← Back to context

Comment by teknopaul

6 years ago

I find myself validating a lot of input to be ascii still. I think its time to write a lib to make use of all those wasted bits.

11 comments

teknopaul

Reply
teknopaul  6 years ago

I signed the above post with an emoticon that does not render? Could it be that hn is not 8bit safe?

  • detaro  6 years ago

    HN filters out emoji (well, most of them, the blacklist appears to be incomplete)

    • codetrotter  6 years ago

      > the blacklist appears to be incomplete

      I was under the impression that the emojis that are not blacklisted are intentionally whitelisted.

      For example, all of the flag emojis are possible to use. That seems to be no coincidence.

      There are a few others that are possible to use as well, most of which appear to be logically grouped together.

      For example, multiple emojis relating to time are possible to use.

      The flags make sense I think. And I could see the ones relating to time being sort of relevant in post titles about time management for example.

      For some reason, some of the symbols resembling media playback controls are possible to use too.

      I don't see any reason for the media playback controls symbols to be available (while so many others are blacklisted I mean), but it does make the following possible though:

      "This is so sad. Alexa, play Despacito 2."

      Now playing: Despacito 2 (feat. Eminem)

      ⏯ ⏮ ⏭ —————————○—————— (2:01 / 3:14)

      Not that there is any immediate practical use of that of course.

      I think it would be interesting if the mods would comment on which emojis and other symbols outside of human writing systems are available and if indeed that is intended or not, and if intended what they are expecting people to use them for and why they decided to whitelist exactly those that they did while still blacklisting a few of the other ones that might be useful.

      It might just be like you said also though, maybe they explicitly blacklisted some symbols only and then more symbols were introduced later and the blacklist was never updated to include those.

      8 replies →