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Comment by swiftcoder | Hacker News Reader

> it's impossible to remember 32 random characters in UUID

Is it, though?

Plenty of folks memorise 16-digit credit card numbers - I've known retail employees who can recite those back after reading them just once.

Back when I was a sysadmin, I taught myself to type 25-digit Windows product keys from memory.

32 digits doesn't seem an unreasonable stretch, given time and practice.

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A little trick to remember long things like a diceware passphrase for example is to develop the muscle memory for it starting with the first three words. When those three words have been ingrained/burned into memory, you add another two words, and over time increase the amount of words until the whole phrase is memorized. It seems obvious, but you would be surprised about how many people try to remember the whole phrase on the spot without developing it in small parts, over time.

Studies show the difficulty increases rapidly after 7-10 digits (which is why phone numbers are 7 digits, not counting area code).

Someone memorized 70,000 digits of pi: https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/most-pi-p...

It depends on the person too. I struggle to remember six digits and forget them in hours, but my partner somehow manages to instantly memorize credit card numbers at a glance and retain them for months. I thought she was tricking me at first, but I tested her and its genuine. I guess some people are just gifted with very good memories.

it's difficult to remember sequences with no meaning, but if you can remember them as objects (eg, a product key with combinations of 5 letter+number sequences) it becomes easier.

It doesn't have to be 32 characters/digits... You can express them with a broader character set, which will reduce the length some... if we add additional glyphs the expression can be shorter still.

If you use a combined uuid (partially random, partially by date-time), it could be easier to remember 2020-07-15-ch99izy332 or similar... then you can take the date portion which is easier to segment (for some) and a shorter string of the subset of characters used for VIN or similar... all lowercase, and making 1 and l the same as well as 0/O, 5/S, and a few others.

Just some thoughts on this. For that matter, you could use emoji for some of those glyphs.

Credit card numbers I can do, but remember they're just digits. The UUID character space is a little larger and the sequence is double the length.

dude cards are just numbers, uuids has alphas also, but said that it’s easier to remember some words in readable uuid than chars in weird order. Sure some people can remember them, I wouldn’t disagree

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