Hacker News Reader

I'm having trouble understanding the use of v8. It can be pretty much any bits as long as it has 1000 in the right spot? It strikes me as too minimal to be useful. I must be missing something

View on HN

The useful part is you can do anything you want with the other bits and have it still be a valid UUID.

Being able to do anything with the remaining bits is very useful.

You can do any scheme that suits your individual features needs, and it will be a valid UUID still.

This also means future schemes can be implemented right now without having to get a formal UUID version.

You could use the first few bits to indicate production vs qa vs dev data.

Or a subtle hint to what it might be for (eg is this UUID a product identifier or a user identifier or a post or a comment etc). Similar to how AWS etc prefix IDs with their type.

But it kind of defeats the purpose of encoding which of a fixed set of generation methods you are using in the ID, which is presumably to avoid having to check that none of the O(N^2) pair-wise combinations of N methods produce collisions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com