URLs are a way of life. Of course the ideal solution is a semantic hyperlink, but people don't share hyperlinks, they share URLs, and they don't always take the time to type out a nice description like the above tweet contains.
> I would argue this is not true. Take Amazon for example. Converting "Panasonic-KX-TG7743S-Bluetooth-Cordless-Answering" to a product in the database is a nightmare I don't want to deal with. Computers work better with surrogate identifiers that are short, and they're easier to generate.
I don't think computers care one way or the other, and it's not hard to generate a key like that at all. In your example, you'd simply have brand + model + short description. In most other cases, you'd simply take the title of content that was submitted. It's a very common solution to this problem [1]. The idea is that a short description is part of the item in the database. It's not some sort of complicated lookup that acts like a keyword search.
> My thoughts on what I believe is a bad article on HN: “URLs are for people, not computers”. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5499730 http://www.not-implemented.com/urls-are-for-people-not-compu...
URLs are a way of life. Of course the ideal solution is a semantic hyperlink, but people don't share hyperlinks, they share URLs, and they don't always take the time to type out a nice description like the above tweet contains.
> I would argue this is not true. Take Amazon for example. Converting "Panasonic-KX-TG7743S-Bluetooth-Cordless-Answering" to a product in the database is a nightmare I don't want to deal with. Computers work better with surrogate identifiers that are short, and they're easier to generate.
I don't think computers care one way or the other, and it's not hard to generate a key like that at all. In your example, you'd simply have brand + model + short description. In most other cases, you'd simply take the title of content that was submitted. It's a very common solution to this problem [1]. The idea is that a short description is part of the item in the database. It's not some sort of complicated lookup that acts like a keyword search.
[1] https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/models/fields/#slu...