Type-safe, K-sortable, globally unique identifier inspired by Stripe IDs

Re:Type-safe, K-sortable, globally unique identifier inspire... by hinkley on Wednesday June 28, 2023 @02:09PM (#36510296)

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.

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Re:Type-safe, K-sortable, globally unique identifier inspire... by hinkley on Wednesday June 28, 2023 @03:41PM (#36511560)

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.

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