Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by davidjytang 1627 days ago
People in my industry in my country has specifically avoid using B and D together as they sound too similar over the phone.

Also 2 and Z can be similar in writing.

However it is nice to not see 0 and O, 1,I,l in the same string.

3 comments

F and S sound similar over the phone, at least on POTS landlines, as they don't carry the higher frequencies (> 4 kHz) that distinguish the S from the F. Note that cat names tend to have S sounds.

POTS = Plain old telephony service is restricted to a narrow frequency range of 300–3,300 Hz, called the voiceband, which is much less than the human hearing range of 20–20,000 Hz [from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_old_telephone_service ]

Anybody who has to relay things like API or CD keys over a POTS line on a regular basis quickly learns the NATO phonetic alphabet.
If you're worried about clarity over the phone, you should look into the NATO phonetic alphabet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet
I prefer to use Aeon, Bdellium, Czar, Djinn, Eye, etc.
The bomb defusal scene in Archer was an absolute classic for this. https://youtu.be/_4jxLxZrMfs
> Djinn

Fun fact: dzs counts as a single letter in Hungarian (e.g. in alphabetical ordering).

Quite a challenge for non-English crowd.
You still have to know that 0 is 0 and not O, and that 1 is 1 and not I or l.
but if mistake is made, and you wrote down L instead of 1, and sent me in a e-mail. I, knowing that it is crockford 32, would easily deduce what mistake was made.
Right, I didn't realize the decoder is specified to be lenient in that way, so the confounded characters are actually equivalent in the encoding.