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Comment by dilap | Hacker News Reader

This seems half-jokey, but I think it'd actually be really great if places where we usually see hex or base64 hashes used emoji instead.

Much easier to compare at a glance, and have a chance of remembering (by sight -- "is this the same hash", not "let me write down the hash from nothing").

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Someone has already done this[1]. It works okay (they picked 256 emoji that were very distinct) but you still have problems like mistakenly reading two emoji as being swapped.

[1]: https://github.com/emojisum/emojisum

Telegram uses emojis to verify phone calls

https://www.engadget.com/2017/03/30/telegrams-voice-calls-ar...

A more serious attempt to solve hat problem is base58: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base58

Plus you can actually type base58 using a phone or non-native keyboard.

Plus it's the right size for one cryptocat gene per character.

I prototyped that very idea at https://dmitri.shuralyov.com/projects/hash-emoji/.

I doubt that if you get twenty emojis thrown at you, that you'll see the difference much faster.

The easiest way to check if a hash matches is to use ==. Or === if your language has problems with numbers in strings.

My current strategy is checking the first few characters visually, hoping the odds for a collision even on those are rather low.

I would say even with emojis, people will continue doing exactly that forever.

Citymapper run buses in London that use emoji to show at which stop you have to get off.

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