In Hash function performance Dave Winer writes:
It’s been a long time since we looked at the object database in Frontier, so today Brent wrote a little app that checks out how the hash function distributes objects across the buckets for each table in the database.
[… result distribution among buckets …]
This looks pretty random to us.
And he’s right. In the sense that it’s just a bunch of random numbers. Not something you would want in a hash function.
Meanwhile in the Hacker News page about this people are talking about a few other things, they thought they should read from this article.
- Ignorance. I think it’s sarcasm actually.
- Performance. Performance isn’t always about speed.
- Hash function (as in cryptography). In cryptography you use functions that won’t collide for documents that are possible. In an object database, collisions aren’t important, it’s assumed.
- Using a built-in hash function. If you built your own platform and language, there isn’t always a built-in hash function. Sometimes you need to write one yourself.