this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2024
98 points (94.5% liked)
Programming
17436 readers
263 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Often times, the first section of the UUID is unique enough. With certain UI design choices, one can encourage users to normally work with that, while having the full UUID available in a detail view or from a copy-button.
Another strategy I quite like, is to have the UUID as the definitely-always-unique identifier, and then have a separate name, which either the users can enter or we generate something like random adjective+animal.
But yes, neither of those strategies would work for car plates.
Speaking of car plates, the Wikipedia pages for "Vehicle license plates of [insert country here]" are a rabbit hole.
I was just reading the page for Romania the other day, speaking of uniqueness, and they had this issue apparently where the combinations overall were enough for the whole country but not enough for their capital city, so they had to hack an extra digit into the plates for the capital.
Seeing as just five alphanumeric symbols gets you over 60 million variations, exactly how the hell did they fuck up that hard
60M total but divided among 40 counties makes 1.5M variations per county and the capital city (which is its own county, like Berlin) went over that.
I looked it up and Bucharest actually has only a 1.7M population so... I think it's understandable that nobody expected an almost 1:1 person-to-car ratio. Exactly why and how they reached that crazy ratio I have no idea. 😆
Told you it's a crazy rabbit hole.
Ah Ok, so the mistake was allotting per county.