[HN Gopher] Six Characters
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Six Characters
Author : Airplanepasta
Score : 81 points
Date : 2026-04-13 09:24 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (ajitem.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (ajitem.com)
| chrismorgan wrote:
| Also not mentioned, they're not unique across time: six base-36
| characters is only 2 billion possibilities, wouldn't surprise me
| if the largest GDS would blow through the entire space within a
| year.
| <https://support.travelport.com/webhelp/smartpointcloud/Conte...>
| suggests they get purged after a week, and recycled.
|
| I wonder what fraction of the space is occupied at any given
| time.
| Procrastes wrote:
| There used to be a story going around, possibly apocryphal,
| that the process to reset them used to be entirely manual and
| generally unknown to the rest of the organization. There was a
| big problem the week the person who had that task retired.
| Someone around here was probably there if it really happened
| and can add some color.
| hamburglar wrote:
| Interesting post. One detail I don't see is how the ROE info
| actually tells you what currency to convert to. I see the
| exchange rate calculation but how do you know what the final
| units are?
| gregschlom wrote:
| I suspect it's this part:
|
| "This ticket was priced in GBP, not INR. Because the journey
| originated in Manchester, the fare is denominated in the
| currency of the origin country: the United Kingdom."
|
| So: the currency is the one for the country of origin.
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| After reading the article, for some reason I am finding the
| following fact profoundly distressing. Surely there are more than
| 1000 active airlines worldwide!?
|
| > _Every airline has a 3-digit IATA numeric code. 098 = Air
| India. British Airways is 125. IndiGo is 526. These codes predate
| the familiar 2-letter IATA codes (AI, BA, 6E): they were used
| when teletypes could not reliably transmit letters and numbers
| interchangeably._
| ks2048 wrote:
| IATA-registered airlines - it seems there are 370,
|
| https://www.iata.org/en/about/members/airline-list/
| lexicality wrote:
| The IATA has 367 active airlines.
|
| Bear in mind that this doesn't apply to charter airlines, only
| public passenger ones.
|
| Given there are about 200 countries in the world, you'd need 5
| large airlines per country, which is a lot! Most of them don't
| have any and rely on other countries. Still more have a single
| national carrier.
| addaon wrote:
| Also, not every airline has a 3-digit code. e.g. Aero Republica
| has the two-alphanum designator P5, but doesn't have a 3-digit.
| decimalenough wrote:
| Two-letter codes are assigned to anybody on request, but three-
| digit codes are assigned only to full IATA members.
|
| The three-digit code is used primarily for ticketing (it's the
| first three digits of a ticket number), and as an airline you
| only really need it if you're going to do complex interop
| things like ticketing another airline's flights. Most low cost
| carriers like Ryanair are not IATA members, and even Southwest
| only joined last year.
| croisillon wrote:
| Related: 49 comments, 5 days ago
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47730712
| Procrastes wrote:
| A half-joking comment I once heard from someone who was part of
| the group that established the NUC. It stood for "Not US
| Currency," but tracks the dollar because that compromise was the
| only thing everyone could agree on. The first stablecoin.
| bbanyc wrote:
| I wonder why they didn't go with the IMF Special Drawing Right,
| which is used in many other international contexts. (Including
| aviation - the liability limits under the Montreal Convention
| are in SDRs.)
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| Very interesting article. However, almost didn't open due to the
| vague title. I was expecting something about short DOS names
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