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Comment by eneuman | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

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)

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