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Comment by microtherion | Hacker News Reader

One of my favorite geek license plates is '4BSD755' on a California car, which happens to perfectly match the format for a generic license plate in that state. It could be a coincidence, but I suspect not.

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My favorite was a VW Beetle with the plate "FEATURE". No, it's not a bug...

California currently prohibits vanity plates which match the sequential plate patterns, although it's possible that was ordered before it was assigned and before they prohibited it. If it's a vehicle you see often, you can estimate the date of the plate based on its style and see if it was made earlier than it would have been if sequential.

Edit: It looks like if it's sequential, it would be a white plate, with California in cursive at the current (large) size, where the descender on the f almost touches the plate number, and it might have no subtitle or the sesquicentennial subtitle.

I assumed that too, but it doesn't appear to be prohibited.[1] Indeed, I tried 8BSD755 and 9BSD755 which were accepted. (The current sequential plates start with 7.)

[1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/wasapp/ipp2/initPers.do

On the (paper) order form[1] it says:

> DMV has the right to refuse any combination of letters and/or letters and numbers for any of the following reason(s): [...] it conficts with any regular license plate series issued.

My understanding is that all vanity plates are reviewed by at least one human, so it's possible they handle denying vanity plates that fit the sequential series that probably should have been denied in the online form.

[1] https://dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/6d97bdef-c5b1-46ee-a55...

In the Lisp Machine world in the early '80s, one guy's first car had HLRZ as his vanity plate, that's the PDP-10 instruction that implements the CAR (IBM 704 Contents of Address Register) operation, which gets you the first element in a list, and his second, or another's, was CADR, which gets you the second element, and was also the name of the 2nd generation, beyond the prototype Lisp Machine that was manufactured in small quantities by MIT and LMI.

My neighbor had a plate EOF26Z in NJ. Surely I was the only one noticing patterns in a coincidence. EOF = #26 = Ctrl+Z in DOS.

My least favorite was a guy who worked at CompUSA in the mid 90s who had SBPNP32 (sound blaster 32 pnp)

I once knew a guy with an `ALT-F4` plate in Texas.

Might buy a minute if that's being radioed in....

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