For anyone that is seeing the square block, if you have a browser that supports emojis it looks like an emoji bridge. It's interesting that even though Chrome won't display it in the text, it does render the emoji in the title bar of the tab.
I'm pretty sure every Unicode character will (unless somebody missed any). There are Unicode character charts on Wikipedia too, and they're fully linkified, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrows_(Unicode_block)
I don't know if it's good or bad. But, it leads me to an interesting thought experiment.
If the trend of using emoji in Western discourse continues to increase in popularity indefinitely, could the English language of 200-500 years in the future officially incorporate ideograms of some sort?
I think it will become more prevalent in Eastern culture before Western -- ie. it allows characters in the native language... instead of only Western (English) characters.
But then again... I don't have a bridge character on my keyboard...
Anyone can make a redirect to anything, generally they don't face much scrutiny because "redirects are cheap" [0]. Though there has been some discussion about deleting those that are just emojis e.g. [1-2]. Here's a category of them:
This is an interesting oddity such as you might expect to see on reddit's /r/mildlyinteresting or til, but I don't feel that this fits well on HN personally. I'm not saying HN is turning into reddit by having this content, just pointing out how I'd classify this content.
This is absolutely not "intellectually gratifying" in my mind. The fact that it can be trivially consumed (as opposed to a long blog post) might in part lead to it having a higher number of upvotes due to being more accessible, but that doesn't mean that it's better than a less accessible item that gets more upvotes relative to people consuming it, but fewer as an absolute.
Edit: It was 1st for about two minutes and then dropped down to 198 instantly (among items from 1-3 days ago and/or with over 20 times fewer points). I'll hazard a guess that the mods agree with me on this and nuked it down.
I've said that dozens of times and got quite tired of repeating, so briefly speaking, it's because it takes only ~5 votes within first 30-60min to make the front page.
The best thing you can do about it is to go to /newest and help to bring good content to the homepage :)
Personally, I don't see anything wrong with it as long as it's once in a few days. Was it a regular trend, then it would be worth flagging.
This is an anomaly that your explanation doesn't apply to though.
Notice that it has 50 points and is half an hour old. I count 12 items on the front page currently that have 50 or fewer points and are 1 or more hours old and yet remain there. These items are generally quality content (such as the tinfoil security post -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8086834 -- which sits at 37 points / 3 hours).
Your explanation of "5 votes within the first 30 minutes" completely disregards that this has as many votes as many other items on the front page, but in a fraction of the time period.
I can sort of understand why a cross-platform browser engine might include its own text rendering engine, but is there any justification for it not making use of the fonts on the local machine to fill in the necessarily large holes in what fonts the browser bundles?
FWIW, the emoji character works fine in all contexts I've seen it: status bar URL hover, location bar and on HN and the Wikipedia web pages. This with OS X/FF 31.
