<story><title>Show HN: Base24 binary-to-text encoding for humans</title><url>https://www.kuon.ch/post/2020-02-27-base24/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wp381640</author><text>Microsoft product keys were base-24 with the following alphabet:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; B C D F G H J K M P Q R T V W X Y 2 3 4 6 7 8 9&lt;p&gt;they were 115 bits encoded in 24 characters&lt;p&gt;see also human-oriented base32 encoding:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;philzimmermann.com&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;human-oriented-base-32-encoding.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;philzimmermann.com&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;human-oriented-base-32-encod...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;which includes this nice trick:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; We have permuted the alphabet to make the more commonly occuring characters also be those that we think are easier to read, write, speak, and remember.&lt;p&gt;edit: to add, an interesting human-readable and memorable base52 alphabet that I&amp;#x27;ve never found a use for is to use playing cards</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>VMG</author><text>See also Bech32 which includes error correction and detection:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;bitcoin&amp;#x2F;bips&amp;#x2F;blob&amp;#x2F;master&amp;#x2F;bip-0173.mediawiki#bech32&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;bitcoin&amp;#x2F;bips&amp;#x2F;blob&amp;#x2F;master&amp;#x2F;bip-0173.mediawi...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Why not use an existing character set like RFC3548 or z-base-32? The character set is chosen to minimize ambiguity according to this visual similarity data, and the ordering is chosen to minimize the number of pairs of similar characters (according to the same data) that differ in more than 1 bit. As the checksum is chosen to maximize detection capabilities for low numbers of bit errors, this choice improves its performance under some error models.</text></comment>
<story><title>Show HN: Base24 binary-to-text encoding for humans</title><url>https://www.kuon.ch/post/2020-02-27-base24/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wp381640</author><text>Microsoft product keys were base-24 with the following alphabet:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; B C D F G H J K M P Q R T V W X Y 2 3 4 6 7 8 9&lt;p&gt;they were 115 bits encoded in 24 characters&lt;p&gt;see also human-oriented base32 encoding:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;philzimmermann.com&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;human-oriented-base-32-encoding.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;philzimmermann.com&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;human-oriented-base-32-encod...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;which includes this nice trick:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; We have permuted the alphabet to make the more commonly occuring characters also be those that we think are easier to read, write, speak, and remember.&lt;p&gt;edit: to add, an interesting human-readable and memorable base52 alphabet that I&amp;#x27;ve never found a use for is to use playing cards</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Fnoord</author><text>&amp;gt; We have permuted the alphabet to make the more commonly occuring characters also be those that we think are easier to read, write, speak, and remember.&lt;p&gt;Basically they removed vowels (except for y, if it counts as one) as non-vowels often include a vowel in their sound. A fact reinforced while teaching my toddler daughter letters, words, and numbers. On top of that, they removed l&amp;#x2F;1(&amp;#x2F;i, and also o&amp;#x2F;0), m&amp;#x2F;n, s&amp;#x2F;5, z. Not sure why they removed z. Perhaps because of 2?&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not sure this is universal either, sound-wise. I suppose it does count for English. Because 7 (&amp;quot;zeven&amp;quot;) and 9 (&amp;quot;negen&amp;quot;) in Dutch get confused when spoken, some people say &amp;quot;zeuven&amp;quot; instead of &amp;quot;zeven&amp;quot;.</text></comment>