I guess I can now sympathize with everyone who complained about too many econ/politics/non-ruby/xyz posts to HN.

Front page story about a suggested change from 'RT' --> '♺' on twitter? If I had less faith in HN I would label this a jump the shark moment.

It definitely belongs in the "just for fun" category.

I guess there's nothing super-wrong with posting links like this, my surprise was more that it got so many upvotes.

Perhaps, to put a HN spin on it, we could discuss the fact that Twitter is apparently aware of the difference between unicode chars and bytes, but what about SMS? After all, that 140 character limit comes from SMS's limit. Does SMS treat ♺ as 1 against the 140 limit or 3?

In case anyone is interested, I just tested a bunch of UTF-8 Japanese characters in Twitter. It counts each character as 1 on the front-end (countdown from 140 to -infinity), but counts the BYTES on the backend, so the front end will say you are under the limit, but then you click update and get an error message saying you are over the limit.

So, this idea is DOA.

The only point I see is that it looks neat. And it seemed to be an emerging meme today on Twitter, so I posted it. Already on the article I linked there are comments explaining why it doesn't make much sense (among others, it takes up 3 bytes instead of two for "RT").

So I guess it was an opportunity to witness the rise and fall of a meme within one day ;-)