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Comment by 10000truths | Hacker News Reader

I think a better argument is that that the identifier needs to be unambiguous in cases where e.g. an ID needs to be communicated over the phone between an end user and a customer service rep. But that is easily solved with encodings like Base58 that exclude ambiguous characters.

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When the encoding relies on differentiating between lowercase and capitalized characters, you’re hitting a high level of ambiguity. Hexadecimal UUIDs don’t have this problem.

Once you get over about 10 characters the chance that the user will skip or repeat a character or misread one goes up.

Sometimes when I order parts for my car the site wants the VIN to verify that the parts are correct for that vehicle. I often have to make two or three attempts at entering it to get it right.

Eventually, everyone converges to babble[0], BIP-39[1], mnemonic[2], diceware, pgp-word list or equivalent.

[0] https://bohwaz.net/archives/web/Bubble_Babble.html

[1] https://iancoleman.io/bip39/

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20090918202746/http://tothink.co...

I don't know of anyone who has converged on that.

Although after reading that Babble link it sounds like a great idea for product id's. Scenarios where it is unlikely for people to have to read it out but when they do it's easy enough to convey.

I regret that there are scenarios that we should have converged on it but didn't.

you might want to consider an alternative with a base32 encoding with a luhn checksum

https://github.com/tttp/dxid

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