Why “Unicode” is being discussed
The most recent Hacker News stories and comments contributing to this topic's mentions.
If it's just a general Transformation Format and Unicode will never assign those code points, it'd be just TF-8. I can think of a second way to expand that abbreviation.
by yencabulator · Sep 20, 2026
It's a brilliant hack. It means that when you're dealing with valid UTF-8 strings, various kinds of string relationships enjoy a homomorphism between byte strings and Unicode st…
by kragen · Sep 20, 2026
And UTF-8 isn't even fully compatible with windows UTF-16 - UTF8 can't encode a lot of truncated windows UTF-16 filenames.. You need WTF-8 for that. https://artoria2e5…
by adornKey · Sep 20, 2026
Since the Unicode Consortium isn't going to actually assign those code points, this is functionally just a scheme for encoding variable-length integers designed as an extension…
by zahlman · Sep 20, 2026
I have entertained ideas like this every since becoming familiar with the original RFC2279 UTF-8 well over two decades ago, before UTF-8 was subsequently restricted to 21 bits.…
by strenholme · Sep 20, 2026
I'm failing to see why an embedded environment would have any need for a new encoding format, which is kind of my point: the types of things that are going to be written in C ar…
by saghm · Sep 20, 2026
Interest
Proportion of Hacker News items mentioning "unicode" over time.
Mentions
Total number of Hacker News items mentioning "unicode" over time.
Unicode is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 17.0 defines 159,801 characters and 172 scripts used in various ordinary, literary, academic and technical contexts. Read more on Wikipedia