Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulRobinson | Hacker News Reader

Why would you want this?

The entire point of UUIDs is I can quickly generate them knowing that they will be universally unique, I don’t need to check for their existence anywhere.

This dramatically increases the likelihood of collision to the point I can almost certainly guarantee that they won’t be unique in any non-trivial context.

View on HN

I am doing a project, needed to share secrets on submission and UUIDs are not cool, sharing these Shakespearean sentences is cool. Entropy is not lost, I will add an inversion. it's a pure bijection.

Where is the entropy going?

This still has all eight bytes, from the generated UUID, and looks like it can be converted back into a UUID.

yes, I will add an inversion, it's a bijection

The space of all uuids is larger than the space of all shakespearean uuids. So by definition you can't biject them. You may be able to on able for your subset of uuids in your project, but there is less entropy when using the latter.

edit: It seems the shakespearean uuids are longer than uuids so I may be conpletely wrong

I skimmed the code and it looks like there’s a hole for every pigeon. Space size appears to be equal.

Perhaps some projects are just for fun and not targeted at your specific needs?

Exactly. The fun aspect of programming used to be more appreciated back in the days.

Fun is fine outside production code.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com