Next up - Andres Valloud, who's talking about hashing functions (the subject of one of his books).

Why does this stuff matter? It has implications for performance, especially with large data collections. To shorten down his points a lot, if your hash function causes too many collisions, you end up with a linear search.

We saw the concrete results of some of Andres' work - the hash function that we use by default in the product now (as of VW 7.6 and OST 8.1) is much, much better than the legacy one.

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