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Comment by ajkjk | Hacker News Reader

Unrelated, but this links to "Crockford's alphabet", https://www.crockford.com/base32.html , which is a base-32 system that includes all alphanumeric characters except I and L (which are confusable with 1), O (which is confusable with 0), and U (????). The page says the reason for excluding U is "accidental obscenity'. What the heck is it talking about?

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> The page says the reason for excluding U is "accidental obscenity'.

Crockford is being cheeky. To make a nice base32 alphabet out of non-confusable alphanumeric characters you only need to exclude O, I, and L. This leaves you with 33 characters still, so you need to remove one more, and it doesn't matter which one you remove, so you might as well pick an arbitrary reason for the last character that gets removed (and it's not the worst reason, if your goal is to use these as user-readable IDs, although obviously it's not even remotely bulletproof).

You could argue that U can be confused with V.

A vaguely related historical tangent is that V and U used to be just two ways of writing the same letter in Early Modern English. Which I imagine is why W is named as "double U" in speaking.

This is also interesting since in French (and I think Spanish?) W is (correctly) called "double V"

In Romanian and Italian too.

Same thing in Norwegian. But W is also not really a part of Norwegian orthography, it's just kind of there in the alphabet anyway. Only useful for names and maybe a couple loanwords.

Same with B and V, P and F, SS and Z, etc.

It is why PH is F, for instance.

That is indeed why w is named "double u" in English (and "double v" in French. And why it's a vowel in Welsh.

See more from jan Misali: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sg2j7mZ9-2Y

5 and S seems more likely.

Fvck!

U is a fairly new letter anyway.

This assumes that english is the only relevant language regarding curse words. Which is quite biased.

If I and O are already excluded and you also exclude U that removes a lot of potential rude looking three letter combinations like *** and *** and *** and also the four letter ones like **** and **** and the dreaded ****. Of course because you have A then **** is still a possibility but very very unlikely

Wow I didn't know HN even had obscenity filters, and I've been here for many years.

Guess that's a credit to the general civility of the community.

EDIT: It appears that other people in this thread are freely using profanity, so either your comment was targeted by automation due to the unusual density of banned words, or it's a joke that went over my head :)

That explains it, I was very confused by what I assumed was self-censoring, since the comment didn’t actually clarify anything. I wish there was an accepted way to disambiguate asterisks from server side filters.

I assumed this was a riff on the classic bash.org transcript.

http://www.bash.org/?244321

But we know there are no server side filters here. At least I never had any profanity censored by anything other than the Mk 1 brain.

No obscenity filters, but there is a pretty good password filter I hear. For example, my password 'hunter2' will be all **** to you

Isn’t it nice how some traditions do stick around. It’s been a while, Cthon98!

Sadly, this is one of those things that, soon, if not now, only the olds will know about.

Like telling people asking for game cheats to use Alt-F4.

you accidentally the whole thing

I think the point

True Latinists find the letter U vulgar to the point of obscenity because it didn’t exist in Cicero’s time.

Trve Latinists wovld appreciate yovr point.

Gotcha, there was no “W” in the Latin alphabet either ;)

There's more!

- base 58 - Satoshi's/Bitcoin's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary-to-text_encoding#Base58

- "base62" - Keybase's saltpack https://github.com/keybase/saltpack

- The famous "Adobe 85" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascii85

- basE91 - https://base91.sourceforge.net

At work we defined several new "bases" for QR code. IMHO, it is an under applied area of computer science.

A coworker and I came up with basically this same set about 4 years before Crockford. We were trying to solve the url slug problem, and they were long enough that we felt 5 bits per byte would reduce transcription annoyances.

In the end I think we had a couple of characters to spare, and so, sitting by ourselves because everyone else had gone home for the day, we ranked swear words by how offensive they were to prioritize removal of a few extra letters. Then I convinced him that slurs were a bigger problem so we focused on that, which got rid of the letter n, instead of u

tggr is just cute, n**r is an uncomfortable conversation with multiple HR teams (we were B2B)

I'm a bit fuzzy now on what our ultimate character set was, because typically you're talking [a-z][0-9], an there are a lot of symbols you can't use in urls and some that are difficult to dictate. My recollection is that we eliminated both 0, l, and 1, but I think we relied on transcription happening either from all caps or all lowercase. 0o are not a problem. Nor are 1L.

Other comments are jogging my memory. I think we went case sensitive (62 characters -> 30 spares), eliminated aA4, eE3, iI1l oO0 (maybe Q), uU, which is 16 characters, 14 to go. Remove the remaining 7 numbers (once you remove most for leetspeak what's the point of the rest?), nN, yY. That leaves 2 left and I can't recall what we did with those. Maybe kK or rR.

Y is pretty versatile for pissing people off.

The Scunthorpe problem?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

There's enough comedic content in this article for several Silicon Valley episodes.

E-Mail accounts seem the worst. Just lets write letters again, if you need a pencil I recommend penisland.net

Penis mean “tail” in Latin.

As they say Your pen is Our business!

FUCK

yep, youtube video ids has/had? same issue where it would have things like fag/f4g etc in it.

eg: google "allinurl:fag site:youtube.com"

You can prevent any obscenity, O and 0 confusion, and I and L confusion, just by excluding vowels. If someone interprets "f4g" in an offensive way, then they have bigger issues than can be dealt with in software.

Why we care about obscenity in pseudo-random ids and url?

anglo morals

i don't, the people that can start a **storm on twitter/tumblr causing your stock to drop 10% does.

There was that time Delta generated an "H8GAYS" PNR. [1] Pretty sure that's valid Crockford encoding too :) however, to your point, it does rely on 'A'. "H8G4YS" would likely still offend someone out there, though, given the kerfuffle in [1].

[1] https://newsfeed.time.com/2013/12/17/delta-airlines-is-very-...

> But as White points out, it’s a bit surprising that Delta didn’t block this particular combination as a possibility. “I’m sure they removed many four-letter words that would be seen as offensive,” he tells the Post. “I’m surprised that ‘gays’ and ‘H8’ weren’t blocked as well.”

Oh sweet summer child (meaning Jeff White, not OP/GP). As someone who has implemented a censorship/filtering list, this is a UX problem on the same level of decideability as the halting problem. You can spend boundless time curating a list to flag/grawlix every possible string that would offend even the most prudish of prudes, and some would still get through. Such as the superficially benign "EATTHE"

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2039662/Virginia-dr...

Obscenities change with language. That’s why every language has them.

Even programming language have them. For instance, Basic has GOTO.

and javascript has type coercion

The problem is not being offended per se, but having your user id accidentally become "user_123fuck567" — that's akin to having a vulgar license plate on your car's forehead. People don't appreciate how lucky they sometimes are.

Are those supposed to be user- facing though?

Using Stripe-style prefixing is most useful if they are—it makes interacting with customer support easier because everyone is on the same page about what this ID identifies.

> The page says the reason for excluding U is "accidental obscenity'. What the heck is it talking about?

Because he’s an American?

The F word has a U in it. Sure you could just say FVCK

Or Fwck if you doubly mean it.

Yeah, wtf?

Obviously by “wtf” you must mean “why the face?” Right? Right?? :-)

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