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Comment by aasasd | Hacker News Reader

English pronunciation mentioned together with words “unique” and “unambiguous”―is that a joke? Oh yeah, no way that people pronounce ‘u’ and ‘a’ similarly.

“There are 6 unambiguous 1-letter vowels”―since when are vowels in English unambiguous? English writing should properly be classified as logographic, since you can't know how a word is pronounced from its spelling, or vice-versa.

Has the author ever communicated his own middle and last names in a phone call? A big benefit of numeric identifiers in the first place is that it's easier to dictate them without error. Even in my native phonemic language, with words or letters it's too often back to the Folks' Phonetic Alphabet: “No, D as in Dmitry.”

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The strings only have to be unique and pronounceable to be valuable, they don't have to be uniquely pronounceable.

When scanning a list of records by eye looking for an entry or entries, it's helpful for the identifiers to be pronounceable because that allows normal people to hold more in their short term memory than they could if the strings were all gibberish and each entry ended up consuming multiple short term memory slots in the brain. Sure, there is a tiny chance of collision but that chance is still there when scanning by eye and trying to find a GUID that starts with the first few letters of the GUID you're looking for. At that point you verify you actually have the one you want. And yes, there are lots of occassions where people look at identifiers, that's why pronounceable identifiers have value.

I'm baffled as to what you imagine the use-case to be. Is that how e.g. IP addresses are used, in your opinion―by finding them in an onscreen list? Or SS numbers? Or credit card numbers?

Replacing hexadecimal stack traces?

As others mentioned, this is the least feasible use-case exactly because the time window is short and the return for the introduction of the new scheme is dubious.

The Upspin project uses these to make private key recovery easier. I love the idea.

However, the choice of letters only seems unambiguous to western speakers. In Arabic, for example, P and B sound the same, and so do V and F for most native speakers.

> Oh yeah, no way that people pronounce ‘u’ and ‘a’ similarly.

Take their example "gutuk-bisog." The second 'u' could easily have a schwa sound.

Now imagine someone pronounces that string over the phone. The recipient then asks the speaker if that vowel is one of [eauo]. Now the speaker's brain uncontrollably fits whatever wrong letter the recipient utters into the slot to realize the ambiguity.

Now the recipient had better hope the speaker just hard-coded "second vowel is 'u'" into their memory. Because there's no other information to resolve the ambiguity.

Yet how would the speaker have known ahead of time to do that?

People using this system would have to learn to be more precise with their pronunciation and say a true /u/ instead of letting it become a shwa.

This could still work in situations with some kind of error correction. Like "read your user ID" where gutuk-bisog is a valid user id but (e.g.) gutak-bisog is unlikely to be.

Yeah, uniquely pronounceable subset of English has no vowels in it, so it's not pronounceable at all :)

Just use a sane phonetic language.

Perhaps something like the Japanese Kana could be used instead?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kana

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