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Comment by uvdiv | Hacker News Reader

My simple, clean ampersand (&) became a paperclip (0x1f4ce), a "fried shrimp" (0x1f364), several species of geometric triangle, and dozens of other silly, silly glyphs.

http://i.imgur.com/NLkl75J.png

the unicode block containing "fried shrimp" 0x1f364 -- why does this exist???

http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F300.pdf

Latest Abstruse Goose comic sums up my emotional response:

http://abstrusegoose.com/496

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Who doesn't love 🍤?

There's lot of other strange Unicode too. There's things like '⁢' (U2062 INVISIBLE TIMES), ⓞⓓⓓ ©ⓗⓐⓡⓐ©ⓣⓔⓡ ⓢⓔⓣⓢ and sɹǝʇɔɐɹɐɥɔ uʍop ǝpısdn.

All of which can be used to bypass filters and generally cause browser-crashing havoc. For example, this address looks like Google, but it really links to hacker news.

‮http://news.ycombinator.com/?/moc.elgoog//:ptth

> "INVISIBLE TIMES"

Sounds like a Muse song title

I've never been able to work out if it is an invisible ⨉ character, or a character meant for use when things are invisible. Either way works for Muse I suppose.

It's for mathematics. Some kind of math markup may want to distinguish x times y written xy from a two-letter variable called xy. So the product is x<invisible times>y but is rendered xy.

Who doesn't love 🍤?

I just discovered the OS X terminal renders the friend shrimp glyph in color!

edit: and it's now my $PS1.

Yes, I tested pasting "🍤" to my OSX, and was surprised by a color rendering of a friend shrimp.

(yes, you can copy the character between "" and paste in your OSX terminal)

Shame this doesn't work in zsh.

Why wouldn't it work on zsh? The font face is a property of the terminal emulator (e.g. xterm, Terminal.app), not the shell.

http://i.imgur.com/RKTOBKe.png

edit: It appears (?) stock linux fonts don't include emoji.

echo 🍤

fried!

I love that link example xD I never thought of doing that!

Experiments with some common glyphs.

(!) -- 8th suggestion, after three apparently identical "upside-down 'i'" (including an "upside-down capital 'I' with a dot underneath")

(@) -- 1st suggestion

(#) -- not suggested. Top suggestion is "capital 'H' with stroke"

($) -- not suggested, although the 14th is an indistinguishable glyph "Canadian syllabics carrier sh" 0x165a, a phoenetic symbol for representing a Canadian aboriginal language.

(%) -- 1st suggestion

(^) -- 10th suggestion, to be fair this one is impossible

(&) -- not suggested (fried shrimp lol)

(*) -- 3rd suggestion

(?) -- 1st suggestion

(∫) -- 1st suggestion

(∂) -- 4th suggestion (1st one is same thing in boldface)

----------

This is suggests a really easy way to greatly improve the results: weight them by a prior probability (i.e., frequency of occurrence in a letter count). The OCR itself seems pretty good. Common math symbols are more likely than silly shrimps. Glyphs from common languages are more probable than esoteric ones, and real languages more than constructed ones. Plain glyphs are more common than variants (bold/italic) -- and these should be grouped together anyway. fried shrimp horseshoe.

Why would you use this tool to lookup common characters found on your keyboard? Maybe a better idea is to show uncommon characters first.

Exactly, this is why priors for latin alpha characters are not set that high - you have them on your keyboard already.

$#& - all were my first suggestion... perhaps I draw them better than you do? :)

dollar sign works if you draw the vertical line all the way through.

& only seems to work if drawn with the top loop broken.

I was only trying to see the fried shrimp http://imgur.com/Ev3gGwd

There is a prior probability in the results - but it's hard to balance it so that latin characters don't dominate the results if you search something else. That is why I opted for the way it is now - this is a tool to find unicode characters, you have latin characters on your keyboard. It's not really meant for OCR

You could do prior probability conditional on not being available on a US keyboard, or at least make that an option.

edit: just read your comment elsewhere on the page indicating that you do something like what I described.

> the unicode block containing "fried shrimp" 0x1f364 -- why does this exist???

A softbank-based Emoji set was imported (in an extended form) into Unicode 6.0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji#Emoji_in_the_Unicode_stan...

Because Emoji originated in japan messaging, a number of them relate to japanese culture: foodstuff (not just fried shrimp but rice balls, dango, oden, fugu), cultural practices (kadomatsu, hinamatsuri, koinobori, Fūrin wind chimes) and other such things which may be present in other cultures but usually not as prominently (e.g. Unicode Love Hotel)

http://kyon.pl/img/18939,unicode,lol,inside_joke,.html

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