021 (127 comments) String Lengths in Unicode - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20914184 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20914184 - Sept 2019 (140 comments) (as you can see, we've taken quite a few different whacks at that piñata of a title over the years)