<story><title>German tank problem</title><url>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>T-hawk</author><text>This actually hit my previous company in a software context.&lt;p&gt;We would number our hotfixes sequentially.  Many would be items demanded by a single client, so would get deployed as hotfixes only to that customer&amp;#x27;s site, and just rolled into the main trunk for the next quarterly release for everyone else.  Clients would always be notified about hotfixes going onto their live sites.&lt;p&gt;One savvy client noticed the hotfix numbering sequence.  Naturally, that ensued quite a number of extremely awkward discussions as they would regularly ask why our software needed so many hotfixes (tens per week) and why they weren&amp;#x27;t entitled to all of them right away.&lt;p&gt;Solution: a new policy to randomly generate hotfix numbers.  Which of course led to the next problem, that now the sequence was not obvious from the names, so dependent hotfixes would sometimes get deployed in the wrong order.  Why can&amp;#x27;t anything be easy...</text></comment>
<story><title>German tank problem</title><url>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sparkman55</author><text>There is some practical relevance to software development here.  One shouldn&amp;#x27;t expose sequential IDs (a.k.a. serial numbers) to the public for anything non-public.&lt;p&gt;I see this Hacker News post has a numerical ID in the URL, for example; I can estimate the size of Hacker News given enough of these numbers...  More directly, I can modify that numerical ID to crawl Hacker News.&lt;p&gt;Many sites do this; it&amp;#x27;s generally better to generate a (random or hashed or generated from a natural key) &amp;#x27;slug&amp;#x27; to use as the key instead.  For example, Amazon generates a unique, non-sequential, 10-digit alphanumeric string for each item in their catalog.</text></comment>