It's Not Wrong that (for HN) " ".length == 36

Hey! Unintentional clickbait! I am not talking about how a space character has length 36 in Hacker News! If you are coming here from HN the above 🤦🏼‍♂️ emoji have been replaced with a space!

A couple of days I published a pretty innocent post to HN. The source article was talking about all the various escamotages techniques used to create new emojis.

I noticed after posting it that the emoji have been replaced with a “ “ character. I was pretty sure to have seen emojis in the past on HN titles, so I thought that maybe it was a first level filter of some sort.

Today I checked again and it was pretty funny to see the actual renaming done to have it stay in our beloved 80 columns.

It’s not wrong that “\u{1F926}\u{1F3FC}\u200D\u2642\uFE0F”.length == 7 (2019)

Ah, and copy-pasting this post URL on mobile Safari, shows it this way:

https://zaerl.com/2025/08/24/its-not-wrong-that-for-hn-🤦🏼♂%EF%B8%8F-length-36/

🙂 <- a simple one