4 ms·
It seems like it might be better to put the metadata at the end. That would make it easier to truncate to a certain amount of entropy. Also, it would make it po
by mtdewcmu 10y ago
It seems like it might be better to put the metadata at the end. That would make it easier to truncate to a certain amount of entropy. Also, it would make it possible to trim off the metadata without having to understand the format to figure out the variable length.
- panic 10y agoWhat are you going to do with the hash after you trim off the metadata if you don't understand the format?
- mtdewcmu 10y agoGood question. There are instances where it allows you to write cleaner (and faster) code if you can identify the parts without necessarily having to parse the metadata.
- mtdewcmu 10y agoI've dealt with variable-length headers on (binary) things before, and it creates annoyances. It screws up the memory alignment, for instance.
- IanCal 10y agoI have two minor, but useful, uses: One is that the prefix is probably unique for small sets. So it's both easy to read and parse and then use just a prefix for doing something like stopping a docker container. Second is that a short prefix on a larger set of data is probably not unique but at a rate I can predict. I can take a random, and repeatable, sample of data by selecting everything with the same prefix. This gives me a fast way of taking a random sample from a database (or file or anything else).