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Comment by vanderZwan | Hacker News Reader

Nice!

For the record: the valid chars string is 62 characters, so naively using a modulo on a random byte will technically introduce a bias (since dividing 256 values by 62 leaves a remainder). I don't expect it to really matter here, but since you're putting in the effort of using crypto.randomBytes I figured you might appreciate the nitpick ;).

Melissa E. O'Neill has a nice article explaining what the problem is, and includes a large number of ways to remove the bias as well:

https://www.pcg-random.org/posts/bounded-rands.html

(in this case adding two more characters to the validChars string would be the easiest and most efficient fix, but I'm not sure if that is a possibility here)

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> For the record: the valid chars string is 62 characters, so naively using a modulo on a random byte will technically introduce a bias

Indeed, there's no reason you couldn't just add "_" and "-" or "." as well to complete the set. Your identifier will still be URL-safe. I've been using this type of encoding for years [1] for these kinds of ids to use in URLs, and encoding/decoding is super-fast with some bit shifts. And unlike Base64, you don't need padding characters.

[1] https://sourceforge.net/p/sasa/code/ci/default/tree/Sasa.Web...

- and _ tend to break text selection.

I'm not sure what you mean by "break". If you mean that touching or double-clicking on a block of text only extends up to the nearest symbols, that's true. But if your text selection UX is not terrible then it should be simple to extend that further.

That said, iOS and Android text selection have gotten worse recently, IMO.

Usually one is not in control over every place where text can be selected.

As a developer I will be exposed to ids being displayed in code, terminals, browsers of various sorts, database editors, json dumps, text editors, api responses, chat messages, you name it.

Sure, I agree. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make though.

Because - and _ break text selection in existing systems you do not have control over, if you use those characters your ids will become harder to select.

Someone already made this point, and once again, "break" is completely undefined. It is not at all impossible or even difficult to select text with - or _, so what's "broken" exactly? At worst it takes one extra step to extend the default selection. These are such weird objections.

I work across multiple machines with different pointing devices (regular mouse, vertical mouse, touchpad), and have no issues double clicking to select a word. Dragging from the start of a word to the end can sometimes take multiple tries. I may miss the first letter. I may drag too far. The vertical mouse isn't great at holding a selection. It's not a huge deal, but it's an annoyance that I don't run into working with Stripe IDs.

The entire point of making this form of ID is to make it a friendly user experience, to create an ID that can easily be communicated by a person over the phone to another phone, to make an ID that is easy to click, double-click, tap (with fingers on a touch surface), double-tap, hold-and-select and tap to 'copy', and so on.

The _ and - symbols make this difficult in the edge cases of all of the above. Do you call it dash, or underscore? Line? Hyphen? Binder-strich?

&etc.

I would have gone with adding the @ and ~ symbols, those are at least parsable in human form as well .. ".. email symbol and squiggly thing .. "

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