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Comment by alexqgb | Hacker News Reader

Hostile? Really? How is typing '$' instead of '4' any different from typing 'A' instead of 'a'? They both use the same shift key. Watch, I'll do it again. How about a seven? See? 7.

Now for the ampersand...just hold the 7 and reach for the shift key... &%$#$ FUCK! The little bastard just BIT ME!

I'm sorry, you're absolutely correct - those non-alphanumerics ARE hostile.

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The services/apps are often hostile to it, in my experience. For a while I had a mental password-generation scheme that involved commas, and about 50% of websites would reject my password for having an illegal character, sometimes explicitly, other times just breaking in weird ways. After one site let me set my password to one involving a special character, but wouldn't let me enter that same password on the login form, I became wary of using special characters in passwords. (The site was a bank, not some random forum.)

Nah, they have a great reason - if they restrict you to alphanumeric characters, it's easier to prevent XSS when they display your password back to you later on in the flow :-).

My favorite is when I pick a 20 character password (keypass, ahoy!), and register using that. Works great, until I try and log in, whereupon I realize they silently cut off n characters from the end of the password when saving it on the backend.

Heck, at one place, n was 12. Go figure.

Some systems restrict you to alphanumeric passwords (generally for no good reason). If you reuse your password across systems (or you have a formula for creating passwords) then you are less likely to use special characters in case 1 system requires a different one.

Additionally, entering symbols on a phone keypad or touch screen is usually a little harder.

There's no shift key on my game controllers.

R2 comes close, though.

& is physically more difficult to type than U because of the hand stretch from holding the shift key. Not everybody has the same size hands :). While typing letters is easy, special chars are more awkward just because of where they are on the keyboard.

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