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Comment by jbclements | Hacker News Reader

Shameless plug (of my FOSS): if you like Diceware, you might like Molis Hai even better. Maps the 56-bit sequence 0x556bfdce0148c9 to "wrowd aut settea". I betcha the corresponding diceware passphrase is way longer and less memorable. cf https://www.brinckerhoff.org/molis-hai/pwgen.html, or download FOSS repo from github.

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I get "aaron nitty ms exxon inept" for the same value in Diceware (with a few bits spare, hence "aaron" from near the start of the alphabet). Subjective but I think that's more memorable.

quite a bit longer, though...

Sure, but how does the raw length matter? The computer is storing it hashed anyway; the human can probably type five actual words faster than 3 pseudo-words.

What's that? Gaelic? Old English?

I'd certainly dispute the "memorable" part for most people on Earth.

I haven't looked at the source, but the linked page claims to use a Markov model trained on an English corpus (in this case, A Tale of Two Cities), so it emits English-like sequences of letters and spacing, and uses that in conjunction with a Huffman tree setup to map random bitstrings to the pseudo-English phrases.

You could use this on $LANGUAGE of your choice, or $CORPUS of your choice.

(Also, it seems much more memorable to me than an equivalent random stream of bits are.)

Ah, English-like. Not English. That eluded me.

Still, neither "wrowd", nor "aut", nor "settea" looks or sounds English-like to me. I wouldn't even begin to know how to pronounce it.

It's nice in a sense, sure, but I suppose I could even remember (real) French words better, despite all those accents and me not speaking French.

"wrowd": a portmanteau for "wrong crowd". "Take care, you don't want to hang out with the wrowd".

"aut": a logarithmic unit of measurement indicating the level of automation of a process. "I think we can get another couple of auts out of the sentiment-analysis pipeline."

"settea": a genus of shrubs in the family Settaceae.

Re: wrowd. The term 'OK' originally meant 'Our Kind'. There was another term "NOK" meaning "Not Our Kind" which got lost. Now we have wrowd, maybe it will fare better.

> The term 'OK' originally meant 'Our Kind'. There was another term "NOK" meaning "Not Our Kind" which got lost.

I frown on casually lying to people over the internet. The term 'OK' originally stood for 'all correct'.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=OK

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/503/what-does-ok-st...

You're trying to allude to NOKD, which is (1) completely unrelated, and (2) not lost.

Nah. Alluding to the usage of the word in my youth. But go ahead, defer to authority and call names! This is the internet after all.

Are you claiming that a usage from your youth predates ("originally meant") the usage of 1838?

And for something as trivial as a two-letter acronym, does the first appearance in print cement it for all time? Does it constrain conventional usage forever? I'd check out some other acronyms to get an idea of their various usages and meanings over time. There's a site for that.

In the context of "originally meant" (your words), yes, the original meaning of a word is going to be its meaning when the word first came into usage. Sure, word meaning can change over time, but their original meaning shouldn't.

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