Pretty cool, I like how they figured out the French flag emoji is associated with italy, #montreal.
It reminds me of the Android app dango which does a pretty good job at suggesting emoji associated with full sentences
This seems like it took very heavy influence from http://getdango.com/emoji-and-deep-learning/
Or actually it could be the opposite, seeing as this post is about a year old
I like this app that applies deep learning to Emojis: http://getdango.com/emoji-and-deep-learning/
This was posted in 2015, but now that fasttext (https://github.com/facebookresearch/fastText), just released by Facebook and can scale to Instagram-sized datasets, can create word vectors better than word2vec which account for context (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1607.04606v1.pdf), this type of analysis will only improve in the future.
I imagine that a natural language AI which uses emojis would be better at passing a Turing test
If anybody else is confused why the first usage of the heart emoji (️) in text renders as a black heart (), it's because the page lost the 0xFE0F VARIATION SELECTOR-16 invisible character that comes after the U+2764 HEAVY BLACK HEART character to turn it into the emoji form.
Edit: What the, HN deleted both instances of U+2764 HEAVY BLACK HEART in the text, and left the VARIATION SELECTOR-16 behind. That's super weird.