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Comment by gajus | Hacker News Reader

I never ran into into this situation, but I plan to update the article based on aggregated feedback. A few good suggestions have been made.

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It might be based on the handwriting standards used in your country. Where I live we were taught at school to draw a horizontal bar on 7 and avoid the serif on 1:

https://is.mediadelivery.fi/img/468/a93c32e08dae4768869a4bda...

No chance of confusion. This seems to have prompted some to add the serif to their 1 for stylistic reasons or whatever, since it's still distinguishable from 7 with a bar.

But then again people following older or newer conventions drop the bar from their 7:

https://is.mediadelivery.fi/img/468/46827e3320294f89b12a9338...

This makes a singular 1 with sloppily drawn serif hard to distinguish from a 7 without horizontal bar unless you can also see how the same person draws the other digit in their style.

Updated the article. Thanks for the context

An alternative way, that makes the "1"s a bit less ambiguous, is to draw a bar at the bottom. So even if you put the serif on the 1, and write it sloppy, you still have the bar at the bottom.

See the last example in this image:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ee/Ha...

Side note to OP and author, the Wikipedia page is pretty handy and has a lot of info:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_handwriting_variation

Where I grew up (Korea), we write 7 with an extra serif at the upper left corner, like this: https://pop.yesform.com/pop/16113

It never gets confused with 1, but in America, people were confusing it with 9 (!!), so I had to stop writing it like that. Can't please everybody...

I can see it as a native-born American.

My handwriting has always been pretty sloppy. My 9s come out like your 7s when I don't close the loop properly (I start at the bottom).

People confuse my lowercase r's for n's all the time too for a similar reason. Either I loop a little too much or I drag down the overhang so it basically is an n.

When it comes to handwritten numbers, Brits frequently mistake German ones for sevens, and Germans British sevens for ones.

A small typo I noticed - "Case-sensitive: 53^5 = 62,259,690,411,360" should be to the eighth power, not the fifth.

Thanks. Fixed

Suggestion: after "a longer ID with a lower chance of visual ambiguity" show how many characters that will be needed to have the same number of IDs as 53^8 using the 22 encoding.

I.e. for a given number of IDs, how many characters are needed in the 53 versus 22 encoding (people who are not good at math might assume it is more than twice as many).

Actually, 53^8 = 62,259,690,411,361 (not ..360)

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