[cap-talk] use of hashcodes?

[Raoul Duke]

On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 10:51 AM, Jack Lloyd <lloyd at randombit.net> wrote:
> But you do have to worry about maintaining your counter state
> correctly in the face of concurrency, file system bugs, application
> and system crashes, recovery from backups, VM state rollbacks, and so
> on. I would give much worse odds for handling all of these sucessfully
> 100% of the time than I would SHA-256 randomly colliding.

ah! interesting. thanks for mentioning that, that is a helpful
lightbulb-over-head type perspective.

it sort of alarms me that a 'simply' incrementing counter is hard
software engineering, even though i understand the concerns you point
out (cf. i'm learning Clojure because of its STM (yes, i looked at
Haskell before that, i'm not totally ignorant of history :-)).

sincerely.