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!

Edit: Success! HN has renamed my entry to It’s Not Wrong that (for HN) “[facepalm emoji]”.length == 36. At least better that the JS \u{HEX} one

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

Edit: [U+1F642 slightly smiling face emoji] <- a even simpler one?

@online{zaerl2025-its-not-wrong-that-for-hn-%f0%9f%a4%a6%f0%9f%8f%bc%e2%99%82%ef%b8%8f-length-36,
  author = {Francesco Bigiarini},
  title = {It’s Not Wrong that (for HN) “🤦🏼‍♂️”.length == 36},
  date = {2025-08-24},
  url = {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/},
  urldate = {2025-08-24}
}