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Comment by avian | Hacker News Reader

> The problem with this is that it's prone to error (doesn't have error correcting bits

Doesn't the use of the latin alphabet act a bit like an error correction code here? In contrast to a pure binary code you know that only certain shapes are valid, which should allow you to do some guessing if you don't get a perfect match.

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Doesn’t help if a whole cell is missing, whereas with QR codes chunks can be entirely gone without consequence.

Can you give some practical examples of where that would be useful? Honestly curious, don't know much about this space.

Physical sticker exposed to the environment. Scrapes/marks are common, they would render the “HR” code useless, but the QR would be fine. Or at least stay fine for longer. So the trade off becomes: do I post something that will be accessible to everyone, even those without a phone, for a week; or do I post something that will be accessible to everyone with a phone for two weeks. Given almost everyone has a phone, the answer is obvious. (Making up the times, but you get the idea)

A lot of applications centralize their logo in a QR code, obscuring a significant chunk. Yet the code scans fine and there is some nice custom recognizability for which service it is.

Maybe scanning from photos where the code is obscured, bad quality, almost-trashed physical codes.

"Guessing" and "a bit like" are key qualifiers here; error correction codes in QR provide a pretty hard guarantee and won't scan corrupted. With this scheme, who knows?

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