Why “timestamp” is being discussed
The most recent Hacker News stories and comments contributing to this topic's mentions.
How would it internally sort your index by (timestamp, ID) without you later having to provide the timestamp to locate the ID?
by ndriscoll · Oct 24, 2026
So you can't generate more than 1000 UUIDs per second without skewing timestamp portion? That's not a lot. Bulk imports often require a lot more inserts.
by vbezhenar · Oct 23, 2026
Yes, this is standard. And the point is performance. The needs of user-facing ID's (short alphanumeric, randomly ordered) tend to be pretty orthogonal to the needs of internal I…
by crazygringo · Oct 23, 2026
I have never tried to do this myself, for the obvious reasons you've stated, but postgres has a function to do it so clearly enough people did do it: https://www.postg…
by tredre3 · Oct 23, 2026
If you did that you would also have to provide the timestamp every time you wanted to look up an ID, and now we're back to UUIDv7 again.
by debazel · Oct 23, 2026
Yes, which means that you should probably be able to provide your timestamp to the database so it can use it for optimizing its index, rather than trying to shove it in your ID
by saagarjha · Oct 23, 2026
Interest
Proportion of Hacker News items mentioning "timestamp" over time.
Mentions
Total number of Hacker News items mentioning "timestamp" over time.
A timestamp is a sequence of characters or encoded information identifying when a certain event occurred, usually giving the date and time of day, sometimes accurate to a small fraction of a second. Timestamps do not have to be based on some absolute notion of time, however. They can have any epoch, can be relative to any arbitrary time, such as the power-on time of a system or some arbitrary time in the past. Read more on Wikipedia