2026-02-18 Hacker News Top Articles and Its Summaries
1. Cosmologically Unique IDs Total comment counts : 17 Summary ID assignment needs to scale from ships to trillions of parts, so a random ID approach can work without central authority, as long as the ID space is large enough to make collisions negligible. UUIDs use 122 random bits, yielding an expected collision after about 2^61 IDs. At cosmic scales, the universe’s computronium limit (~10^120 operations) suggests ~10^240 possible IDs (≈798 bits) to avoid collisions until heat death....