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Comment by Terr_ | Hacker News Reader

> One way to enhance the usability of unique identifiers is by making them easily copyable. This can be achieved by removing the hyphens from the UUIDs,

No! That's throwing the baby out with the bathwater! Removing all separators means rare-but-important manual tasks of transcription or comparison become terrible, since there are no clear chunks.

Instead use a different character which doesn't have the same problem, one that most software considers part of the same "word"... such as the classic underscore.

For most people, double-clicking on this 123_456_789 will select all 9 important numbers. (And maybe a trailing space, but that's a separate problem.)

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Speaking of which, why are we stuck with this terrible "trailing space selected" behaviour? It's not the case on all platforms, macos/ios perform fine and only select the actual word but Windows still includes the trailing space. There are posts online complaining about this going back 15 years at this point, it's super low hanging UX fruit.

Probably they tried to fix it in Windows, but it caused all your files to be deleted or something.

Like the coconut in TF2.

When you hit the delete key once, the word and extra space are gone, nothing more to do.

Is there an unambiguous, accepted, monosyllabic way to verbally speak the _ character?

No.

There also isn't one for "w", yet we get by with that as a letter.

> There also isn't one for "w", yet we get by with that as a letter.

Warning: Tangential rant ahead.

I'm teaching my toddler to read (Distar alphabet).

Even with the modified alphabet, it's a chore to "know" how to pronounce a letter.

'a' has at least 4 different pronunciations in words used by toddlers: apple, came, eat, bread.

All the vowels are like that, and even some consonants ('y' has at the very least: baby, yesterday, cycle, buy)

The only well-behaved letter in English is 'x': pronounced the same wherever you see it, as 'cks'[1].

[1] For toddlers, anyway. I doubt a 4-year old would be interested in LaTeX :-)

Unless it's at the beginning of a word, like xylophone?

The only rule in English is that there is an exception to every rule (including this one).

> Unless it's at the beginning of a word, like xylophone?

Well, we didn't cover sounding out of `ph` yet, and it isn't a toy he has, so thankfully it is not a word he uses.

> There also isn't one for "w"

There's dub.

Dub-dub-dub is pretty widely understood to mean www.

If "underscore" gets tedious I just say "tac"

But I get that it's confusing with dashes.

Alas, no... however you might not need a sound if you can use tonal inflections and pauses to express the boundary instead. Particularly when chunks are short and when the receiver (or the software they're typing into) knows the format already... Although with a tech-illiterate relative you'll have bigger problems, like explaining what an underscore even looks like and where it is on their keyboard.

Obviously I can't fully express it in text here, but try to imagine this as a coworker speaking to you: "Hey, write down this IP address. It's ten, seventy, one twentyyyyyTWO, five."

They didn't actually say "period" or even "dot", but I bet you'd type 10.70.122.5 .

yes, but to confirm I'd repeat it back to them as "was that ten dot seventy dot one-twenty-two dot five?"

having a clear seperator helps me say the numbers faster

or you could say 172390917

I've worked in IT (support, network mgmt and development roles) for 20 years, with colleagues, customers and clients from dozens of countries.

I've never once heard anyone drop out the dots in an IP. Non technical users aren't confident enough to do anything but read it exactly as it appears (one zero dot seven zero dot...) and technical users who are generally experienced enough to know what an IP address is, know that the dots are meaningful.

Generally, yeah.

If it's something like 56.7.23.231, I'm definitely going to disambiguate it by deliberately saying each one of of those three dots.

But if it's more like 192.168.0.1, I'm probably not going to bother with speaking any delimiters in conversation with another person who has at least reasonable familiarity with common IP networking layouts.

Bringing it back to the topic: UUIDs should not ever follow familiar content patterns (if they do, then that's an issue in and of itself), so I'm always going to speak the delimiters of a UUID -- whatever they consist of.

(If nothing else, doing so breaks up the pattern into human-digestible chunks -- which is probably the sole reason we have those delimiters in UUIDs to begin with.)

Unicode call it a lowline. PostScript calls it underscore and HTML says UnderBar.

I feel like "slab" would work.

nono, was it slab or slash [over a 8k bandwidth phone call]?

I would back "blank" as the most likely to be understood by the other person.

I'd understand that as space, but then I'm not a native speaker

Screenreaders pronounce it "line".

It's a mess. In Georgian we say "lower dash". No short name in any language I know.

> double-clicking on this 123_456_789 will select all 9 important numbers

True, but alas, on iOS I found that a double-tap selected only one of the digit groups.

In my view the touch interface UX is just as significant - perhaps even more so in recent years - given that the backdrop to many of these identifier format decisions is ensuring nontechnical end-user support, under time pressure, over possibly quite unreliable channels, goes as well as it can.

But look on the bright side, at least it didn't try to call the number

Text selection on iPhones has been unusable since iPhone OS 1. It's the one thing that's actually easier on Android.

Get a better baby for the rare cases, no need to always suffer

Or at LEAST make the dashes evenly spaced.

0000-0000-0000-0000-0000-0000-0000-0000

I don't think we're talking about the same problem here.

Regardless of how many dashes you have or how (ir)regularly they are spaced, to select the whole ID you must carefully click-drag-release around its boundaries, you can't just double-click anywhere in it to select.

use the character 'v' to separate sections? That would solve that problem, and it isn't a hex character

0000v0000v0000v0000v0000v0000v0000v0000

BitLocker does this and it's nice UX for walking someone through a recovery key over the phone.

Another VERY nice feature is it hashes each set of 6 digits as you type, so if you transpose one, you immediately get feedback instead of "invalid key!" after typing the whole thing out.

> hashes each set of 6 digits

nice, now i can dictionary attack any key, 6 digits at a time

I don't think that's how it works... It's a checksum, not letting you check if each section is part of the key.

At worst, the key would have some portion less entropy since there's a lot of bits used for checksums.

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