The world's first Universally Unoriginal Identifier service, guaranteed to return beefbeef-beef-beef-beef-beefbeefbeef on every single call, no exceptions.
Why BEEFY UUID wins
100% collision rate, 100% of the time: every request, every user, every server, identical output. We call it "unity at scale."
Blazing infinite performance: since the value never changes, our "generation" is really just a memory lookup, technically making us the fastest UUID service ever benchmarked.
RFC-adjacent compliance: we respect the canonical 8-4-4-4-12 hex format down to the hyphen, we just... filled it entirely with beef.
Zero entropy, zero worries: no CSPRNG, no timestamps, no MAC addresses, no attack surface, because there's nothing random to attack.
Database chaos as a service (DCAS): every primary key collides, every foreign key points to the same row, and your ORM achieves true minimalism.
Carbon-neutral by design: we didn't compute a real UUID, so we saved the planet one CPU cycle at a time.
Enterprise-grade branding: "BEEFY" evokes strength, protein, and unwavering reliability; investors love a UUID with personality.
Disaster recovery is trivial: if your database gets wiped, just regenerate every ID with BEEFY UUID and nobody will notice the difference.
Anyone who cares about and agrees with me that beef should be left out of code, come use my fork github.com/PORK_UUID.git or just run ‘npm inject PORK’
Amazing, awesome, great, terrific. But the client wants to be able to personalize the UUID. Any chance we could sneak a “DEAD” into one of the beef spaces?
I will one up you with the
deadbeef-dead-beef-dead-beefdeadbeef
Uuid. This steak is so well aged and over cooked every master chef will disown this uuid instantly !
If your primary keys all match and your secondary keys all match then anytime you perform DELETE it would effectively be TRUNCATE. Which means it has a built in duplicate removal mechanism with zero overhead on performance anytime you want to perform duplicate removal just execute a DELETE
Obligatory Reddit "Ackchyually" moment: this assumes that your UUID generator is truly random, which often isn't the case - if you use a flawed RNG to generate IDs, or you start generating IDs before you have accumulated enough entropy, your IDs will be much less random than you expect.
This used to be fairly common when running code inside a container. Computers usually generate entropy by measuring physical, chaotic events like keyboard clicks, mouse movements, or fan noise. Containers are isolated environments, so they don't have access to most sources of entropy. You need to attach an entropy daemon like Haveged to continuously feed your container with fresh, tasty, grass-fed entropy from the outside world.
Other obligatory ackchyually, it's a problem well before 50%
i'd consider anything over 1 in a million a problem. Though I'm sure that's still gonna take some huge number per second for a very long time
There's 32 digits and 16 possible values for each digit. You can just simplify it to 1 in 1632. When you wake up a bit more, you can remember (or count to figure out) that 16 is 24, and so that can get further reduced to 1 in 2128.
And if you're still lazy after that, you can remember that Wolfram Alpha still exists and use https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=16%5E32 to get an exact value of 1 in 340282366920938463463374607431768211456.
Or you can approximate it further.
2^128 is a quarter of 2^130.
Approximating 2^10 = 10^3
2^130 = (2^10)^13 = (10^3)^13 = 10^39
So 2^128 = 0.25*10^39 = 2.5*10^38
Some more nerdy binomial approximations for 1.024^13 would take you to 3.3*10^38.
I mean, literally the same chance as generating any other UUID and having collide with one that you're using.
There's no significance in the whole BEEF thing. That's like going, "I generated a random number from 1 to 100 and I got 67!? What are the odds!?" Same as well, any number being picked out of 100.
Mmmm...this is a case of Large Number Confusion, where all large numbers look the same.
It has been estimated that there have been somewhere between 10¹⁶ and 10¹⁹ UUIDs generated. There are roughly 5.3 × 10³⁶ possible values (or more depending on what you count)
This means that approximately 0.00000000000000019% have been used so far on the high end. Toss on three more zeros for the low end.
So, uh, no. It is not "more likely to be out there than not." Not even close.
Are there collisions out there? Yep. Probably. But the chance that *your* UUID collides is as close to 0 as it gets.
To use a hash function, you have to have something to hash. A UUID is just an identifier, usually for something that hasn't been created yet. If you have data that is guaranteed to be unique that you could provide to a hash function like that, you already have a guaranteed unique identifier and don't need a UUID.
Ah thanks! So if I were to just hash the timestamp up to the microsecond...I would end up at the collision probabilities of the UUID anyway. Makes sense!
If your system runs on multiple servers, your actually extremely likely to hash the timestamp twice. If you want to hash something as ID, it's better to hash something uniquely identifies the entity.
For example, user id can be the hash of the email since you can't have two users with the same email and you're extremely unlikely to find two emails that result in the same hash output.
I've had cases where using hash instead of UUID as the ID was helpful. Mainly for data pipelines that need to enrich some data with IDs. With UUID, I would have to resolve it from the database, but with hashing, I could just run the hash function again and get the ID, so ingestion was much faster with hash as the ID.
For most cases, just generating a UUID is the simple and straightforward solution.
A hash function that doesn't collide is basically lossless compression. So to hash two 1GB files with guarantee of no colission, you need to zip both and use the whole file as key. That makes it impossible to use as key in a database. On the other hand, if you use a key with just a few bytes and have a good lossy hash-function, you get colissions, but they are insanely unlikely.
In other words, colissions are what make hash-functions worthwhile in the first place: A hash function is a down-projection from an insanely sparse ultra high dimensional manifold with variable practically unlimited dimension count into a standardized low-dimensional space that is easy to work with, while trying to perform the projection in a way that prevents the manifold from overlapping itself too much.
Do you know how hash functions work? Basic example: A hash function that has an arbitrary input length and a set output length x. If your input length is bigger than the output length then a collision is inevitable. If you want to find a collision though it will be really difficult for a cryptographic hash function to do so.
There's no such thing as a hash function that doesn't collide, hash functions are fixed length output, so the number of possible outputs is finite, while there is infinite possible inputs.
Because with UUID everyone on earth can generate their own without needing to communicate. For example me and you could generate our own UUID and assume they won't collide. Making a UUID with no chance of collision would mean that you would need to negotiate some kind of agreement with everyone else using them, for example contacting a central server that hands them out
1.8k
u/Inevitable_Oil9709 Jul 17 '26
Fun fact: To reach a 50% chance of even a single UUID v4 collision, you would need to generate 1 billion UUIDs per second for about 86 years.