2 stories
The essay follows characters that entered reference works through transcription errors and historical ambiguity. Once encoded, they become part of the compatibility burden that keeps old text readable.
HN readers described the conservative trade-off: extra invalid characters are often safer than deleting a character that later proves to be real.
The top HN threads: facts from the discussions, both sides, insider voices. Email, Telegram, or RSS.
On Medium, Ś vanished while the eight other Polish accented letters typed fine. Marcin Wichary traced it: the Polish 'programmer's layout' makes Ś with Right Alt+S, Windows remaps Right Alt to Ctrl+Alt, and Medium's save handler was swallowing anything with Ctrl+S to block the browser save dialog.
The one-character fix: stop firing on Ctrl+S when Alt is also held. The flip in the thread is that browsers still give developers no clean way to tell these key combos apart, so the bug keeps coming back.
