alt Hacker NewsMaybe this would be a suitable application for "Fibonacci hashing" [0][1], which is a trick to assign a hash table bucket from a hash value. Instead of just taking the modulo with the hash table size, it first multiplies the hash with a constant value 2^64/phi where phi is the golden ratio, and then takes the modulo.
There may be better constants than 2^64/phi, perhaps some large prime number with roughly equal number of one and zero bits could also work.
This will prevent bucket collisions on hash table resizing that may lead to "accidentally quadratic" behavior [2], while not requiring rehashing with a different salt.
I didn't do detailed analysis on whether it helps on hash table merging too, but I think it would.
[0] https://probablydance.com/2018/06/16/fibonacci-hashing-the-o... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43677122 [2] https://accidentallyquadratic.tumblr.com/post/153545455987/r...
> This will prevent bucket collisions on hash table resizing
Fibonacci hashing is really adding another multiplicative hashing step followed by dropping the bottom bits using a shift operation instead of the top bits using an and operation. Since it still works by dropping bits, items that were near before the resize will still be near after the resize and it won't really change anything.