Show HN: CuteUID – Generate Cute UIDs | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: CuteUID – Generate Cute UIDs

github.com

119 pointsanais923 comments

> This project is intended for entertainment purposes only - it is not recommended for use in your production or intended as a replacement to existing UUID generation mechanisms.

Ha! You can't tell me what to do!

T-20 days until "Sir or madame, I have found your codes and used. We are experiencing highly critical outage of production system as result of bug. Kindly do the needful to resolve."

GitHub bug reports on personal projects make me substantially revise upward my estimate of the proportion of programmers who are just greedy (in the regex sense) copy / pasters.

> "Sir or madame, I have found your codes and used. We are experiencing highly critical outage of production system as result of bug. Kindly do the needful to resolve"

... "and revert back with the same"

my first thought was also "this is just another conspiracy to recruit humans to fuzz UID based systems with unicode" :D

Suggestion, specify number of unique possibilities for each example in the readme. That way I know if I could use it in something.

That’s a great idea - will calculate and add!

For something a little more practical, I recently came across this postgres id generator[1], which Ive been playing around with as a solution for ordered, scalable bigint ids (that take up less space than standard uuids).

[1] https://rob.conery.io/2014/05/28/a-better-id-generator-for-p...

I feel like this is how SSH clients should display the server fingerprint.

Is there a theoretical name for the "hash / fingerprint / key -> visual signifier" idea?

I've always thought it was underused in decentralized authentication spaces.

Well, it's been called "randomart" for a while.

Telegram does this for phone calls. Not exactly ssh but both users see the same emoji to show the line is "secure"

I am not sure I understand its use case.

> Generate cute UIDs, i.e. unique(ish) identifiers that are similar in appearance to UUIDs.

Ok - but what's the difference between them and UUIDs... What makes them "cute"?

Oh, is there a way to test the collisions for this? Like it generates a uuid, prints it to screen, then does a progress bar showing how many tries attempted and a timer for duration.

ENS allows to register names with emoticons, I think that regular URL allows that as well. The problem with those things is not that they're not memorable, but that there's no good UI to type then when you want to write the name.

That said, the project is great! I love such things:-)

Finally, a use for the touch bar!

Probably more prone to collisions given some modes it offers has less character space.

The hex 1337 mode certainly faces this limitation, but the emoji modes are actually working with more character space (albeit taking more space to store).

The all alphanumeric characters based 1337 mode should be able to approach / overtake standard UUID character space given its inclusion of the characters G-Z, though might need to add to the words list and tweak minimum word size to do so.

Thank you for the feedback! I'll be adding documentation for each mode's count of potential variations to clarify.

Yeah but there are subtle differences in emojis between platforms. I can't remember the exact details, but I remember running into it as a problem when I was buying emoji domains.[0] Essentially Emoji A would render identically to Emoji B on Android but on iOS Emoji A would render identically to Emoji C, so if you were ever entering them into a URL bar you'd have to have all of the possible combinations 301 to the canonical domain name.

[0] That was such a poorly preforming investment. At least I hit early on Bitcoin to make up for it.

Note that Windows does not support country flag emojis, so CuteUID only consisting of flags would look like a typical textual UID but longer.

This is a terrible idea and I love it.

I did something like this a while ago for Mac addresses. It's how I got my username.

https://github.com/alexdredmon/cuteuid/issues/1

... I appreciate this whole exchange, complete with emoji:)

not an emoji tho

Huh; you're right. I somehow managed to confuse emoji with kaomoji (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoticon#Japanese_style).

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