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Comment by BrandoElFollito | Hacker News Reader

Could someone please explain what the string after "consider this replay" is?

I see a combination of characters loosely looking like some East Asian alphabet, I guess that this is some kind of encoding ?

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To watch a replay you need to click the replay button and paste this string

Is this base64 but with Arabic chars included?

Base2048. An encoding optimized for packing maximum data into a Tweet (which supports 280 characters, but with Unicode support).

That is fascinating! In particular, base2048 was designed after twitter adjusted the tweet limit to 280 characters, but started counting “heavy” codepoints as double, making the previously used base65536 less efficient in the context of a tweet.

See https://github.com/qntm/base2048#readme

I'd never heard of this either. It really is interesting!

I can't other articles on it other than that readme. Does anyone else know where I can learn more about it? Someone needs to make a Wikipedia page!

I think the reason is just that it isn't widely used. It's a very niche use-case, anyway. Even link-shorteners don't particularly benefit from something like this, and for all cases where the actual amount of data is concerned, simple base64 is more efficient.

But yeah, making a wikipedia entry and adding it to this list (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary-to-text_encoding) could spread it a little further.

I remember downloading binaries from Usenet using uudecode. Looks like Twitter is the new Usenet.

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