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Comment by base698 | Hacker News Reader

96a2dff2ba1aceed1994fddd9adc276556c789c52d3e5f8a1721703a461d41ab4ddd9563075e8adda6382a8c9d52be78ae07eec77dcfba58978ea87290a9028f

SO BIG. For git, most people don't realize in most cases if the repo isn't giant you can use just 96a as a shortcut. I imagine people would be turned off by the sheer size.

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If I were eyeballing two hashes to make sure they were equal, I'd worry about my ability to see near collisions (similar to [0]) the longer the hashes were. My eyes just start skipping ahead at some point, and would probably miss different-but-similar-looking characters in the middle.

But I think SHA-512 is resistant to near-collisions (sorry, I don't have a citation), and besides, one would probably best compare hashes using a script one understands.

[0] http://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-3-540-286...

Maybe we just need better tooling to help us compare hashes easier. Not exactly sure what that would look like though.

Color the character boxes and display in two adjacent lines.

>I think SHA-512 is resistant to near-collisions

All good hash functions have an even distribution, and are therefore resistant to near-collisions. Hash tables for example require this property to work properly.

96a is not the full hash in git currently. Why couldn't you also refer to the above hash as 96a as well?

You could, I was just saying I run across a lot of people that don't know you can reference them that way.

KFyFwOkYdQatN3ZVjB16K3aY4KoydUr54rgfux33PuliXjqhykKkCjw is quite a bit nicer, I think, albeit case-sensitive.

s2rn74v2dlho2gmu7xozvxbhmvlmpcoffu7f7cqxefydurq5igvu3xmvmmdv5cw5uy4cvde5kk7hrlqh53dx3t52lcly5kdsscuqfdy is at least not case-sensitive.

The CLI could always just truncate it to 256b (or fewer) when used interactively.

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