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Comment by dependenttypes | Hacker News Reader

I do not get it. How are black, white, and western offensive? https://github.com/e-neuman/madhash/blob/master/offensive.tx...

Anyway, this is kinda similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PGP_word_list

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The words aren't offensive, but the output sentences might be, so why risk it?

I appreciate the reference to the PGP word list, I didn't know about it.

One thing MadHash adds is a bit of structure in the form of <adjective> <noun> <adverb> <verb> <adjective> <noun> which should help make the phrases more memorable.

Also, each sentence covers 64 bits, whereas the PGP word list covers just 2 bits per word.

Having generated user passwords with dictionary[random()] a few times, I can tell you you will get angry users moaning about the fact you defaulted their password to "You Fat Pig", or "Dumb Looks".

A surprising percentage of random combinations of innocuous words can be found offensive by someone, and automatic filtering is pretty much impossible.

That's pretty funny, and you're right. I'm just avoiding the very obvious ones, but there will always be more!

At work I briefly experimented with naming releases deterministically based on the git hash and a common words list. I generated 20 random 3-word phrases as a quick proof of concept, and 3 of the 20 were easily construed as sexually suggestive.

I filed a bug report with the English language, but it was rejected.

Maybe you should consider telling your users not to get offended by machine generated semi-random strings of words.

For a password generator we ended up going with something like three pieces: predefined word list, list of all the colours CSS supports, two digit number. I originally tried to use more of our own word list but the possibly offensive combinations drove us away.

We're not making passwords anymore (yay!) but use it for like coupon code generation.

> the PGP word list covers just 2 bits per word

huh? no, it covers 8 bits per word, just a bit less than yours (6 vs 8 words per 64 bits)

There are a lot of potential words that those words could appear offensive in combination with. Looking through the current word list (https://raw.githubusercontent.com/e-neuman/madhash/master/pu...), a couple that come to mind are "power", "dominance", "curse", "immigration", "perfection", and "intelligence". (Some of those words should probably be removed from the list themselves, but that's besides the point.)

TBH, I don't think the approach of picking words randomly from a dictionary is appropriate here. Not only does it have a tendency to leave in words which could cause offense, but it can also end up picking uncommon words which are hard to remember (like majdanek, szold, or palazzo) and groups of words which could easily be confused (politician and politics; psychiatrist, psychologist, and psychology; supervision and supervisor).

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