HN Hall of Fame Weekly email

A Brief History of the UUID

segment.com Essays & writing Essays & articles Computer science Candidate

Resurfaced independently across 5 calendar years, with breakout response in 2 of them.

submissions
6
submitters
6
observed span
2017–2024
peak thread · 66 comments
304 pts
latest 20+ return · 2019-02-03
113 pts

Submission timeline

2007–2026

One slot for every year since HN launched. Height is that year's peak points; orange marks a 100+ point or 50+ comment breakout. Select a bar to open its strongest thread.

First comments on top threads

HN comment order

I can actually fill in some of the details about the history of UUID's. Paul Leach was an architect who worked at Apollo, OSF, and later Microsoft. I met Paul in the mid-90's when he was an architect at OSF, and I was the tech load for Kerberos v5 development at MIT. OSF DCE was going to use Kerberos for authentication, and was going to use Apollo RFC as its RPC layer. It was from talking to Paul that I…

tytso·304-point thread·

Comments from the first post in 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14508413

The first top-level comment from each of the four biggest threads, in HN’s own order. Excerpts are shortened; open a comment for full context.

Breakout years
2

100+ points or 50+ comments

Total points
423

reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking

Total comments
87

reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking

Every submission

DateTitle as submittedByPointsComments
2017-06-07A Brief History of the UUIDFirst breakout · Best threadmrbbk30466
2019-02-03A brief history of the UUID (2017)Latest 20+ point returntosh11321
2020-09-25A brief history of the UUID (2017)c17r20
2020-09-27A Brief History of the UUIDwheresvic420
2023-08-06A Brief History of the UUIDmariuz10
2024-07-14A brief history of the UUID (2017)rdpintqogeogsaa10