Submission timeline
2007–2026One slot for every year since HN launched. Height is that year's peak points; orange marks a 100+ point or 50+ comment breakout. Select a bar to open its strongest thread.
First comments on top threads
HN comment orderI think we should take a moment to appreciate how great UTF-8 is, and how it well it worked out. It's easy to get disillusioned with internet standards when IPv6 is taking forever and messaging is all proprietary locked down protocols. Yet character encodings used to be a horrible mess and now it's not. In the 90's the only practical solution was for everyone to use the same OS, same word processor, same web browser, and who cares about talking…
There are socio-economic reasons why the early computing boom (ENIAC, UNIVAC, IBM mainframes, early programming languages like Fortran and COBOL) was dominated by the US: massive wartime R&D, university infrastructure, and a large domestic market. But I wonder if the Anglophone world also had an orthographic advantage as well. English uses 26 letters with no diacritics, compared to other languages like Chinese (thousands of characters), Hindi (50+ letters), or French/German (latin with diacritics). That simplicity…
Notice how the spec changed when they added the requirement for being able to resynchronize.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2071529
The first top-level comment from each of the four biggest threads, in HN’s own order. Excerpts are shortened; open a comment for full context.
- Breakout years
- 2
- Total points
- 447
- Total comments
- 155
100+ points or 50+ comments
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
Every submission
| Date | Title as submitted | By | Points | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2009-04-24 | The history of UTF-8 as told by Rob Pike | luckystrike | 48 | 1 |
| 2011-04-05 | The history of UTF-8 as told by Rob Pike | motxilo | 47 | 2 |
| 2013-10-05 | The history of UTF-8 as told by Rob Pike | anonfunction | 3 | 0 |
| 2020-03-19 | The History of UTF-8 as told by Rob Pike (2003) | ColanR | 2 | 0 |
| 2021-04-08 | The history of UTF-8 as told by Rob Pike (2003)First breakout · Best thread | quyleanh | 244 | 116 |
| 2023-07-23 | The history of UTF-8 as told by Rob Pike | thunderbong | 2 | 0 |
| 2025-09-13 | UTF-8 history (2003)Hall induction · Latest 20+ point return | mikecarlton | 101 | 36 |