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Comment by smarx007 | Hacker News Reader

I understand that ports don’t share container info with each other and manufacturers don’t have a crystal ball to see all container IDs of a given customer but given that first 3 chars identify a shipping company, I have hard time understanding how the shipping company failed to catch this. How did they manage to create two waybills for two containers with the same serial?

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Generating a waybill raises exception. It is Friday night and everyone else is already at the bar. Drop the unique constraint and call it day.

Ok but still: as a user, how do you even know that there are two containers with the same id? In other words, a human needs to have way of telling them apart.

Even if two entries showed up with the same id, I’d assume as a user it’s a glitch and would not put two different shipments into what I would assume is a duplicate entry for the same container.

I'd assume the containers were labeled at different ports and by chance got sent to the same port. So the persons looking at the containers only had one to worry about. And with both going to the same destination one person probably shrugged when they saw the origin port was somewhere else.

I don't know anything about shipping containers but I'd assume that the container owning company had the two doppel-containers enter service at different times and/or locations and their asset database either isn't centralized or isn't de-duped.

I’ve seen this type of thing happen a few times. Usually a combination of a human error at the factory plus flaky backend systems that like to do upserts.

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