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Comment by solidsnack9000 | Hacker News Reader

One challenge with PNR is actually restricting the alphabet appropriately. They sure are easy to say aloud -- just five or six letters in many cases -- but how do you ensure you have (a) enough letters to get a reasonable bitwidth and (b) not form ridiculous words?

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Take all the Roman alphabet apart from the vowels - 21 characters and length 6 gives you 100 million possibilities which is plenty for most applications.

You can still get vaguely offensive sequences like FKNNGR or BLKCNT, but at some point you have to put this down not to your software being offensive or hateful but to humans finding patterns in randomness.

Use Crockford encoding to reduce this. It has readability and dictation considerations too which makes it ideal for things humans will interface with.

Removing Y turns out to be important, as well...

It's still bothering me that Y is a vowel in french but not in English. Can we all agree on something for once?

Do you ensure that your software does not form ridiculous numbers? Imagine that some christian person gets "666" number. What a scandal.

Do you ensure that your software does not form ridiculous words in every language? Or just another US-centric thing?

The idea of avoiding identifiers to be ridiculous is ridiculous to me, honestly...

This is just not going work in a customer centric organization. If SABRE gave out PNRs like, I don't know, SEXGOD, it would make customers angry, and that is not even with any curse words. They are heavily filtered.

https://onemileatatime.com/insights/funny-airline-pnr/

You can also get 666 in a quid for what it's worth

> not form ridiculous words

Depends on what you mean by ridiculous.

For example https://sqids.org/ ensures that there are no profanities in the generated ids. And it allows you to add additional words that you want to avoid.

It does but it allows common names, the name of the deity, common words, &c. I suspect you have to do something like an earlier poster suggested -- strip out all the vowels to start with...

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