Hacker News Reader

Comment by biztos | Hacker News Reader

I think that 0 and 1 are likely to cause problems when customers end up reading their "user ID" back to your employees in Customer Support Country over the phone.

"It's one-three-oh-dee-ee-el. Yes, I'm sure, EL as in elephant."

View on HN

I developed safe32 for this reason.

https://github.com/kstenerud/safe-encoding/blob/master/safe3...

Notably, confusable characters are interchangeable when being ingested (although a machine encoder MUST always produce canonical output). https://github.com/kstenerud/safe-encoding/blob/master/safe3...

So a user can confuse 1 for l, 0 for o, I for l, u for v, uppercase, lowercase etc, or the agent can say any of those over the phone, and it won't matter.

Oh that looks well-thought out and is probably the sanest way to solve this particular problem!

It's obvious why the safe64/safe80/safe85 cannot do this, but is there a reason why the safe16 version doesn't have the same features?

Oh whoops that's an oversight! I'll fix that up tonight.

Isn’t this just crockford encoding?

Every base-32 style encoding is Crockford at the core. The difference is in the alphabet, and also whether it requires padding or not (safe32 does not).

Crockford also incorporates error correction, which is unnecessary in modern systems since the underlying protocols do that already.

Another approach is using base31 with all vowels removed https://ss64.com/ps/syntax-base31.html

You still have the problem of 1 vs l. And also it doesn't support user-error (reading 0 as O, or reading V as U).

My favourite ambiguous readback is to say "M for Movember".

I have a note from a few years ago that 367CDFGHJKMNPRTWX may be a sufficiently unambiguous alphabet. Drop the one you like the least (probably N) to obtain a faux hex encoding.

Anything that needs to be read over the phone should probably be written out using something like the NATO phonetic alphabet, split into smaller chunks if needed: "The code? It's kilo eight niner; one three mike; delta echo lima."

Having come from a military background where using that is second nature, I'm constantly surprised how rarely I meet civilians who understand it effortlessly. When picking up a package I say "the code is Oscar Foxtrot three-fife" and you see the person processing for a long time to extract the first letter of the word. I've started saying "OF, that's Oscar Foxtrot, 3-5" to help them out.

In other words, asking a customer/consumer to be able to recite something in phonetics is not realistic in most cases.

Fortunately the code already takes this into consideration and removes ambiguous characters.

digikey phone personnel all speak NATO. it’s wonderful.

First thing I drilled into Apple phone support folks.

My experience in the USA is that if I don't include the phrase "as in" (as in "X as in Xray") most people still will not realize what I am doing (the alternative "for" can be confused with the digit.)

I also ask them to check my readback of key information they have given me and vice-versa; usually that works well.

*tree :-)

One can convert those to the correct characters. Since “oh” and “el” are excluded from the alphabetic range, they become “zero” and “one” - deciding whether that is done in software for the help desk, or in the brain of the help desk staff is left as an exercise to management.

I wonder if Unicode could be used to alter the characters such that these mistakes would be less possible, e.g. using ⓪.

That is "AT", isn't it?

(No, it isn't, if you look closely enough.)

Yeah...what I'd really like to do would be to give a character a "natural" background color, e.g.

Then its simple for support to say "red is one, green is ell". But you can't just add a color to a character, because copy paste/rich formatting don't work everywhere, or even transfer well...

Alternatively, if you use ⓪ and ⒈ it matters less if the user says "at" or "zero", and more that they didn't say "oh" or "one".

It's obviously a �. Or perhaps a □ . Maybe an Â¾, on odd Wednesdays?

(Unicode has its strengths. Making up replacement characters isn't one.)

I happen to know that the biggest ski resort reservation system in Scandinavia contains a function called MaybeOnATuesday(), but to my knowledge it's never called.

If you are trying for URL safe, Unicode is problematic because of Punycode conversions and differing browser behavior with Unicode URLs. (Some browsers always show Unicode as Unicode in URLs. Some browsers always show Unicode as Punycode in URLs. Some browsers switch between the two based on a huge number of variables such as gTLD, user preference, phase of the moon, etc.)

Or just drop the L and O, like CUSIP does.

i, L and o are left out of the alphabet in the snippet, so there's not really any ambiguity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com