[mkleczek]

> This hacker news article was given a surrogate key, 46272487. From that, you can determine what it links to, the name/date/author of the submission, comments, etc.

> Do not encode identifying information in unique identifiers! The entire world of software is built on surrogate keys and they work wonderfully.

The amount of manual work required to manage duplicates is in no small part the result of not thinking enough about the identifiers and simply slapping surrogate keys on the data.