Hacker News Reader

Comment by function_seven | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why you want to coddle normal people with those friendly names.

I propose that they version each standard with the last 8 characters of a hash of the standard itself.

Using your humble list, here's the improved one:

    USB 845fee48
    USB cf580d60
    USB ea95d69e
    USB 1e0cdbcc
    USB ee846eec
    USB 1c0733ea
    USB 7b36fc51
    USB b5db768f
    USB 47bd0646

View on HN

This is actually better than the human-readable scheme because then you can go on AliExpress/Google and actually land on the exact product by matching the hash.

With human-readable names, the product pages start to have too much creative freedom like "USB 3.0 3.1 Gen 1 2" which becomes hell for browsing, as now the people buying get to be blamed if they make a wrong purchase

Heh, good point! But I'm a pessimist. New product names you'll see:

"USB 1e0cdbcc works with 47bd0646 for power"

"USB b5db768f (compatible with 7b36fc51, and improves 1c0733ea; KHTML, like Gecko)"

USB b5db768f Pro MAX Gen 2 Founders Edition

> then you can go on AliExpress/Google and actually land on the exact product by matching the hash.

I'm fairly sure some people would split the hashes up like phone numbers.

No no this is all too confusing. They should take the Apple laptop approach and just come out with new standards every year named like this:

“USB Pro (2022)”

“USB Air (2022)”

With 32-bit hashes you risk a collision. You should use at least a 128-bit GUID for each standard.

No no no, if there's a collision, just append "Full Speed" on the old one, and "High Speed" on the new one. Much simpler.

Then encode GUID as emojis.

I'd go straight for sha512 naming, to make sure there won't be any naming collisions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com