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https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or adding a parenthetical remark saying how great an article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important."

Using the apple-specific unicode "" character in titles qualifies.

Which I guess I am unable to see because I am in Chrome in Ubuntu?
I see it fine on Arch. I have a relatively minimal set of fonts installed, and it seems to be coming from a font named "Standard Symbols L", which seems to be included as a Type1 font with Ghostscript's core35 font collection.

It might also be in Symbola or Unifont.

That rule seems to be talking about embellishments added by the submitter. In this case, the title submitted is as it appears on the site.

Maybe there should be an addition to the guidelines to require sticking to characters that are in some specified universal subset of Unicode?

Yes, this particular submission is tricky. The title does try to stand out by using the apple-specific unicode character (which won't render on all systems). But the title on HN is also the original title of the article. To make matters even more sticky, the HN submitter seems to be the same person who wrote the original article and title.

This story was submitted by a fairly new HN account, and the url is to a fairly new site/domain. If you or I (with old accounts) flagged this story, the story would unfairly get marked [dead]. It seemed more fair to point the submitter towards the guidelines, and hope for the best.

An "acceptable unicode characters" guideline would be lengthy, so it would be ignored. Also, providing an "allowed" list also provides the inverse, a "forbidden" list, which might be detrimental to some of the anti-abuse code filtering out the more egregious sins of unicode (like reversing all text in a discussion to read right-to-left).

Understood, just to be on the safe side, I'll rename such symbol when I see them in future posts. Thanks!