Six Characters

croisillon•11 minutes ago

Related: 49 comments, 5 days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47730712

chrismorgan•about 2 hours ago

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.

Mordisquitos•about 2 hours ago

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.

lexicality•about 1 hour ago

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•about 1 hour ago

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.

ks2048•about 1 hour ago

IATA-registered airlines - it seems there are 370,

https://www.iata.org/en/about/members/airline-list/

hamburglar•about 2 hours ago

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?

Six Characters

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