Top all-time · #11383
Paul Wood
Personal blog · paultendo.github.io/posts · on HN as paultendosecurityprogramming
Paul Wood writes paultendo, a personal blog at paultendo.github.io about security and programming. Since 2026, 7 different Hacker News readers have linked it 8 times, most often “Unicode's confusables.txt and NFKC normalization disagree on 31 characters”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-18, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Paul Wood's posts examine Unicode confusables by rendering characters across many fonts to test visual similarity, and include steps to reproduce the results. HN readers link them for this testing approach.
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.
Paul Wood FRSA on legal technology, open-source tools and Unicode security.
Most-linked posts?
- Unicode's confusables.txt and NFKC normalization disagree on 31 characters3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2026-02-22
- I rendered 1,418 confusables over 230 fonts. Most aren't confusable to the eye2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-02-25
What Hacker News says?
This other article from the same author is more interesting: https://paultendo.github.io/posts/unicode-confusables-nfkc-c...
Comment linking /posts/unicode-confusables-nfkc-conflict/
on “I rendered 1,418 confusables over 230 fonts. Most aren't confusable to the eye”Submitted Denial of Spend: New category of resource exhaustion attacks as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIf you have a Mac you can follow the steps at the end of the post and reproduce the results https://paultendo.github.io/posts/confusable-vision-visual-s... I don't have a Mac.
Comment linking /posts/confusable-vision-visual-similarity/
on “I rendered 1,418 confusables over 230 fonts. Most aren't confusable to the eye”Submitted I rendered 1,418 confusables over 230 fonts. Most aren't confusable to the eye as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Unicode's confusables.txt and NFKC normalization disagree on 31 characters as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted 96.5% of confusables.txt from Unicode is not high-risk as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Unicode characters look like Latin letters but aren't in a detection system as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Confusables.txt and NFKC disagree on 31 characters as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
