It is clear that the author does not understand what a hashing function is. He says, "Your programming language of choice's API will almost certainly have a few acceptable ones within arm's reach", but that's not true. Firstly, what is a programming language's "API" ? Secondly: most languages that I'm aware of have no builtin hash functions; they are usually libraries (I know, I'm getting pedantic here). And thirdly: most hash functions that you'd find in a library don't return a floating point value that you can operate on with a "min" function (or even an int value). They typically return a string of 40-, 128 or 256 bits (depending on the function). So you'll need to map the hash returned by your hash function to a value that you can compare; for example, by grabbing the last 4 bytes and treating them as an unsigned integer.