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Comment by joallard | Hacker News Reader

Case-insensivity is important for some to be able to reliably remember a string. I won't easily retain the difference between 'b4dQbFs31' and 'b4DqBfs31'.

Same thing when speaking it out loud. 'B four D capital Q B capital F s thirty-one' is way more convoluted and error-prone than 'B four D Q B F S thirty-one'.

The best thing I've found that fits this criterion is Crockford's Base 32 [1], basically the extension of hex digits, removing letters ILOU.

But Base 32 (case-insensitivity by proxy) constrains us to 5 bits, which is only a 20% reduction over the 4 bits of base 16. So instead of the 20 bits `1ab2f` we could express them with something like `1qm3`.

Or we could be using words...

[1]: http://www.crockford.com/wrmg/base32.html

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Regarding Base 32, I love the justification used for removing U. I, L, and O all have potential confusion with digits, but U was removed because of "Accidental obscenity".

That's actually pretty brilliant

I once had a moment of panic after coming up with and shipping a custom scheme along these lines, when I realized there was a decent probability of generating accidental profanity. Afterwards I came up with a filter, and we spent a fun day filling it with every nasty word we could think of.

I'm surprised it wasn't just "and all vowels" with the same reasoning, or at least 'a' (because I can more readily think of examples than for, say, 'e').

I suppose, though, there's an attraction in using b32 rather than b29... (Though I notice mid-word apostrophes are double-tap-selectable at least on macOS, so perhaps swapping 'a' for ''' would be advantageous, if more complicated to explain.)

The two "worst" swearwords that pop into mind both have "u" in them. Meanwhile, the swears with "a" in them seem to be the tamest of the lot.

"Tameness" varies extraordinarily by region - an infamous example being 'twat' which throughout the UK ranges from friendly to vulgar.

Regardless of variance, I don't think I'd regard either the above or the name of a fat character in Austin Powers as "tamest of the lot".

I find it interesting that you're willing to say "twat" but not "bastard". I admit that I didn't think of either of those words, though I think they're still much tamer than the ones with "u" in them. Really what I was thinking of was "crap" and "damn".

The best way to use words that I've seen (e.g., over the phone, and also to memorize) is Mnemonicode, originally created by Oren Tirosh, who has since abandoned it, but there are multiple compatible versions all around, see e.g. [0].

Unfortunately, most of the references around the web link to Tirosh's original work on the WayBack machine, which used to be hosted on "tothink.com", but the new owners put a "robots.txt" which make even the old version unaccessible on archive.org

[0] https://github.com/singpolyma/mnemonicode

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