Top all-time · #12007
Benjamin Esham
Personal blog · esham.ioprogrammingwriting
Benjamin Esham's personal blog at esham.io covers programming and writing. Since 2017, 6 different Hacker News readers have linked it 7 times, most often “Unicode’s encoding of national flags is just crazy enough to work”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-08-20, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Benjamin Esham's posts on Unicode and Python strings, such as the Python 3 str walkthrough and the flag-rendering piece. Commenters use them to illustrate how hard text handling is.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Essays on software development and other nerdy topics.
Most-linked posts?
- Unicode’s encoding of national flags is just crazy enough to work3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-01-14
- Kibibytes are silly and we should all use them2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-05-10
What Hacker News says?
Treating strings as "a sequence of bytes" is perfectly fine if you never, ever interpret or manipulate the contents. As soon as you want to e.g. limit to 160 characters and suffix with an ellipsis, you run into problems of "what is a character", and you can't even call it a single unicode codepoint. Is "Z̴̛̺͉͙͚̰̔̏ͧͅ" is a single character, or over 10? Can you even call it a single "glyph" since it's formed of many u…
Comment linking /2014/06/unicode-flags
on “Grokking Python 3’s str”Submitted Curate your shell history as a story · 156 points
HN discussionFavourite unicode fact: properly rendering unicode requires understanding of the current geopolitical situation (Depending on whom you accept as a country and whom you do not, two country-code-letters may or may not render as a flag. This changes sometimes in today's world.). https://esham.io/2014/06/unicode-flags
Comment linking /2014/06/unicode-flags
on “Unicode is harder than you think”Submitted You can't spell "Gell-Mann amnesia" without LLM as a story · 45 points
HN discussionSubmitted Kibibytes are silly and we should all use them as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Kibibytes are silly and we should all use them as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Unicode’s encoding of national flags is just crazy enough to work as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
