Show HN: Timeflake, 128-bit roughly-ordered UUIDs

1) You want to have UUIDs in URLs that are not predictable (vs auto-increment integers).

2) So they should be random, but roughly-ordered over time so that your MySQL/Postgres indices stay fast and efficient as the dataset grows.

3) And simple to use across multiple machines (no coordination or centralized system required to generate).

4) It would be nice if they were compatible with standard 128-bit UUID representations (many libraries in Python handle uuid.UUID, but no third-party types).

Checkout the "Why?" section in the readme for a comparison to some of the alternatives.

Also if you don't want to have to use this library:

  import os
  import uuid
  import time

  timestamp = int(time.time() * 1000)
  randomness = int.from_bytes(os.urandom(10), byteorder='big', signed=False)
  value = ((timestamp << 80) | randomness).to_bytes(16, byteorder='big')

  uuid.UUID(bytes=value)  
  >>> UUID('016fd379-198f-3327-2bf0-d2a0f5d863d7')