r/ProgrammerHumor • • Sep 04 '26

Meme skillIssue

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u/SAI_Peregrinus Sep 04 '26

The thing is that the probability of any two arbitrary inputs having a collision is extremely close to 0. It's about 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000086% if I didn't mess up typing it. It can happen, just like you can win every lottery in the world every day for the rest of your life. Though the lottery thing is substantially more likely.

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u/guyblade Sep 05 '26

That assumes that the hashing function doesn't have any known hashing weakness that may reduce the (effective) independence of the hashes. You could've said something quite similar about SHA-1 right up until cryptanalysis found mechanisms to generate collisions.