For a glorious few hours after one of the last emoji updates hacker news did support it because they didn’t filter those ones out yet. They do not filter out some of the quasi emojis like the hieroglyphs.
It's not a matter of not supporting it; if you can store UTF-8 (as HN does) then you can store emojis. It's that HN actively strips emojis. One of the more childish and petty aspects of the site IMO.
Yeah. If you look at somewhat similar forums like Less Wrong, people don't even use emojis that often. So not a big loss on HN anyway. Markdown and LaTeX support however...
