Sorry to hijack your post, but I wasn't aware of emojis (flags only?) being available on HN.. there's no mention of them in the guidelines nor FAQ. What are the rules / guidelines on them? Are they (emojis in general) available in comments only or in titles of posts too?
HN is a plain-text site so we basically don't allow those. Software strips some of them out sometimes, but it's not the sort of thing we'd go for a 100% technical solution to. I edited them out of the posts in this thread. Interestingly, I don't think the meaning of any of the comments was affected by doing so.
Emojis are unicode characters like any other, you can use them almost anywhere. I don't believe there are any official rules/guidelines on using them on HN, but they are rare here.
