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

https://zaerl.com/2025/08/24/its-not-wrong-that-for-hn-%f0%9f%a4%a6%f0%9f%8f%bc%e2%99%82%ef%b8%8f-length-36/

by program • 11 months ago

34 59 11 months ago

zaerl.com

merelysounds• 11 months 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• 11 months ago

Or use "[facepalm emoji]" instead of the emoji itself or something.

chuckadams• 11 months ago

That's kind of the whole joke.

franky47• 11 months ago

"[man with blue shirt facepalm emoji]".length == 36

Checks out.

chrismorgan2• 11 months 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.

Joker_vD5• 11 months 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• 11 months ago

You should read the article...

Joker_vD5• 11 months ago

Is the article about HN stripping emojis (and some other Unicode code points) from the title of another HN submission?

criddell• 11 months 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• 11 months ago

A good text editor will make all whitespace variants visually distinct.

monkeyelite4• 11 months 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• 11 months 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• 11 months 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• 11 months 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• 11 months ago

These articles are about emojis and how they work, I don't see how having one in the title is a problem.

bigstrat2003• 11 months 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.

Joker_vD5• 11 months ago

Emojis aren't text

Neither are digits, or control characters, strictly speaking. We really shouldn't have been able to have CR and LF explicitly embedded in the text files.

closewith2• 11 months ago

It's been a huge success, so hard to portray it as a mistake.

AnotherGoodName• 11 months ago

The line is really fuzzy honestly. We have some universal pictograms that are known and reasonably well understood around the world and the way they are used is pretty much a writing system. An icon of a man or women on a bathroom door? Well you may write it in one of a million different styles (fonts) but the general idea is used around the world as a common writing system. I'd say that belongs in unicode.

The real problem is that the alphabets of certain writing systems are unbounded. Emojis are completely unbounded. That's the only reason to have concern with it in unicode. Unicode is a limited set by definition and emojis are an unbounded set.

mock-possum• 11 months ago

Why would Egyptian hieroglyphics be legitimate, and emojis illegitimate?

miki1232112• 11 months ago

Where do you draw the line?

What about "fancy fonts" (foreign characters that look like latin letters)? Japanese / Chinese ideographs? Common pictograms like "stop sign?" Mathematical symbols?

People made emoticons out of ~100 printable ASCII characters. With thousands of "real" Unicode symbols available, they would have gone wild anyway.

As a person with accessibility needs, I'm honestly glad emojis exist. They at least carry semantic meanings (though some people do abuse them in ways inconsistent with those meanings), unlike random combinations of symbols that the internet community has agreed on.

ThrowawayTestr• 11 months 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• 11 months ago

Example YouTube videos that have "no title":

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K93zcgFsynk&ab_channel=Vsauc...

- 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• 11 months ago

Only if you're counting bytes

stickfigure• 11 months 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.

deepsun2• 11 months 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.

mattigames3• 11 months 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.

maratc3• 11 months 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.

program• 11 months ago

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

myfonj• 11 months 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)&nbsp;“<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• 11 months ago

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

chrismorgan2• 11 months 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• 11 months ago

Like as delimiters? Ruby kind of does, in that:

  %{hello, world!}

is one way to write a string literal.

tremon3• 11 months 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• 11 months 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 - 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)

Also related:

It’s not wrong that "🤦🏼‍♂️".length == 7 (2019) - 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 - March 2021 (127 comments)

String Lengths in Unicode - 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)

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

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