Hacker News Reader

> Basically useless

And yet, implemented across an incredible number of systems! Is it cargo culting? Was it "good enough"? Why do you think these "basically useless" mechanisms are/were so widely adopted and used?

View on HN

Probably distributed computing was not common at the time, so a truly universally unique identifier was not needed. And UUIDs were not used as database keys so they did not need to be time ordered.

I still think they were quite naive. I mean, using MAC addresses in the UUID? Not great for privacy.

UUIDs were invented for distributed computing. But distributed computing in the original true sense of the term, not in the current sense of getting horizontal scalability for what is in the end one big application.

In my experience, the vast majority of the time UUIDs are "implemented", they are just 16 randomly generated bytes; the important part is that they are unique.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com