Simon Willison’s Weblog

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2 items tagged “ids”

2022

Hashids (via) Confusingly named because it’s not really a hash—this library (available in 40+ languages) offers a way to convert integer IDs to and from short strings of text based on a salt which, if kept secret, should help prevent people from deriving the IDs and using them to measure growth of your service. It works using a base62 alphabet that is shuffled using the salt. # 8th January 2022, 7:31 pm

2009

The Twitpocalypse is Near: Will Your Twitter Client Survive? Twitter tweet IDs will shortly tick over past the maximum signed 32 bit integer, potentially breaking applications. I learnt this lesson when the same thing happened to Flickr photo IDs: never store numeric IDs from external systems as integers, always use strings. # 9th June 2009, 10:52 am