On those machines the old way works fine, but not all machine even have a place to store this data, on top of that people clone VM instances, and you don't want

On those machines the old way works fine, but not all machine even have a place to store this data, on top of that people clone VM instances, and you don't want the same number each time. Read the previous https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21114524 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21114524 story for more on the problem space and why what you wrote is not considered enough.