
Show HN: CuteUID – Generate Cute UIDs - anais9
https://github.com/alexdredmon/cuteuid
======
xvector
> 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!

~~~
ethbro
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.

~~~
DyslexicAtheist
> "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

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hn_user2
Suggestion, specify number of unique possibilities for each example in the
readme. That way I know if I could use it in something.

~~~
anais9
That’s a great idea - will calculate and add!

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pcmaffey
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...](https://rob.conery.io/2014/05/28/a-better-id-generator-for-
postgresql/)

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

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

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

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

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callmekatootie
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"?

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ianai
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.

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neiman
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:-)

~~~
sneak
Finally, a use for the touch bar!

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

~~~
anais9
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.

~~~
3pt14159
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.

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

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PixyMisa
This is a terrible idea and I love it.

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dec0dedab0de
I did something like this a while ago for Mac addresses. It's how I got my
username.

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yjftsjthsd-h
[https://github.com/alexdredmon/cuteuid/issues/1](https://github.com/alexdredmon/cuteuid/issues/1)

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

~~~
tsukurimashou
not an emoji tho

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

