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Supporting Unicode characters comes with a set of complications that you may want to address, as, for instance the infamous HTML-parsing with regex rant shows.
by scbrg 6y ago
Supporting Unicode characters comes with a set of complications that you may want to address, as, for instance the infamous HTML-parsing with regex rant shows.
As soon as you start trying to address those, the simple problem suddenly grows quite a lot in scope.
- enriquto 6y agoNotice that HN already does support unicode: α β γ é ö 本 It actively filters out a small part of it, mostly emojis (which I think that it is a good thing to do).
- xPaw 6y agoIs HN actually filtering these, or they use utf8 in mysql which is famously not full utf8mb4?
- capableweb 6y agoHah, you think HN would use something mainstream like mysql?! I don't blame you. But HN is 100% custom software, and built with it's own programming language as well, Arc (on Racket). AFAIK, HN still runs on files-as-a-db. You could check out the source here: http://arclanguage.org/install http://arclanguage.org/install
- enriquto 6y agoWhy "still" ? Is there anything wrong in using the filesystem as a database when it suits to do so ?
- capableweb 6y agoNope, I'm not implying it's bad, just that they used to do that and they still do that to this day. I have nothing against storing data in files. In fact, I do that all the time myself too.
- KorfmannArno 6y agoDon't databases also store data in files or am I missing the point?
- capableweb 6y agoYes, ultimately they do (usually) and yes, you are missing the point. "filesystem as a database" is not referring to database software that stores the data on disk but rather that the application is directly interacting with the filesystem. Imagine dumping a JSON document to disk, then reading it from disk, compared to storing a JSON string in a DB. Sure, they are both backed by the disk, but one is not "filesystem as a DB".
- gus_massa 6y agoThat release is quite outdated. They added a lot of stuff to filter spam, voting ring detectors, and other moderation stuff. Anyway, as far as I know, everything is still saved to the file system.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Biganon 6y agoI find this trend of despising emojis quite pretentious and annoying. They are very useful in some circumstances. Acting like anyone using them is a dumb teenager, or they will automatically ruin a community, is completely absurd.
- vmception 6y agoIts Gen X and you know it They don’t know it, but the rest of us do Its not a trend its out of touch old people that dont know they’re out of touch old people yet
- emodendroket 6y agoWhat exactly are we afraid will happen if someone uses an emoji instead of typing :) ?
- enriquto 6y agoit's not really a big deal. Just like not allowing bold or colored text in the comments.