czep.net

Reminds me of this page with an example for understanding how many permutations there are for a shuffled deck of cards: https://czep.net/weblog/52cards.html

> So, just how large is it? Let's try to wrap our puny human brains around the magnitude of this number with a fun little theoretical exercise. Start a timer that will count down the number of seconds from 52! to 0. We're going to see how much fun we can have before the timer counts down all the way.
Shall we play a game?

> Start by picking your favorite spot on the equator. You're going to walk around the world along the equator, but take a very leisurely pace of one step every billion years. The equatorial circumference of the Earth is 40,075,017 meters. Make sure to pack a deck of playing cards, so you can get in a few trillion hands of solitaire between steps. After you complete your round the world trip, remove one drop of water from the Pacific Ocean. Now do the same thing again: walk around the world at one billion years per step, removing one drop of water from the Pacific Ocean each time you circle the globe. The Pacific Ocean contains 707.6 million cubic kilometers of water. Continue until the ocean is empty. When it is, take one sheet of paper and place it flat on the ground. Now, fill the ocean back up and start the entire process all over again, adding a sheet of paper to the stack each time you’ve emptied the ocean.
Do this until the stack of paper reaches from the Earth to the Sun. Take a glance at the…

No discussion of 52! is complete without [1]. A somewhat condensed version of one of the illustrations from the site.

52! is the number of different ways you can arrange a single deck of cards. Let's try to wrap our puny human brains around the magnitude of this number with a fun little theoretical exercise. Start a timer that will count down the number of seconds from 52! to 0. We're going to see how much fun we can have before the timer counts down all the way.
Start by picking your favorite spot on the equator. You're going to walk around the world along the equator, but take a very leisurely pace of one step every billion years. Make sure to pack a deck of playing cards, so you can get in a few trillion hands of solitaire between steps.

After you complete your round the world trip, remove one drop of water from the Pacific Ocean. Now do the same thing again: walk around the world at one billion years per step, removing one drop of water from the Pacific Ocean each time you circle the globe. Continue until the ocean is empty.

When it is, take one sheet of paper and place it flat on the ground. Now, fill the ocean back up and start the entire process all over again, adding a sheet of paper to the stack each time you’ve emptied the ocean. Do this until the stack of paper reaches from the Earth to the Sun.

Take a glance at the timer, you will see that the three left-most digits haven’t even changed. You still have 8.063 × 10⁶⁷ more seconds to go. So, take the stack of…

I've thought long and hard about this very question as I often wondered how I'd maintain my skills when my kid was born. I remember reading the Preface of some technical book where the author said he's glad he never had kids because he would always be afraid that in a competition for his time, "the computer would always win." I feel that way sometimes, I just want to study, learn, write code, because I love this field and having a family doesn't mean my interest in computing has died.

But we have to ask why this attitude is endemic to tech and not to other fields. You don't see surgeons or investment bankers asking their peers in forums, "how do you skill up" after having kids! So why do we feel like in tech we must sacrifice everything else that makes us human just to keep our nose to the grindstone?

I wrote two blog posts that echo this dilemma. [1] "Don't call me a '5:01er'" where I attack the unfair portrayal of people with kids as being less committed to their jobs, and [2] "Why can't a CEO be a family man?" about how our entire civilization seems to have its priorities bass-ackwards.

For me the critical turning point in my perspective came one day as I gazed down at my son on his changing table. I looked at him lying there helpless and it made me think of how I said goodbye to my father, looking down as he lay in the casket. Then I realized that one day the tables would literally be turned as this very same helpless creature would be looking down at my…

The number 52! is absurdly large. While the article is behind a paywall and so I can't see its full discussion, I'm reminded of https://czep.net/weblog/52cards.html that has a bit on the "how large is the number"

> Start by picking your favorite spot on the equator. You're going to walk around the world along the equator, but take a very leisurely pace of one step every billion years. The equatorial circumference of the Earth is 40,075,017 meters. Make sure to pack a deck of playing cards, so you can get in a few trillion hands of solitaire between steps. After you complete your round the world trip, remove one drop of water from the Pacific Ocean. Now do the same thing again: walk around the world at one billion years per step, removing one drop of water from the Pacific Ocean each time you circle the globe. The Pacific Ocean contains 707.6 million cubic kilometers of water. Continue until the ocean is empty.

And it goes on.

Numbers like Tree(3) or Loader's number or the various "these are really big mathematical functions" ( relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/207/ )... we know we can't comprehend them. But 52! - that's something that we think we can get our head around... and it's mind boggling large once you start doing the math and trying to relate it to real things that we can relate to (which are mind bogglingly large).

I assumed your link was going to be this one about a "graspable" description of the number 52! (factorial).

https://czep.net/weblog/52cards.html

Start a timer that will count down the number of seconds from 52! to 0. Then walk around the world along the equator, at the very leisurely pace of one step every billion years. The equatorial circumference of the Earth is 40,075,017 meters. After you complete your round the world trip, remove one drop of water from the Pacific Ocean. Now do the same thing again: walk around the world at one billion years per step, removing one drop of water from the Pacific Ocean each time you circle the globe. The Pacific Ocean contains 707.6 million cubic kilometers of water. Continue until the ocean is empty. When it is, take one sheet of paper and place it flat on the ground. Now, fill the ocean back up and start the entire process all over again, adding a sheet of paper to the stack each time you’ve emptied the ocean.

Do this until the stack of paper reaches from the Earth to the Sun. Take a glance at the timer, you will see that the three left-most digits haven’t even changed.

I mean, the links are going to be a template either way, so you can change the identifier part to change the item; it's just a question of whether the identifier portion is the internal rdbms PK, or something else.

It's considered undesirable because it's basically an "implementation detail", it's good to let the internal PK change without having to change the public-facing URLs, or sometimes vice versa, when there are business reasons to do so.

And then there are the at least possible security implications (mainly "enumeration attacks") and/or "business intelligence to your competitors" implications too.

But it's true that plenty of sites seem to expose the internal PK too, it's not a complete consensus. Just kind of a principle to separate internal implementation from public interface.

Here's a short 2008 HN discussion on it, in which people have both opinions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19876901

Here's a more recent and lengthy treatment:

https://czep.net/21/obfuscate.html