MRMrBuddyCasino·Apr 11, 2024
If you expose UUIDs to the user, even if just as part of the URL, encode them as shortUUID: https://github.com/skorokithakis/shortuuid
In The UX of UUIDsskorokithakis
shortuuid
Python2011–2024
skorokithakis / shortuuid
shortuuid
A generator library for concise, unambiguous and URL-safe UUIDs.
6Distinct people
9Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
2.2KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
A generator library for concise, unambiguous and URL-safe UUIDs.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year9 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2011-08-18 16:44:37 UTC to 2024-04-11 21:26:37 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2011 | 2011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2012 | 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2013 | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
9 sourcesI use shortuuid[0] for that stuff, which also omits the capital letter I, and has some other niceties (I wrote the library). It works really well, and I like how small the IDs are.
[0] https://github.com/skorokithakis/shortuuid
In Short, friendly base32 slugs from timestampsThe Python package `shortuuid` makes working with UUIDs a little easier by encoding them as strings:
https://github.com/skorokithakis/shortuuid#usage
(uses base-57 encoding, with alphabet consisting of A-Za-z0-9 with potentially confusing symbols skipped)
The string representation is what you show to users, but under the hood it's still a UUID and compatible/interoperable with any other system that needs UUID-shaped identifiers.
The coolest part is youcan even truncate the string encodings to get shorter IDs, which correspond to UUIDs with lots of leading zeros.
In GUIDs Are Not the Only Answer@StavrosK the code still very much WIP, but you can take a look at the links I posted on this issue:
https://github.com/skorokithakis/shortuuid/issues/50
I'm making some choices very specific to my use case (truncated to length 7, and use of a prefix), so not directly PR-able, but can followup in January if you find this useful.
(Going to have to figure out how to test with all Djangos and DB backends to be sure it works)
In Pg-shortkey: YouTube-Like Short IDs as Postgres Primary KeysI wrote a Python version of this six years ago, it's been working beautifully and I use it for IDs in all my APIs:
https://github.com/skorokithakis/shortuuid
That way, elements are neither enumerable nor guessable.
In Nano ID: A tiny, secure URL-friendly unique string ID generator for JavaScriptI wrote a fairly popular Python library to easily generate short UUIDs (encoded with base57):
https://github.com/stochastic-technologies/shortuuid
Since it turned out that most uses didn't actually need a UUID and just needed a random string, I figured I'd maximize the randomness per bit and added a .random() call that returns a short string that is taken from os.urandom().
It would probably be good if you asked yourself whether you actually need a UUID or a random string, and used the right tool for the job. Using a UUID when you want a random string and vice versa leads to these kinds of problems.
In UUIDs generally do not meet security requirementsAs mentioned in the README, it's heavily based on the Python version[1].
[1] https://github.com/stochastic-technologies/shortuuid
In Show HN: Go library for concise, unambiguous and URL-safe UUIDsI didn't like long UUIDs either, so I wrote this small Python library to re-encode them using a more varied character set:
https://github.com/stochastic-technologies/shortuuid
In How long do GUIDs really need to be?Shortuuid - Generate concise, unambiguous, URL-safe UUIDs (Python)
3 points · Open discussion